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I would like to get back into retro gaming. As a kid had a NES and SNES. Of course sold the devices later on. Now with a kid in my own i would like to share the

I would like to get back into retro gaming. As a kid had a NES and SNES. Of course sold the devices later on. Now with a kid in my own i would like to share the experience. Buying original equipment is very expensive. But emulators are abound. A middle ground would be for me to play those with original controllers. But how could that be done?

wolrah 5y ago
> Buying original equipment is very expensive. But emulators are abound. A middle ground would be for me to play those with original controllers. For NES/SNES? Absolutely trivial. Those controllers are literally just one (NES) or two (SNES) 4021 shift registers connected to the various buttons. Console sends a latch signal every now and then and then reads out the button state one by one. There are adapters to convert those to USB HID available through a variety of sources and they're also trivial to DIY if you like to play with microcontrollers. Most other 8/16 bit era controllers are either doing something similar or just directly wire the buttons to pins on the connector like the old "game port" on PC sound cards did. If you want the ultimate in realistic play though, you can build a MiSTer. https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki Take one not-super-expensive FPGA dev board, add some open source firmware and optionally a few open hardware addon boards, and you have a near universal hardware emulator for 8/16 bit era consoles and computers that has perfect hardware timing. With either of the addon I/O boards you can connect native controllers directly at which point the accuracy is so high that you can actually use original light guns if you're connected to a CRT. Anyone who is nostalgic for the 8/16 bit eras should really take a look at this project. Recently there has even been progress in to the 32 bit era, with both PSX and Saturn cores in development.

wolrah 5y ago

> Buying original equipment is very expensive. But emulators are abound. A middle ground would be for me to play those with original controllers. For NES/SNES? Absolutely trivial. Those controllers are literally just one (NES) or two (SNES) 4021 shift registers connected to the various buttons. Console sends a latch signal every now and then and then reads out the button state one by one. There are adapters to convert those to USB HID available through a variety of sources and they're also trivial to DIY if you like to play with microcontrollers. Most other 8/16 bit era controllers are either doing something similar or just directly wire the buttons to pins on the connector like the old "game port" on PC sound cards did. If you want the ultimate in realistic play though, you can build a MiSTer. https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki Take one not-super-expensive FPGA dev board, add some open source firmware and optionally a few open hardware addon boards, and you have a near universal hardware emulator for 8/16 bit era consoles and computers that has perfect hardware timing. With either of the addon I/O boards you can connect native controllers directly at which point the accuracy is so high that you can actually use original light guns if you're connected to a CRT. Anyone who is nostalgic for the 8/16 bit eras should really take a look at this project. Recently there has even been progress in to the 32 bit era, with both PSX and Saturn cores in development.