Enjoy retro N64 games, but can’t stand the controller? That’s the situation I found myself in about 7 years ago, back in 2004. So I built an adaptor, to use Game Cube controllers on the N64.
The adaptor hardware is very simple- all you need is a PIC microcontroller. I originally designed the project to work with the very popular at the time PIC16F84A, or some smaller 8-pin chips. It bit-bangs both protocols, so you don’t need any more hardware than a tiny µC, a couple resistors, and optionally either a voltage booster or battery pack to run the “rumble” vibration motor.
I had a lot of fun building it, since it was an opportunity to reverse engineer a protocol that, as far as I could tell, had never been documented publicly. There were many web sites explaining the basics of the N64 and Game Cube protocols- enough to talk to the controllers with your own hardware. But there was significantly more to learn about emulating an N64 controller, since there are many features that you don’t really need to use the controller, but which games will use. The N64 also has the added complexity of having a memory card slot. The controller implements a protocol that tunnels SRAM reads/writes over the controller wire. Peripherals like the Rumble Pak pretend to be SRAM, but are actually memory-mapped I/O devices.
This is a very old project, but I thought I’d do a quick post with an update on it. I never really released the project, I just quietly posted the source code and the CIA feed. Since then, many others have found the project and built their own.
I recently heard from Jacques Gagnon, who went a step farther. He was frustrated by a few lingering bugs, most notably lack of support for the WaveBird wireless controllers. So he pulled the project into Google Code and has been hacking away! WaveBird controllers work now, and he’s added several other new features, such as the ability to store multiple sets of button mapping layouts in memory.
If you’re still interested in this classic gaming platform and you’d love to have your own Cube64 adaptor, I highly encourage you to check out Jacques’ work. The adaptors are easy to build, especially if you already have some experience with microcontroller programming.
