Nintendo Controller Teardown

I&#x27;m biased since I&#x27;m an EE, but to me the real magic in game controllers is the mechanical&#x2F;materials&#x2F;manufacturing engineering that goes into making the buttons feel right and have consistent responsiveness. This is what most third-party controller manufacturers seem to get wrong, even (or perhaps especially) when they clone the basic shape and layout of a well-known controller.<p>That said, one of the cool things about how they designed the NES and SNES pads electrically&#x2F;logically is that an SNES pad will actually work with an NES if you make an adapter for the different connectors, since it&#x27;s the same protocol with a different number of data bits clocked. But the best part is that they didn&#x27;t simply add X, Y, L, and R at the end of the bit stream for the SNES pad; instead they transposed it so that SNES Y is NES B and SNES B is NES A, which translates the common idioms used in action games on the two systems.

Hmm, I am not 100% sure, but I recall the NES gamepad uses an 8 bit shift register not a microcontroller.

The 16 pin &quot;microcontroller&quot; in the NES controller is actually an 8 bit parallel-in&#x2F;serial-out shift register.

Here&#x27;s a blog post I wrote about how the joystick of the Nintendo 64 works, electrically speaking: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dpedu.io&#x2F;article&#x2F;2015-03-11&#x2F;nintendo-64-joystick-pinout-arduino" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dpedu.io&#x2F;article&#x2F;2015-03-11&#x2F;nintendo-64-joystick-pino...</a>

It&#x27;s pretty impressive to look at and consider the differences in the complexity of the circuit boards in successive generations.<p>It would be very interesting if someone had a chart of BOM costs for the various controllers and systems, to see if the budget for controllers has changed since the NES&#x2F;Famicon days.<p>Also of course, if Nintendo really wanted to make a killing, putting the original NES in a controller and selling that with an HDMI port on the end would be sweet. I&#x27;d pay $50 for a low-hassle, no-legal-ambiguities way to play NES games with my kid.

I love the fact that the NES controller&#x27;s PCB has free-flowing, curvy copper tracks!

good article, except none of the chips in any of the controls are microcontrollers. looks like the author is confusing IC with microcontroller. he even correctly points out that the NES one is a shift register.

Little known fact: with the exception of select&#x2F;start, NES and Game Boy buttons are interchangeable. If you want a nice tight game boy control, replace the D-pad with an NES one. If you want the best-feeling NES buttons ever, replace the concave A&#x2F;B buttons with the Game Boy&#x27;s convex ones.<p>(Source: I took apart every nintendo console I own for sport&#x2F;boredom when I was a kid.)

A both loving and detailed look into the internals of controllers. Fun read!

Interesting how Nintendo went with that IR setup for their analog joystick when everyone else (MS and Sony to 3rd party controller manufacturers) went with two potentiometers.<p>Maybe Nintendo&#x27;s famous insularity is showing in their hardware designs as well as software?

&gt; The benefit of [the SNES bumper] button design vs a standard push button is that it has a much longer life and it also gives a soft, yet very tactile button feel.<p>Contrary anecdote: the bumpers on my SNES controller lost their resiliency before the face buttons.

Nice to see inside the SNES controller. I&#x27;ve had the same two for some 25 years or so and they work (as far as I can tell) as well as they did out of the box. The console too, though it&#x27;s missing a big chunk off the chassis in the back.

Can we add a &quot;(part 1)&quot; to the title? And when the next instalment hits HN, let it come with a &quot;(part 2)&quot; in the title as well.

A microcontroller seems like an overkill for a NES controller...