joeyparrish / retcon

Use comfortable wireless PS3 controllers on your old Sega or Nintendo system.

Retro Console Controller

Use comfortable wireless PS3 controllers on your old Sega or Nintendo system.

⚠️ NOTE ⚠️: This project has been deprecated.

I bought receivers from 8bitdo that do much more than my homebrew project ever could, in a smaller space, for less money. For example, here you can get a Sega Genesis receiver for bluetooth controllers that is tiny and powered by the Sega itself: https://www.8bitdo.com/retro-receiver-genesis-mega-drive/

I had begun a redesign based on a microcontroller that I hoped would be powered by the console itself, and would use generic Bluetooth instead of PS3, but for $20 (as of Feb 2024) it's hard to beat what 8bitdo is doing.

Feel free to build off of this repo if you wish, but I'm abandoning it in favor of https://www.8bitdo.com/

-Joey

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The PS3 controllers pair with a Raspberry Pi, which translates the controller inputs to the game console through an external circuit.

The repository hosts the schematics, board layouts, and source code.

For a list of known issues, see our issue tracker.

Software

RetCon consists of three pieces of software that run on a Raspberry Pi:

• retcon - reads events from the gamepad and toggle GPIO pins
• trusting-steed - waits for gamepads and marks them as "trusted"
• sixpair - waits for PS3 controllers over USB and pairs them for bluetooth

These run on the Raspberry Pi, and I do not recommend cross-compiling them. To build them, check out the source on Raspbian, install the deps, then build the debian package:

git clone https://github.com/cashpipeplusplus/retcon
sudo apt-get install libusb-dev pigpio python-gobject python-dbus
cd retcon/src/
fakeroot ./debian/rules binary

To install on Raspbian:

sudo dpkg -i ../retcon_0.0.1-1_armhf.deb

Raspberry Pi SD card image

The SD card image is generated using a fork of a tool called pi-gen, which is included as a submodule.

From retcon, you can check out the pi-gen code like this:

git submodule update --init --recursive

To build the SD image, first you must build the retcon debian package from Raspbian. Then, copy the deb file to your Linux machine and build the SD image there. Assuming the deb file is in the retcon folder, run this:

cd pi-gen
sudo ./build.sh ../retcon_0.0.1-1_armhf.deb

The output will appear in deploy/.

Pre-built SD card image

Pre-built SD card images are available from the releases page.

Hardware

The Raspberry Pi communicates with the game console through an external circuit. Schematics and board layouts for this extra hardware can be found in the circuit/ folder. The board file can be uploaded directly to DirtyPCBs if you want the boards printed for you. More details can be found in circuit/README.md.

retcon's Issues

RetCon service doesn't start

It seems that pigpio uses gpu memory, and the modified boot config does not provide enough.

Import controller source code from private repo

Fails to boot up without network

If you boot up without a network adapter, the controller service seems never to start. Bluetooth is still working and controllers can connect, but nothing reaches the Sega.

Missing connection between console GNDs and Pi GND pins

Hardware v1.4 is missing connection between console GNDs and Pi GND pins.

Document the build process

Document how to build the tools and services in this repo, as well as the SD card image that runs on the Raspberry Pi.

Build SD card image from raspbian

Upload schematics and board files

Get the system to work in read-only mode

Get this working, then make it the default in the SD image

Decide on a build system

Add console controller interface docs

There should be good documentation of the electrical interfaces to each of the consoles we support.

Write user-facing documentation

Cover setup, power, connecting to the game console, pairing, button mapping.

Support Raspberry Pi Zero W

Raspberry Pi Zero W needs newer drivers, so the OS image needs to be rebuilt.

Add packages to self-build

If I add debhelper, git, and libusb-dev to the SD image, I should be able to use a RetCon image to compile new versions of RetCon.

Document getting DB9 connectors to fit Sega controller cables

The shielding on the DB9 connectors must be removed before the Sega controller cables fit. This fact should be documented, and there should be guidance on how to do it.

Speed up boot

The system boots too slowly.

First, time boot-up on a fresh SD card to get a baseline. Then see how much fat we can trim.

Bluetooth controller 1 LED blinks out

1. Boot up
2. Press PS button on a pre-paired PS3 controller
3. LED 1 blinks on, then immediately back off
4. Workaround: hold PS button to shut down controller, then press PS button again to reconnect
5. LED 1 stays on this time

Automatically trust new BT gamepads

The prototype (unpublished) used parts of QtSixA to pair with and interface to PS3 controllers. This was buggy and largely unnecessary, since the bluetooth stack on Linux already supports PS3 controllers.

We already build sixpair.c (originally from QtSixA) to pair PS3 controllers over bluetooth, and that is a very minor dependency. To avoid using the rest of QtSixA, we need a server that waits for and automatically trusts gamepads.

3D-printed project box

It would be great to have a 3D-printable project box to fit the circuit board into.

Generalize to Nintendo

Sega Genesis is supported now, and thanks to backward compatibility, Sega Master System should work as well (untested).

Generalize to the serial interface used on SNES and NES. These should also be backward compatible electrically, although not in terms of the physical connectors.

systemd can't shut down the trusting-steed service

Running sudo /etc/init.d/trusting-steed stop does not seem to have an effect. Not sure why.

Reduce image size

v1.2.0 is 292MB zipped and 1.4GB unzipped.

Ideally, we could make it smaller.