c0op3r
376 posts
Bought a soldering Iron yesterday and this happened!!! Is this right?!! 😱
Pulled out my ancient Arduino UNO R3 (this one’s been with me for, what, 10 years?!) last Sunday, and finally built something I’d been thinking about for ages… but was always too lazy to actually do. Last week, while chatting online with friends after work, we ended up roasting the Family Basic Keyboard — terrible key feel, awkward as heck, basically “why does this exist?” in hardware form. Someone joked: Why not just adapt it to a glorious modern USB mechanical keyboard? Honestly… my plan was just to toss the idea out there and let someone else build it so I could use it brain-off. Saturday night rolled around, I had some free time, so I soldered up a little adapter plug, hooked it to my Arduino, and got ready to code. Logic side? Smooth sailing. I’m an old-timer at this, so I kept it simple: no heavy computation, just lookup tables + AND/OR bit ops to move data. Built the mapping table first, so at runtime the MCU just shoves data straight to the console. Should’ve been rock solid. Testing time… …aaaaand nothing works. Except it’s spamming “Enter” like a hyperactive toddler. 🤦♂️ Hooked up the logic analyzer, and boom — turns out the online docs for the Family Basic Keyboard have a few unverified (and wrong) bits of info about the signals and voltage logic. The real hardware behaves just slightly differently. Rewrote the logic according to the actual waveforms I captured… and boom, the adapter works perfectly! 🎉 As for how it runs? Well… roll the tape 🎬 #nintendo #famicom #nes #retrogamer
