Saturn to Wireless Orginal XBox Controller

[JrZyBud]

Okay, so I'm very new at all of this, and this may seem like an ambitious project for my first one ... I guess I should start out by saying that I'm wondering if this is even possible at the moment.  I would like to take a standard saturn control pad and wire it to a wireless xbox controller like this http://www.gamestop.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?sku=900547&affid=9797

Shouldn't it basically be the same as wiring up a saturn pad to a regular xbox controller?  Also, is it possible to fit everything inside the saturn pad for a nice clean look?

[kendrick]

Welcome to GamesX. When you say a standard Saturn controller, you're talking about the digital one and not the 3D analog pad that game with Nights, right?

Right off the bat I see two problems with what you want to do. First is that there are a couple more buttons on the Xbox pad that don't map cleanly to any button on any Saturn controller. I'm talking specifically about the back button and the analog stick center buttons. Second, don't the A/B/X/Y buttons have analog input? That is, they're not just on off, but detect how hard you press them. This is one of the main reasons why some games aren't ever going to be on the Xbox 360 backward compatibility list, bcause the 360 controller does purely digital buttons and can't replicate that functionality for the games that use it. Anyway, that means that you can't just wire up a Saturn pad button to those contacts, because all the Saturn pad buttons are purely digital too.

I don't mean to discourage you or anything, but this is the kind of controller conversion that probably requires an additional layer of software somewhere. If you can puzzle out the encoder that goes into an Xbox pad and fix it so that the button input is always detected a particular way (or is adjustable) then that would be the ideal solution. Good luck.

[JrZyBud]

Okay, that seems like it might be a bit out of my league at this point.  Lets try rethinking this here ... basically I'd like to use a saturn pad to play games on my modded xbox.  I don't know a whole lot about linux, but basically thats the platform that Im running when using a modded dashboard correct?  Ive heard that you can make your own usb port on your xbox by modifying a controller, at which point you can use flash drives and keyboards and whatnot.  Would it be possible to mod a regular (not saturn 3D) saturn pad to USB and then somehow use a wireless USB pad to make the controller wireless?  Is that possible?  Basically make a wireless USB saturn pad for the pc?

[kendrick]

You can convert just about any pad into a standard USB pad by swapping the encoder chip, and that's pretty thoroughly covered elsewhere on the site. However, getting it to work on an Xbox depends on what software you're running, and in general most of the Linux builds that I'm aware of require the use of a standard Xbox pad. Note that a normal Xbox controller contains a little USB hub (to accommodate the two memory card slots) and has code in it that's above and beyond what you normally find in a standard HID USB device.

So the short answer is, you can do what you're describing, but it won't give you a pad you can use on the Xbox. Going back over some old GamesX posts, I remembered that somebody out there had a suggestion to do the mod you're suggesting on an Xbox fighting stick instead of a pad. That way, you only have digital buttons (and one pad) to worry about since the encoder in the existing stick already handles the conversion. You lose the analog sticks, but that would have happened anyway.