Modded NES and SNES controllers work wirelessly with Wii

By Conrad Quilty-Harper | February 21, 2007

Filed under: Gaming

Judging by the sheer number of modifications and hacks for the NES that are out there, we’d have thought the limit to the number of things that it’s possible to do with the hardware is close to being reached. Apparently not: as this latest mod by a guy called Mark Feldman proves, as long as the games stick around, people will go to extraordinary lengths to get authentic hardware to go with it. Mark’s wireless NES controller mod for Wii involves opening up a SNES and NES controller, sticking a wireless transmitter, a microcontroller, and an iPod mini battery inside, and constructing a wireless receiver module with a GameCube cable on the end. Thanks to some sort of black magic — Mark refers to it as “coding” — when all this is put together, an off-the-shelf Wii can interpret the control input from the modded controllers, and the nostalgia-fueled gamer can play classic games on their virtual console without worrying about wires, and without a Wiimote-tethered Classic controller. Full details of how to make your NES controller wireless, and how to code the microprocessor so that it’ll understand the signals, are available on Mark’s site. Before attempting to execute any of the plans, we’d recommend warning friends and relatives that they may not see you for a while. Especially spouses: they tend to get worried when their SO disappears to the basement with a bundle of chips and circuitry.