Projects: Open Source N64 Emulator Controller #1

December 17, 2012 by CoolCapEngineer 2 Comments

So, here I am again. I am going to relax after having another brutal semester at RPI. However, next semester will be one of the toughest semesters I ever had. Although I’m only taking 12-15 credits next semester, I will be working at 5 different jobs. The first job is a part time job at TV Ferret redesigning their sewage inspection systems. The second job is working as a lab TA for the Mercer Lab at RPI. Another job will be working at RPI’s Advising Learning and Assistance Center as a tutor for introduction for Electronics and Electric Circuits. The final two jobs will be working at two research centers, but I doubt I will get both of them. Add in my senior design project, and you get a very stressful semester. So I figured going to have to work on a semi big project before going back to RPI. What’s the project I’m working on? A controller for an N64 Emulator.

Recently I started to get into video game emulators, more specifically the Project64. Lately, I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda; Ocarina of  Time on the emulator. The biggest problem, which I’m sure a lot of people who played emulators have encountered, is the controls. Controlling your characters using a keyboard is not humanly possible. I want to make playing on the N64 emulator as easy as pie. I envision myself, picking the device, and playing a rousing game of Super Mario 64 without attempting to throw my laptop out of the window.

To make the project more interesting, I will set up a deadline for myself. I want to at least finish the prototype before January 21^st, or before I go back to RPI. Whether the final prototype will be built on a breadboard or a pcb is up in the air. If I finished the project before January 21^st, I will make it into a project for RPI RCOS, which focuses on open source projects,  next semester.  In other words, expect more posts to come from me December 17^th until January 20^th….as long as the world does not end by that time. So, the question you guys might be wondering how am I going to accomplish this?

So obviously I’m going to use a microcontroller for this project, but it will be a very different microcontroller than the microcontrollers I used in the past. Instead, I will be using Microchip’s PIC18 series microcontrollers. Why? Simple, my dear Watson. I spent one semester using nothing but PIC18 microcontrollers for my research at RPI’s Center for Automation Technologies and Systems.

So the picture above shows the overall system I will be working with for the project. Here’s how it will work. I will have the PIC18F4553 microcontroller to read in the state of the buttons on the controller. Afterwards, it will tell a python serial communication script which button is pressed. Once the serial communication script receives the data from the microcontroller, then it will tell another python script to generate the appropriate keyboard events, which will be automatically seen by the emulator.Depending on the progress of the project, I will create a gui interface for the device. The gui will have an on/off button, and an option to determine the COM port the driver should look at. Again, I will give more details as time progresses. It’s going to be a fun 35 days!