Hi everyone,

I was wondering if there is any interest for a Nintendo 64 input display device which you can buy.

The basic backstory is I'm an electronic engineering student at university, and was working on a Nintendo 64 flash cartridge in my spare time (for fun). However, after ordering all the parts I ended up changing the design slightly, and I now have a number of spare, small footprint microcontrollers leftover. I wound up turning one into a N64 input display device for myself, and it worked out pretty well. I also wrote some matching software for it, and am currently working on a small 3D printed box to house it all in.

The device acts as a HID USB gamepad, and listens to the data line for requests from the console and responses from the controller. The software can detect if a matching device is plugged in, and will display the buttons being pressed, as well as the joystick position in real time. The software also has different controller layouts for the Hori Mini Pad and a GameCube controller (with Raphnet adaptor). I am also working on making it fully customisable, so you can import images to create your own controller layouts.

Still in the early stages... but since I have spares lying around, and from what I've read there doesn't seem to be a universal solution for capturing controller data from consoles... I thought I'd ask around as to whether anyone would even be interested in buying one of these things before I get too far into this!

Thanks in advance!

NintendoSpy is the standard software for capturing input from basically all Nintendo consoles.

Not sure how your software stacks up to it, but most people use NintendoSpy with whatever hardware they build/get built for them for taking the inputs from the controller.

Many thanks for your reply!

I only really developed my software because I hadn't heard of NintendoSpy... I was mostly wondering if anyone would be interested in buying the hardware as a complete package. I've since tried out the NintendoSpy software, (or at least the N64 part of it) with an arduino, and it actually looks pretty good, with a decent variety of skins. I was planning on scrapping my software, and reprogramming my microcontroller to work with NintendoSpy... but then I stumbled across an advantage of my software.

NintendoSpy seems to have quite a lot more input lag compared to my software... presumably because it uses serial through a COM port to send the data, rather than acting as a HID device. It's hard to measure accurately due to the low refresh rate of my monitor... but NintendoSpy seems to have between 180ms - 220ms of lag, whereas mine only has around 40-80ms of lag. I don't know if this is an important advantage or not.

Also, I've since rewritten my software to work with all NintendoSpy N64 skins since there are plenty of them around... so now my software is almost the same as NintendoSpy, but works with different (faster) hardware.

I could also get it to work with any other type of controller if necessary... N64 was just the one I tried first.

I can post a video showing my software (it's almost the same as NintendoSpy) and the difference in input lag side-by-side if anyone would be interested. But regardless, if anyone is interested in purchasing an input display device that can work with either the NintendoSpy software, or my own software, let me know!