Mercwear.com – Curtis Morris

Edit 5/28/06: Added the schematic to this post since the original site with the directions has disappeared.

My goal here was to convert a standard NES controller to an interface that would work with my PC so when I play my NES Roms I could use the original controller.

I am sure that most of you know what an emulator is however for those of you that do not, I am going to explain it:

What is an emulator:

The Emulator that I am referring to is a program that appeared on the net in 1997 that would allow you to play Nintendo Entertainment System games on your pc, without the original cartridge. A person would download the program and then scour the net for files know simply as ?ROMS?. A ?Rom? was an copy of the video game for the NES, for instance if you wanted to play Super Mario Brothers you would download the emulator and then do a quick search for ?Super Mario Brothers NES rom? in your favorite search engine which would usually produce quite a few hits. After the rom file is downloaded you open it with the emulator, which would allow the game to be played. The first emulators were very rough and would only let you play the games with the keyboard, which of course was quite a hassle. Like most things, the emulators got better over time and started to support a variety of controllers, this is where my mod comes in!

I got tired of playing the Roms with a PC controller and wanted to use the real deal old school NES controller, the only problem was that the controller was just that, an NES controller. Well I set out to fix that:

I had attempted this mod in the past with only marginal success, the controller worked on one of my PC?s and not on the others. This time is came out flawless, and I am very happy with the results!

The project is actually quite simple, below is a list of the components that are needed:

Old NES controller
Diodes (3 X 1N914)
Parallel computer cable
Electrical tape
2 AA batteries
Battery Holder

That of course is a bare minimum list, if you want the finished product to LOOK good too you will want to pick up a hood to house all of the wires in, and in place of the parallel cable you may just want to use a 25 pin connector that is available at your local computer store (Altex is where I got mine).

The only port that met the specifications for the controller to work without having to put A LOT of work into the project was the parallel port. The only downside to the parallel port is power, it simply does not have enough to push the controller which requires +5v DC. This is why you see the battery pack attached to the controller, there are 2 AA batteries in the pack which is 3v and I ran a few leads off the parallel port to make up for the missing 2v (You can also draw power from the PC?s power supply if you like).

I used a software program named PPortJoy to drive the controller, the program will let you interface any parallel joystick with the computer.

If you would like to make your own PC NES controller use the following schematic:

Feel free to e-mail me as well if you need any help!

View the pictures of this project in the gallery