“A few years ago on a trip to Tokyo, we took a day to explore Akihabara. We found a shop that was selling retro gaming stuff and when I saw an old SNES controller for sale I had to buy it.
Playing the SNES was one of my favourite things as a kid and Secret of Mana remains one of my favourite games to this day.
Of course, I didn’t have a SNES console anymore so when we returned back home I decided it would be a fun project to modernize the SNES controller so I could plug it straight into my PC via USB.
SNES Controller Hardware
The first step was to figure out how the SNES controller hardware reported which buttons were being pressed. After a bit of Googling I found this document describing the hardware.
Luckily I now have another unmodified SNES controller so I can take some pictures of the original hardware.”