Play games with a proper old-school arcade joystick and buttons on your modern systems! Back at the dawn of MAME arcade game emulation there were lots of heavy-duty joysticks made for Windows PCs. Their joysticks and buttons are great, but their brains were meant to output over PS/2 keyboard cables or sound card joystick interfaces.
Now you can keep all the good parts and swap out the old-fashioned driver board for a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller that works as a gamepad over USB. With the Pico H and Terminal PiCowbell you can avoid soldering altogether for a plug-and-play solution.
This particular arcade stick has a trackball that is already a USB HID mouse device, so we'll leave it as-is.
Old Arcade Controller to Resurrect
This type of controller can be found at yard sales and online auctions -- they were made for MAME gaming on PCs with PS/2 or sound card joystick ports. Build like tanks, they contain real arcade joysticks and buttons and an obsolete controller interface PCB we'll bypass to modernize it!
This guide shows an X-Arcade Tankstick, but nearly any arcade-style controller should work.
You can alternatively build your own controller from scratch using the following items, plus an enclosure of your own design.
Page last edited May 01, 2024
Text editor powered by tinymce.
