NES Gamepad Arduino Uinput Thing

This repository contains two co-reliant programs. Together they allow you to use up to 4 NES gamepads as standard joysticks through a single USB port. On Linux.

You can also use the builtin Linux gamecon driver to use NES gamepads via the RS232 serial port. This project is an alternative to that.

You can reach me via github: https://github.com/gammy

Components

uinput-nes: A Linux userland driver which creates 1-4 standard joystick interfaces representing a real NES gamepad/controller. It relies on nes_arduino_relay (or something which does the same job) for requesting and receiving controller state data from an FTDI virtual serial interface.

nes_arduino_relay: An Arduino sketch which can decode NES gamepad data from up to 4 controllers. It waits for a pad number request on the serial line and then sends that pad state back.

nes_test: A barebone NES gamepad decoder which just sends human-readable data to the serial port.

Requirements

• A USB port
• Linux with uinput support (standard)
• An Arduino Duemilanove or pin-compatible equivalent
• The Arduino IDE (for programming the Arduino)
• One or more NES gamepads

Build

Hardware

Connect the NES gamepads to your Arduino like this,

Ground -> |1\_ 
 Clock -> |2 5| <- +5V
 Latch -> |3 6|
  Data -> |4 7|

        Gamepad | Arduino
       ---------+-------
       Ground 1 | Ground
        Clock 2 | D2
        Latch 3 | D3
(Pad 1)  Data 4 | D4
(Pad 2)  Data 4 | D5
(Pad 3)  Data 4 | D6
(Pad 4)  Data 4 | D7
          +5V 5 | +5V

Then you need to connect the Arduino to your computer via the USB cable. I presume that people who are reading this are mainly interested in using this code for their own purposes; the userland driver is fairly modular in that sense.

Software

You'll need to build the software; both the uinput driver and the relay Arduino sketch, and for those things you of course need a build environment such as build-essential on debian/ubunututu or base-devel on archlinux, and the Arduino IDE of course. In addition, the uinput driver depends on libftdi for USB serial port communication.

1. Clone this repository or download it somehow
2. Go into nes_gamepad/uinput-nes/ and build the program by running make, which will hopefully result in the production of a uinput-nes binary.
3. Open the Arduino IDE and load the nes_gamepad/nes_arduino_relay/ sketch
4. Build and upload the sketch to your Arduino

That should be it.

Usage

Just run uinput-nes as root. By default it creates a single joystick interface (js0 if no other joysticks are connected) in the most standard fashion. Run uinput-nes --help for a variety of options.