 I have a new games console. It's a Nezono chip handheld gaming device. This is the Player 2 gamepad. The gamepad is vile and spongy and generally horrible in every possible way. So let's try to turn this into an Uiga gamepad. This is just a simple straight through cable. This is connected to here. I've used a sharp tool to scrape through the tracks here. That's not my best joint. So this feels just as bad as it ever did, which is right. I hate that. These are micro switches. That will do. That's not very good actually. It needs a shim of some kind. So I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I've managed to bodge the gamepad into working with the keys. I 3D printed some shims to give the right spacing inside the keys and as a result they are nice and positive. The magic number turned out to be 1.5 millimeters of padding between the bottom of the hard plastic keycap and the switch itself. It could probably do a little bit more. It's a little rattly but it works. It's nice and clicky and it feels very positive. So I'll just take that apart and show you the bits. So there's the PCB. So we have here this is the circular piece that goes on the bottom of the D-pad. You can see it's got the snubs which push against the key switches. These buttons are a little bit different. Each one has one of these little caps that fits over the whole, the post in the middle of the key and yeah that works fine. The bad news is that after making something of a dog's dinner of the cable I have discovered that it is not a straight through nine pin cable. It's only got four wires in it and not all of these pins are actually connected to anything which means it's completely useless for connecting up the gamepad. As I need, well I have the pin out here, I need seven pins and this is five including the ground shield. Well yeah the good news is that at least I've got a connector here that I can plug into the Amiga. It's now small enough now I've carved all the bits off it. That's not supposed to be in there. So I'm going to have to do a bit of thinking about that. So we now don't need the rubber mat but I think I'm going to keep at least some of it partly to fill these holes which are a bit ugly but also to see if we can do something about the rattling. So let's do a bit of surgery like so and this can go down here. Now let's try the PCB. I'm hoping that that will provide a little bit of cushioning. Hopefully it's not too thick and I don't need to adjust all the pads again. I actually forgot to test it with that in place because obviously I had to cut it to make it fit. Still works fine. It's still quite rattly. I may be possible to jam some of the mats in but I don't think I will. I think I'm just going to live with it like that. Okay so that's actually the gamepad part is basically done. I now need to try and connect this up to a connector somehow. I've got the connector from here. I would need to pull that apart in order to get at the actual pins so in order to solder stuff onto it. I do have one of these. This was the one that was going to go on the gamepad itself. Honestly this is not a good fit to plug into the Amiga and the biggest problem is trying to get hold of a piece of 9-core wire. Technically 10-core if you include the ground. So having done a bit of thinking I've got lots of these. These are Ethernet cables. They are 8-way and they are twisted pairs so they come in 4 pairs. They're twisted together to reduce interference. That gives me 8 wires so that's not enough for a proper straight through 9-pin cable because I need 9 pins plus ground but 8 is fine for the gamepad. Of the gamepad buttons we're not using button 5 here which is not connected and we're not using pin 7 which is plus 5 volts. I did go and looked it up and all these are active low so I need to ground them in order to make them register so that all we need are 4 wires for the directions, 2 wires for the buttons and 1 for ground that's 7 which we can get out of one of these cables. Because this isn't enough for a 9-pin straight through I'm not going to try to wire one up and then put this on the gamepad itself. So what I'll do instead I think is just to connect this straight into the gamepad and solder it to these terminals. It would probably have been better had I known this ahead of time so that I could solder this directly onto the PCB but honestly I think having it like this is easier and then the other end I can attach to this and I'll need to rip this apart to get access to the actual pins. There's a big chunk of resin which everything is potted inside and this this bit will actually pull off and you can see the pins and the framework that the pins are attached to. So I'm going to dismantle this just to see if that will work because if it doesn't I'll have to change my plans and come back. So here is the connector after I've ripped it apart it's reasonably nice it doesn't have a shell which is a pain I can probably 3d print one without too much difficulty it'll be nasty but it ought to work and here is the Ethernet cable I have decided to destroy new in the bag this one has it looks like old-fashioned crimped connectors rather than the molded on ones and I'm hoping that this will mean that it's a bit easier to get at the wires so can I just pull this off just save me having to split the wires apparently not okay and inside there are the four pairs and oddly enough Ethernet cables never seem to be particularly tight there's actually quite a lot of slack space in here let's just expose the wires up to about there trying to get the sleeve cut reasonably tidily well that's not reasonably tidily but it'll do okay so the each pair is twisted together but we don't care about that so we've got orange and orange striped brown and brown striped green and green striped and blue and blue striped and we get the pin out out which I can't get on camera it's just a little bit too big but here for the little joystick you can see pins 1 to 4 are forwards back left and right so these are going to be soldered on to they are numbered you can see the numbers on the socket which is nice 1 2 3 and 4 then we have pins 6 which is this one the button 1 8 for ground and 9 4 button 2 so let's just strip a few of these let's try orange first I hope these aren't aluminium they are silvery and they don't seem to be taking the twist very well aluminium is used in wires because it's a good conductor not as good as copper but cheaper by far but it doesn't take solder that's not taking solder you see it just runs off pants right well that cable is a complete non-starter I'm not going to be able to solder this is there something else I can do these need to be crimped that's the problem okay what I've got here is a header pin kit now this is used for wiring up well headers it crimps on but the metal that the pin itself is made out of is solderable so if I put a pin on one of these wires so the wings fold flat over the insulation which holds the pin in place and then the bare wire itself goes into this thing which I can then crush and that should make electrical contact it's decent just decently solid I mean this is terrible but for the low-grade switching we're doing for the gamepad it's no digital or analog data it's just like human presses on or off that should work fine and we should be able to get solder on the pin so that I can then solder this again I am running out of hands it's got to push into the solder pot okay let's try and find time to hold this with there you go so that one is pin one these on camera and there we have a robust joint okay I think that's actually whoops going to work okay let's crimps up some more you get these things in this ribbon so I just need to pull a few off if I can find the end there we go and we're going to need three more for the directions two more for the buttons and one for ground we cut there okay so now we get to solder them good now blue goes into pin eight is there any slack to let me get pinned pin a good blue to pin eight and yeah I am also noticing that all these header pins are touching each other so I'm gonna have to do something about that I think I'm going to have to desolder these and start again took a depressingly short amount of time to desolder okay the issue is I didn't put any heat shrink on so let us both do that and also take off a bit more bit more shrouding okay I did one off-camera just to make sure it would work and I wouldn't set fire to anything and it must have done so quite nicely so I'm just going to use the right colors so we want that much heat shrink push it up to about there which exposes four or five millimeters of pin and we take our lighter and we lightly toast it perfect also help hold the wire on I don't have any brown and white heat shrink so I'm just going to use brown again likewise with all the striped colors the colors will help in making sure that everything's in the right place I'll it's a fairly obvious whether it's a colored piece of wire or a striped piece of wire fantastic my lighter is empty so here's a corresponding nine pin plug from a different project so if we plug that in we should then be able to do continuity tests actually top off this this is from my hydroponic setup which I was unable to actually make keep plants alive which is a bit of a problem with hydroponics that is it's a problem with the hydroponics if you can't keep plants alive so so here and here yep actually you can do the here I think oh and also I noticed that I wired blew up backwards so good good anyone orange is here yeah the order changes rather oddly yep we need to net between the two ends that was not connected this is green green yep not connected blue and white and blue good we have finally a electrical connection that will plug into the Amiga and yes I will need to 3d print a plug for this yeah these won't work because of the wings they're just too big alright so we now need to do the other end which is going to be exactly the same thing but without the soldering so honestly I'm just going to do that off-camera okay that wasn't too bad once I got the hang of it over here I have some sockets in pin order over here I have wired pins up to the PCB so the pins will go in to the sockets that's not really making good contact that's okay I got the socket strong that's worked well why isn't this one it is pushed all the way in it is kind of working that's very loose so is that are these aren't these aren't all the way in that's why just need to push them in with a thing and they latch into place little plastic things on the DuPont connectors hold the pins in place okay that's better so not much better anyway the advantage of having pins is that we can rearrange the what does what in the inevitable situation when I get the mapping screwed up but let's actually do some mapping and figure out where things should go so I use the good old multimeter in continuity mode black is common she let's use the crocodile clips for this one so this is going to be our test probe let's see what purple does and blacks hooked up to common like so so right purple is left orange is down can be back yellow is up red is be that's going to be button two and that means that green must be must be green is right we missing one green should be right oh that's came loose that's why it wasn't working right green is indeed right so I know why I'm confused about there being a small number of wires which is that the wire for button B has in fact come off that should have been connected here so I'm gonna have to find it and solder it back on so if I were a B button what color would I be I am now quite ashamed of myself that purple wire has got a bare end or they all have bare ends here yeah here's a white wire now has the track come off yeah I can see a little bit of brown on the bottom of the wire which is copper from the track that's come off so we're going to have to expose some new copper zoom in this okay well we have exposed quite a lot of copper in multiple tracks I hope that's not going to come back to bite me we can read in this if I can figure out how to do it with you go to hands so if I do that hasn't come okay we're gonna have to put solder on this track there's a bit bridging yeah that was me trying to solder myself okay that looks good right we'll put on one more pin I'll show you how it's done it's very similar to the sockets in fact I was putting those on incorrectly what you do is the wire itself gets held in place with the smaller set of wings that forms the electrical connection so we fold those down and push really hard and then the big wings hold grab the insulation okay so multi meter there should be a yep and we haven't shorted through to be excellent that bit's done white is a okay so let's stick the pins into a proper DuPont connector pin thing we want the order to be yellow that is distorted and won't go into the hole try this end right yellow orange this is back same thing again you know these soldered as connections are so much less convenient than just soldering something with solder but you know aluminium wires if I had some proper multicore cable it would be a different matter nope that is not going in there we go purple okay and green now the other one is a three-way and this is the two buttons and ground so ground is black and that one goes in the middle don't do that just yet button one is white no it hasn't I think I may even put that in backwards yes I have there's a little projection on one side of the pin that goes into the plastic latch and holds it in place okay so button one ground right and button to storted now even more distorted okay so we're done so the wires come round to this side and connect to here now we want brown to match with yellow whoops these pins are very irregular okay and this side we want green to match with white is that actually okay I think that's good enough now I was there is enough clearance for the connectors to go there if I loop the wire around like this and kink it unpleasantly that should provide a cable clamp so then the back will now that's not fitting here okay let's do it without a cable clamp and we'll just be careful these things are getting in the way I think need to find a place for this base yes and he's pressing the other side of the board okay so we want the wires to go roughly there so let's just get out and stand by and just tape it in place we only need it to be there why we're putting the back on once it's done the back will hold everything in place how is that good now I need to find where I put my screws and put them in put them back in this is the common wire this blue one and this green one should be button B I believe so this one over here should be the other button good and there is actually no possible way I'm going to be able to hold one probe on the ground one probe on one of these and press the button at the same time so let's just cut straight to the chase and get the Amiga out so here it is running treasure island dizzy and let's plug the controller in and see what happens hopefully not exploding my Amiga well nothing bad's happened yet so let's try pushing some buttons oh this is working well B doesn't do anything can I jump hmm yes apparently touching water kills you and that's the end of the game oh yeah I remember this the treasure island dizzy is brutal there we go and now we can jump left jumping is a bit awkward using the left and up but that's how they did it in the Amiga days I'm not sure I can stop on the again now I've picked up a coin good well this is actually working it's not bad it's a lot better than it was when it was the original game controller with the rubber buttons this is quite usable and is certainly capable of playing games to test things hmm it might have been worthwhile mapping one of these buttons to up so that I can get a more intuitive jump of course if you go down that route you eventually end up with a complete Arduino inside the thing and on the fly keyboard remapping using the extra buttons but I don't want to do that oh and apparently I'm dead again anyway that works it could be improved I think a couple of an extra millimeter on these buttons wouldn't do a world of good printing some new ones takes moments so the most difficult bit is taking it apart and trying to get the cable and so on wedged back in the right place the d-pad is fine so I can easily hold jump press I can easily tap jump while holding left or right which is a good thing I'm not really a fan of d-pads but they're better than joysticks anyway that is now done so I am going to wrap it why did I just die I have no idea yeah this game is tough right well I hope you enjoyed this video and please let me know what you think in the comments I don't know yet how many pieces it will have been in yes anyway see you all next time