Keeping aside the XBOX Kinect, there isn’t any other option to connect to a gaming console than a joystick or a game controller. It can also be said now that the game controllers are quite interesting translators of the user’s finger movement which ultimately result in speeding up the car or thrashing down the enemy etc etc. Wouldn’t it quite interesting to know what signals does a controller send to the console? Decoding up the language of a game controller is what has been shown in this blog post by Pieter-Jan.
He has tried this observational experiment on the epic Nintendo N64 controller and has taken the help of a PIC micro controller to understand the signals transmitted by the controller. Pieter has plugged out the controller from its connector and has plugged the wires into a PIC 18 microcontroller board, which, further is connected to the oscilloscope.
We have progressed a lot from mere wired controllers and shock vibration joysticks to wireless controllers and now have turned ourselves to be the controller. With such diversity, there definitely would be a different way to analyze what the controller says; a wireless controller would need and say something else than the one shown in this experiment.
However, this method proves to be quite efficient when one has to debug the controller or hack it to do something else than just gaming.
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