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.