[MP-Ryan]

you can't really do any permanent damage just soldering two pieces of wire together.  worst case, you just melt it off and try again. (provided you use common sense and do the soldering well away from everything else).  or if the cords are copper braid, just strip it, twist that **** together and electrical tape/heat shrink it back up.

Exactly.  It's very likely that no soldering is required.

Or, spend $5 on eBay.  http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=snes+controller+cable+extension

[MP-Ryan]

I done did dat. But see, my bed is right in front of my tv. I already have to move my SNES as close to the edge of the dresser as possible. And I have to sit on the edge of the bed. The foot of the bed is made of wood. No cushion is provided, so it makes my ass hurt. 

I have solved your problem.

1.  Get off your ass.
2.  Go outside.
3.  Meet girls.
4.  Have too little time to pester HLP with things that are easily Googled.
5.  HLP PROFITS!!!!

Or, do some very basic cable extending with a pair of wire cutters, some extra cable, and a roll of electrical tape.  If you want to be an engineer or work out all these little projects, it's time you learned how to practically do things.

[Colonol Dekker]

do some very basic cable extending with a pair of wire cutters, some extra cable, and a roll of electrical tape.  If you want to be an engineer or work out all these little projects, it's time you learned how to practically do things.

:hi-five smiley:

[Nuke]

learn to splice.

its an old device, and an input device at that, so that means its baud rate is very low. so that means just about any piece of cable with enough wires in it will do. first thing you need is a pinout, as with all things hackery, just ask the russians.

snes gamepad only has 5 pins looks like, there are 2 other pins on the connector but these dont go anywhere. there may or may not be dead wires in the cable for those pins, the likely answer is no, because they can save money and make the cables thinner and more flexible by removing them. there may or may not also be a shielding braid (i doubt it given the low baud rate), and if so this would need to be wired in. so you need a piece of cable with at least 5 wires in it, more is ok you can just not connect them to anything.

bluetooth or other wireless links, no! that wont work without a microcontroller at each end to convert the signals, then you would also need all the support components that go with it, a way to power the remote end. thats a voltage regulator and the components that go with it, and a battery of sorts, if lithium, moar components! moar parts! as you have moar parts your board gets bigger, too big to fit in an snes gamepad. unless your some smd guru with 1337 soldering skills, or invest in the thousands of dollars in equipment for proper smd tools, your sol.

my wireles ps2 gamepad conversion was made possible for several reasons. first of which being the ample space inside the controller. once i removed the vibration motors i had enough space to cram in a dead bug (dip package mcu with parts soldered directly to it), and a voltage regulator circuit. i bent the existing circuitry to turn the existing inputs into a button matrix so i could reduce the input requirements greatly, and all this was wired together. an snes gamepad would probibly need a new board made from scratch that had room for an mcu and a bluetooth transceiver module (plus support components and power supply), and this would need to be built with smd parts just to fit. this is beyond my level of expertise (im still a dip chiper and through holer), but has probably been done before.

[Nuke]

But original Snes control pads just feeeel so right for games like starwing and cybernator.x

thare are snes gamepad to usb conversion on ebay for this, starting at around $2.

[Colonol Dekker]

But original Snes control pads just feeeel so right for games like starwing and cybernator.x

thare are snes gamepad to usb conversion on ebay for this, starting at around $2.

I know, but i prefer to use my console, blow the grit out of it. Do the old on-off-on-off trick to avoid the blinky red light of doom.
It's so much more satisfying to play a game after hunting for the cartridge in the mire that is the space.........under my bed

[Nuke]

But original Snes control pads just feeeel so right for games like starwing and cybernator.x

thare are snes gamepad to usb conversion on ebay for this, starting at around $2.

I know, but i prefer to use my console, blow the grit out of it. Do the old on-off-on-off trick to avoid the blinky red light of doom.
It's so much more satisfying to play a game after hunting for the cartridge in the mire that is the space.........under my bed

i thought thats where you kept your dead girlfriends after, how do you brits say, snogged them to death?

[FireSpawn]

But original Snes control pads just feeeel so right for games like starwing and cybernator.x

thare are snes gamepad to usb conversion on ebay for this, starting at around $2.

I know, but i prefer to use my console, blow the grit out of it. Do the old on-off-on-off trick to avoid the blinky red light of doom.
It's so much more satisfying to play a game after hunting for the cartridge in the mire that is the space.........under my bed

i thought thats where you kept your dead girlfriends after, how do you brits say, snogged them to death?

*Senses Dekker's impending deluge of gut churning and amazingly sick jokes*

Oh dear........I'veheard enough of theses to last a lifetime. I'm off!

*Escapes* 

[Colonol Dekker]

If I told one, I'd have to ban myself




Also, snogging = kissing.


One of them, maybe, ....... But she's git at least another month left in her

[Nuke]

i always thought it meant ****ing, oh well. diplomacy++;

at least if i ever meet a brittish chick and she says lets snogg, i wont get charged with rape.

this threads so been hijacked by gd mods

[Colonol Dekker]

You might be thinking of shagging.

We must never reveals teh secret GD Mod handshake and passwords.

The world will asplode....

[deathfun]

this threads so been hijacked by gd mods

I think I have the perfect song to signify this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5ZBu3nHJkM

[FlamingCobra]

-snip-
bluetooth or other wireless links, no! that wont work without a microcontroller at each end to convert the signals, then you would also need all the support components that go with it, a way to power the remote end. thats a voltage regulator and the components that go with it, and a battery of sorts, if lithium, moar components! moar parts! as you have moar parts your board gets bigger, too big to fit in an snes gamepad. unless your some smd guru with 1337 soldering skills, or invest in the thousands of dollars in equipment for proper smd tools, your sol.
-snip-

Please download this. View the PDF file and SNES_TX.txt
And it all fits within a SNES gamepad.

I don't think I'm going to attempt this project yet, as I am n00b and have never done anything like this before.

I'll probably take your advice and learn to splice. But I should probably get another SNES controller in case I screw up.

Do you think I'll be able to find the cables I need at Lowe's?

[Nuke]

this looks like a box you plug your controller into and it converts the signals and pumps the data out over a rather high speed (relatively) transceiver. and a box at the other end that goes into the console. id prefer to put all the electronics for the receiver into the controller itself. instead of let the mcu on the board convert button presses to a serial signal, and then encapsulate that into a packet for transmission over a transciever, as what these diagrams seem to indicate. id just cut out the middle man, use a single mcu to read the buttons directly, transmit their states over the transceiver, and just have the mcu at the other end pretend to be an snes controller, receiving state data from the unit in the controller.

what i would do is just design the boards in a cad program, and make them yourself / have them made. there are services who will fabricate pcbs to spec for you, but they cost $$$. you can do it yourself if you have the equip (blank pcbs, laser printer, ferric chloride, drill press, router table, etc). im still trying to score a laser printer for cheap, and a dremel is about all you need for drilling/routing (i can do it freehand). you can probably hand solder smd parts (like chips with gull wing contacts), to allow any chips you need to be as small as possible. as opposed to using a transceiver module i would just get the transceiver chip and a chip antennae, and include it on the same board. its an smd, in a rather hard to solder package so have fun there.

the transceiver they are using is something ive been looking at. i just ordered a pair of them from china a few days ago for the ridiculously low price of $6.40 (and they even paid the shipping). they normally go for a lot more. the module is about the size of a quarter, and il be sure to tell you about them when i get em in the mail in a couple weeks. you might be able to cram it into the controller if you used smd parts for everything else. they will be better than the ask modules ive been using, which work, when they want to.

as for the diagrams, they come with the hex files which is the program you run on the mcu, but i would prefer to have actual source code for tweaking. as for me, i would just pay the $2 for the usb gamepad and play it on my emulator. my gamepad conversion was more or less meant for radio control applications and less for gaming (its not responsive enough for that).

[Enzo03]

I fail spectacularly to see why some people raised such a huge stink over the fact that someone would actually want to play their SNES games on a real SNES as opposed to an emulator.  I just do both

[Nuke]

if you have the equipment yay for you. i mean when i had a snes, i just bought a 3rd party controller that came with an 8 foot cord, you could get wireless controllers if you were willing to buy them. im just kind of the opinion that modifying the electronics in your controller, at great expense, so you can extend the reach of a controller to be rather overkill, and only for hard core snes fanatics. if i was such a fanatic, i would probably go out of my way to get original licensed by nintendo wireless controllers from that era, than try to hack something together. since im not a fanatic, and no longer own snes equipment/games, id just buy the $2 usb controller and emulate. i wouldnt even do that, id just use the keyboard and emulate. for emulators of other systems i will use whatever input devices are needed. for example i play starfox 64 with my ch fighterstick. if you want to play on original equimpent, fine by me, but its gonna cost yea.

nes for example is in the collectors regeme, some games go on ebay for thousands of dollars. you can get the roms for free, but owning the cartridges will cost a fortune. a virtual boy system goes for $7000 now, and that system flopped horribly (why its so damn expensive). snes hasnt gotten there yet, but im sure it will. when it does il be glad i collected roms.

[BlueFlames]

nes for example is in the collectors regeme, some games go on ebay for thousands of dollars. you can get the roms for free, but owning the cartridges will cost a fortune

That's a pretty ridiculous misconception.  There are a few games that never went into full production that will run a few thousand dollars, but they were incredibly collectable and expensive in the NES era as well.  Anything that saw a full commercial release on the NES was produced in large enough numbers that, even now, it's pretty easy to find good-condition cartridges under $10-$15.  NES decks can be had in the realm of $15-$20.  If someone told you otherwise, then they were trying to fleece you.

That being said, going to the trouble and expense doing a wireless conversion of an original NES/SNES controller is still pretty silly, when you can just sit closer to the console.  I get it, if it's an academic exercise to see if you can make a wireless conversion or an exercise to learn some basic electronics, but as a solution to the cord-is-too-short problem, it's absurd.

[FireSpawn]

Maybe some people like the challenge of finding and implementing a complex and convoluted method to solve a simple problem. I sometimes do, and have done so on several occasions (granted, none of them involved me teaching myself a new craft, but that's beside the point).

[Mongoose]

I know our (awesome) local Play 'n' Trade has a whole bin of NES and SNES games, and the only ones I've seen go for over $15 or so are the rare and desirable ones like Earthbound and Final Fantasy III (VI).  Most of them are well under $10.  The same store also sells these third-party units that can play both NES and SNES titles, though I can't speak to their quality myself.

[deathfun]

I just realized another thing you could do...
Sit in front of the bed, but not on it! You then have something to lean on