The NES Advantage was a cool bit of hardware back in 1987, bringing an arcade stick to the home console gaming experience. Naturally they don’t get much use these days, unless of course they’ve been modded to work with modern systems, as [Aaron] has done.
[Aaron]’s goals were straightforward. The stick should work with modern systems over Bluetooth, but the mod should not involve cutting the case or making any new holes. All controls, including Turbo and Slow Motion, still had to work, too, and there would be no adding extra buttons for configuration or control.
To achieve this, [Aaron] whipped up a custom PCB which replaces the original cable attached to the NES Advantage. Power is via a small LiPo cell, charged via a TP4056 and paired with a TPS63900 buck-boost converter. An ESP32-WROOM-32E interfaces all the original controls, reading the stick’s CD4021 shift registers to do so. It then either emulates a Switch Pro Controller over Bluetooth Classic, for use with a modern Nintendo Switch, or it acts as a standard Bluetooth Low Energy gamepad for use with PCs, SteamOS, phones, and other compatible hardware. All that and the stick can still work with an original NES if so desired, when placed in the Switch Pro Controller mode. You merely need to plug in an 8BitDo NES Retro Receiver and you’re up and running.
We’ve seen other fun retro controller builds before, too, like this classic Xbox controller modded to work with the Xbox 360. If you’re cooking up similar projects, we’d love to hear about it on the tipsline.