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.
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