
Nintendo Controller Teardown - fictivmade
https://www.fictiv.com/resources/starter/hardware-dna-nintendo-teardown
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0xcde4c3db
I'm biased since I'm an EE, but to me the real magic in game controllers is
the mechanical/materials/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.

That said, one of the cool things about how they designed the NES and SNES
pads electrically/logically is that an SNES pad will actually work with an NES
if you make an adapter for the different connectors, since it's the same
protocol with a different number of data bits clocked. But the best part is
that they didn'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.

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kozukumi
Couldn't agree with you more! I am amazed at the precision of modern
controllers considering how complex they are. The fact I can pick up any Dual
Shock or Xbox 360 controller and it feel just like every other one is pretty
mind blowing. Sure over time they develop their own little habits but out of
the box they are almost clones (with the exception of ones that should have
failed QA but somehow shipped).

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georgemcbay
"The fact I can pick up any Dual Shock or Xbox 360 controller and it feel just
like every other one is pretty mind blowing."

I totally agree with the gist of your statement but as someone who has an
absurd amount of Xbox 360 controllers I'm positive that they changed the
components at least twice in the standard controllers (not including the
obvious redesign of the gray special D-pad controller or all the various
special editions) in ways (weight distribution, outer materials) that you can
totally feel without taking the controller apart.

I haven't researched this to know if this was due to changes over time or
different factories or what but of the 9 or 10 controllers I had over the
years (used on both the actual Xbox 360 and a PC) there were 3 distinct
different types of feel that were subtle but obvious if A/B testing.

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

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jpwright
Yup! It's a humble 4021N.

~~~
6502nerdface
Yes! Also goes by part number 74LS165 (edit: actually they are just similar)
[1]. Here's how to use it in your game code:
[http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Standard_controller](http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Standard_controller)

Basically you write high voltage to the "strobe" line of the shift register in
the controller, putting it in a state where it continuously updates to reflect
current button presses. Once you remove the high voltage, it "freezes" its
8-bit state representing whatever combination of the eight buttons were last
depressed, and then you make 8 successive reads from the shift register's
serial line, reading off the state 1 bit at a time. It's up to the game
software to be robust against bouncing, as well as against a tricky hardware
bug where the DMC module of the NES's audio processing unit conflicts with the
latching mechanism used by the controller's serial line. Needless to say, this
must all be emulated by accurate NES emulators, too :)

[1]
[http://www.datasheetcatalog.com/info_redirect/datasheet/phil...](http://www.datasheetcatalog.com/info_redirect/datasheet/philips/74HC_HCT165_CNV_2.pdf.shtml)

~~~
cnvogel
Look closely, the '165 is a little different, both in functionality and
pinout. You'll not be able to swap in one for the other. -- But yes, both are
parallel in, serial in/out shift registers.

[http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/HEF4021B.pdf](http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/HEF4021B.pdf)
[http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/74HC_HCT165.pdf](http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/74HC_HCT165.pdf)
(pinout for LS is the same)

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thescriptkiddie
The 16 pin "microcontroller" in the NES controller is actually an 8 bit
parallel-in/serial-out shift register.

~~~
thescriptkiddie
By the way, the SNES controller also uses a shift register, not a
microcontroller.

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dpedu
Here's a blog post I wrote about how the joystick of the Nintendo 64 works,
electrically speaking:
[http://dpedu.io/article/2015-03-11/nintendo-64-joystick-
pino...](http://dpedu.io/article/2015-03-11/nintendo-64-joystick-pinout-
arduino)

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russnewcomer
It's pretty impressive to look at and consider the differences in the
complexity of the circuit boards in successive generations.

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/Famicon days.

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'd pay $50 for a low-hassle, no-legal-ambiguities way to play
NES games with my kid.

~~~
ashark
The Classic Controllers on the Wii (and WiiU, I suppose) aren't bad. Good,
precise dpad, quick switching between face buttons. A kind of updated classic
feel. You can buy quite a few NES games for those systems, among others.

The main place you'll encounter problems playing legally on new equipment is
with games where licensing issue have cropped up—we'll possibly never see a
re-release of Goldeneye for the N64, for example, and some newer versions of
games have been stripped of their original soundtracks (Crazy Taxi).

~~~
porsupah
Incidental to the article, I know, but there's a wrinkle in Crazy Taxi's
soundtrack story: for whatever reasons, whilst the console ports feature a new
soundtrack, the iOS and Android versions retain the original.

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bjackman
I love the fact that the NES controller's PCB has free-flowing, curvy copper
tracks!

~~~
devindotcom
Beautiful, isn't it? Although I don't regret that things have gotten smaller
and more efficient, there's something wonderful about being able to take in
the whole PCB layout in a glance - and have it be actually nice-looking as
well!

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ldom22
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.

~~~
cnvogel
In his defence, most people starting with tinkering nowadays start off with
something like an Arduino (8-bit or even 32-bit micro) and there's not much
besides the micro on those boards... which easily explains the confusion about
the nomenclature, mixing up the subset (µC) with the superset (IC).

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anonbanker
Little known fact: with the exception of select/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/B buttons with the Game Boy's convex ones.

(Source: I took apart every nintendo console I own for sport/boredom when I
was a kid.)

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

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Scuds
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.

Maybe Nintendo's famous insularity is showing in their hardware designs as
well as software?

~~~
wtallis
I think they just implemented the mechanism that was nearly universal at the
time for a computer mouse. It's not like they had a lot of precedent to follow
for compact joysticks.

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kderbe
> 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.

Contrary anecdote: the bumpers on my SNES controller lost their resiliency
before the face buttons.

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funkedelic_bob
I have an good/odd memory of that great rubbery feel and push the SNES bumpers
had. It's cool to see the inside of it, although I'm surprised I never did
having thrown said controller against the wall so many times because of how
hard Super Star Wars was to beat.

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devindotcom
Nice to see inside the SNES controller. I'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's missing a big chunk off the chassis in
the back.

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

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

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scott_karana
As some other commenters (and the photo, contrary to body text) have pointed
out, it's actually a shift register.

