3600 Controller

OK so yesterday I had my Facebook status as saying I was “being frustrated by potentiometers” – a rather normal day for me, really. For whatever reason this prompted one of my friends to suggest I build an Xbox 360 controller inside of an Atari 2600 controller shell. And I thought “That’s dumb enough to work!”

A mere 5 hours later I had what you see above – the 3600 controller! This is an Atari 2600 controller with wireless Xbox 360 controller guts inside of it – batteries too. The big red “fire” button is “A”, other buttons are attached to the top:

Granted this wasn’t a pay project (rather a UPP – un-paid project!) but it was a nice break from what I was doing. It isn’t usable for standard Xbox 360 games but adequate for many Arcade games and other low-level tomfoolery.

For the sure-to-be thrilling story of how I did it, check after the break. I kind of did a cheat to get controller guts into this small of a shell…

Oh you can also download this pulse-pounding demo video of the controller in action.

Note: despite the mention of Facebook, I prefer to limit it to people I know / acquaintances, so please do not be offended if friend requests go ignored.

Continue reading 3600 Controller

MAGfest 2009

Well I am here at MAGFest now… so yeah… I guess anyone that came can try to find me an say hi.

Looks like my slot is at the same time as the Angry Videogame Nerd, so I guess I have to compete with him. Regardless, should be interesting, there’s arcade machines and beer here, what more do I need?

SATURDAY EARLY AFTERNOON:

I did my panel, it went pretty well. Didn’t have to compete directly with Game Nerd which was cool. Lots of fun stories and truths you’ll never find on this site (such as “the Xbox 360 laptop originally was built to advertise our ghost town documentary trailer”) and for some reason I went WAY off topic with my Christian Bale Batman impressions. That’s what you get when you goto a Benheck panel / let your heart win.

Our Sonic Boom podcast panel is at 6 PM, so I hope to go even more off-topic during that.

The party on the top floor of the Hilton with the balcony was awesome, I could see all of DC which I know well from the 50 hours I spent playing Fallout 3. Haven’t seen any super-mutants yet…

-Ben