Tech Olive

I’m not sure about you, but I could play hours and hours of old Sega games, like Sonic, Sonic 2 and even Sonic 3! Like all good things, it couldn’t last forever. An Xbox replaced my old Genesis, which now resides buried someplace out in a storage shed. However, this lovely Saturday morning, I felt like going back to my roots. I could try and find the actual system and then hope, after over a decade of no use, it still worked. Or, use my old Sonic CD for PC. But after 20 minutes of play, the keyboard just didn’t feel right. So I set out to make an old Genesis controller work with my PC, and make it wireless.

The parts required are relatively simple. A wireless keyboard, you can pick these up for about $20. You’ll also need an old Genesis controller. Mine came with my system when I purchased it way back when, but I’m sure you can find some new ones on eBay. Also, some mini push buttons, I found some in old gadgets that no longer worked, but you can buy them just about anywhere. I used 8 of them. You’ll need some way of powering the controller. You might get lucky like me and just be able to rip the battery pack out of the keyboard, and with a little glue, mount it on your controller.

As for tools, you’ll need a soldering iron, solder, flux, scissors, wire cutters, wire strippers, multimeter, hot glue gun with glue sticks, and screwdrivers.

So lets get started! You’ll first need to take the back off of the old controller, take out the circuit board and cable, and the old squishy tactile buttons.

Next, start disassembling the wireless keyboard, there should be a circuit board that connects to the keyboard membrane and converts the key presses into wireless signals for the receiver.

Next is the tricky part. You will need to use the multimeter and/or follow the traces to see which keys are connected to the circuit board. It doesn’t matter which keys you use. For example, I chose Z to be the keyboard key pressed whenever the user pressed A on the controller. So I found that soldering a switch between trace 7 and 22 (in this picture, trace 26 is on the far left) is what makes the circuit board output Z. Do this for all the buttons on the controller.

Next, hot glue the buttons in the correct place. Same with the circuit board. You may need to trim off some plastic inside the controller to get everything to fit.

Now put the rest of the controller back together and wire on your battery pack. Do a test.

If all goes well, congratulations! You should have a fully functioning controller!

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A Video!