Did I mention I’m a pioneer?

This is actually the second project I finished, but I was so excited about it, I decided to post it first. I recently tried to play a SNES game on my Wii using my Gamecube controller. I soon found out it was impossible. I’ll show you why.

Here’s a SNES controller:

and here’s a gamecube controller

Notice the placement of the Y button. This is crucial, because in platformers, namely Super Mario World, the Y button is run, and the B button is jump. How am I supposed to run and jump with the Gamecube controller?

I could’ve just gone out and bought a Classic controller to accommodate, but I figured I could just swap the buttons by rewiring one of my old Gamecube controllers. I set out on the internet to find a guide for this. I looked pretty shallowly (how do you look up something like this?) on google using a query like, “Gamecube controller button swap mod,” and found no relevant results. I thought to myself, “How hard could this be?”

I’ve opened one of my Gamecube controllers before (my wavebird), to see if I could fix a sticky L button, so opening another one would be no big deal. Inside I found that the entire circuit board was…well, unexposed. It looked like a thin film of white paint was covering the entire thing. So I scraped it off with a screwdriver.

I wasn’t kidding about the scraping. As you can see, I’ve already soldered a wire onto it, which I did in reverse actually, the way that is set up, the A button activates the X button. I’ll discuss more about that later. Anyways, you can kind of see how some parts of copper are shiny and some aren’t, because even after scraping the paint off, the copper parts were covered with a waxy like substance. I’m not sure what it was exactly (I’m no electrical engineer), but after scraping it off, it was shiny, meaning the copper is exposed, and eligible for soldering.

If you take a look at the pictures of the SNES and Gamecube (GC) controllers, you can see that the positioning of the buttons is rotated. That is…
On the GC controller, the…
B button is on the left, A on the bottom, X on right, and Y on top.
On the SNES controller, the…
Y button is on the left, B on the bottom, A on right, and X on top.
I lined up the sentences so you can see the parallels. So to make the the Gamecube controller act as a SNES, I just had to make the B button be the Y button, A button be B button, X be A, and Y be X. Here’s a diagram of my desired result:

The blue lines are where the wires are supposed to connect, the yellow lines are to highlight the copper wires, and the brown zigzag…ignore that. Also, each button is labeled, so I circled them to make sure you didn’t miss that. The A button wasn’t labeled ’cause I probably scraped it off, so I wrote it in. The green lines indicate where I would need to cut through the copper wire so pushing that button wouldn’t register it’s appropriate button press. In other words, the A button would no longer activate the A button. Time for more scraping…

I really wasn’t kidding about the scraping. This is pretty much the same picture as above, zoomed in on the part where i scraped through the copper wire, to deactivate the A button. After I did that, there was no turning back, I had to finish this project. I guess either way it wasn’t a big deal, this was one of my extra gamecube controllers, but I really wanted to play Super Mario World on my Wii.

The rest should’ve been easy, but I am terrible at soldering. I know the basics, put solder on the wire, put solder on the contact, blahblahblah, but for some reason, the solder never wants to stick. There’s probably more to it than that, maybe if an expert solderer reads my blog, he/she could give me a few tips. Anyways, I ended up almost ruining the entire thing when I burnt/scraped off an entire contact point right here:

I thought I would be savvy and solder on the circular points of the contacts, but like I said, I am terrible at soldering. So I ended up burning and/or scraping it off. All I remember was that it was there, and then it wasn’t. I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish the project, but before I gave up hope, I plugged in my controller, stuck the wire in that tiny hole, and touched a spot to complete the circuit and hopefully register a button press. Somehow it registered fine, but now I had the problem of keeping that wire in there. There is no way i could get any solder in that tiny hole (the diameter of the hole is about the same as the wire), so I resorted to tape. Electrical tape of course, even though I am not sure how why I used electrical tape over any other type. So I pushed the wire through the hole, taped it down so it wouldn’t move, and soldered the other end onto the appropriate contact. This turned out to be one of the more sturdier connections, which is kinda sad. Also, I decided to use completely stripped wires for the sake of space and flexibility. The rest of my problems were frustrating soldering issues, so I’ll skip straight to the ending…the sweet, sweet ending. Everything works =D despite my really bad soldering skills!

Here’s a picture of my final wiring job (horrendous):

I wasn’t kidding about being bad at soldering. There is solder on places that don’t need it, too much solder, too little solder causing weak/bad connections, and all sorts of other problems. By this time, though, I was ready to be done and thought as long as I play nice with my controller, these connections will stay intact. The other piece of electrical tape (the bottom one) is to prevent contact between wires. I have also uploaded a video to youtube to show my modded GC controller in all its glory:

So there you have it–possibly the world’s first Gamecube controller button swap mod, done specifically for playing SNES games on the Wii.

Tags: gamecube controller button swap mod, wii