SnesHack

Bonjour! I am the person that made the controllers. Please forgive me for posting in English, I do not speak French and I am using Babelfish to translate this page. The receiver PIC reads the controller and packs the data into a custom format which gets sent to the data pin on the TX transmitter chip. This same signal appears on the data pin on the RX chip, which the receiver PIC reads and converts to the GameCube format. The project could therefore be modified in the way you describe with only a few minor changes, i.e. removing the chips and connecting the two points directly to each other. On the receiver side you would then only need the PIC microcontroller, the 4MHz XTAL and of course the controller itself...all other components could be removed (I would recommend cutting a SNES controller plug off an extension cord so that you don't have to chop up the controller itself; extension cords are very cheap on EBay). You would also connect the transmitter circuit to the 3.43V line on the GameCube connector. On the receiver side you would remove the RX receiver chip and the voltage divider (i.e. the 330K and 680K resistors) and then connect the receiver and transmitter data lines directly to each other i.e. connect pin 18 on the transmitter PIC to pin 7 on the receiver PIC. There is a slight chance that 3.43V isn't powerful enough to drive the controller, if this is the case then connect the transmitter up to 5V instead and run the data line through the voltage divider to bring it back down to the correct level for the receiver PIC (which you would still run at 3.43V). In theory this should work fine with no further changes needed to the firmware. You could make it even cheaper by having the receiver PIC also read the controller, thus removing one of the PICs and one of the XTALs, but this would require a major change to the firmware. However, as others have already pointed out, you can buy commercial convertors now that cost a lot less and would be more reliable. Unless you really want to do it yourself then I'd recommend getting one of these. Hope this helps, feel free to email me at my user name here followed by @ppl-pilot.com. Cheers, - Mark