Wireless NES Controller for the Wii

Posted on September 22nd, 2008 by James.
Categories: General.

Before I start this post, I have to send out a big thank you to Mark Feldman http://www.ppl-pilot.com, who designed all the code and circuits in this project :-)

A few months ago my good friend Robert came to me with Marks URL and demanded that I make him a wireless NES controller for his Wii/MAME Cab, then after a few eyebrow raisings from myself (no not that kind!) he offered to sump up the costs for the hardware and we had ourselves a deal!

The wireless works by using an AM radio transmitter/receiver pair to send the buttons signals. At each end there is PIC16F84A to encode and decode the button signals.. and that’s pretty much it! Simple huh! Woo that was quick, cya!

… Oh ok! ok! Here’s some pretty pictures! :-)

Programming the PIC Chip

Programming the PIC chip. This circuit board hooks up via the serial cable to my computer and I can download programs onto the chip. There’s a very simple test setup on the board to allow me to take inputs from the press switch on the right and control the LEDs.

Receiver Assembly

 

On the left you can see m soldering together the receiver board. The little clampy things that are holding it for me while I work on it are actually called “Helping hands” :-) On the right I’m making sure it fits in the box! I wanted my receiver to look a little more Wii-like than Marks one, so I used a white box with rounded edges. I’m really happy with the result!

Transmitter Circuit testing

This is the transmitter circuit being Breadboarded. Breadboard is a special electronics testing thing. It lets you plug all your components together to test it, but without making it permanent. Each wire you can see is easily unplugged from the board and swapped to a different socket to allow the electricity to flow to somewhere else. It makes testing stuff super easy!

Transmitter Assembly

 

Squeezing everything in here was a bitch! But I finally got it all in! The transmitter is powered by an iPod nano battery! It’s small.. but it could be smaller! I’ve flattened out all the pins on the PIC chip so that it’ll fit under the original Nintendo circuit board. On the right pic you can see I’ve got an on/off switch and a little charging socket. The on/off switch toggles the battery between the PIC chip and the charging socket.

Finally all together and working!

 

The final product! In use (left) and on charge (right).

Now Robert and I can play the original Super Mario on the Wii Virtual Console using the original controller! :-)

18 comments.

Rob

Comment on September 22nd, 2008.

Great job!
… little does James know that there are many more retro controllers to mod… :-)

Jason

Comment on October 4th, 2008.

Very nice.

James’ Blog » Wireless SNES Controller for the Wii

Pingback on October 5th, 2008.

[...] Wireless NES Controller for the Wii [...]

Craig

Comment on March 31st, 2009.

James,
I tried to make one of these but had a strange problem. During playback random button presses would be registered causing my games to pause, etc. I even sent it to Mark down under to see if he could help. Would you consider making one for me??

James

Comment on March 31st, 2009.

I had a similar problem. After a bit of diagnosis, I found that it was interference from my normal Wii controller. Try turning moving your Wii controller away from the receiver, or just turning it off (quickist way is to yank the battery out and put it back in again). I think you may be able to fix this by playing with the length of the receiver ariel, but just turning off the other wiimotes fixes it nicely.

Ben

Comment on April 10th, 2010.

Hello,
great job, i make this wireless snes controller but doesn’t work! i use a TX and RX 315mhz.I have programming my pic16f84a with a USB PICKIT2, looks good, verify is ok.
So my problem is i use a pic16f84a-04/p with a 20mhz crystal for the receiver and the same with a 4mhz crystal for the transmitter.My question is “we must only use a PIC16F84A-20/p and not a -04/p with this hex code?”.

Thanks and good week-end
PS:please can you send me the good snes-transmitter and receiver hex code, the site of Mark is closed…

Ben

zerodayswarez

Comment on April 23rd, 2010.

It is excellent idea

Evan brown

Comment on September 24th, 2010.

can i Buy one from you? it would mean a lot

Samsung Soul

Comment on December 25th, 2010.

It is amazing that this project is being shared online. I visited the museum for the first time last May, a wish I’d had for a long time- it was fantastic

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