zookolo

Ever wanted to play emulators on Linux or windows with a decent control pad?  An easy solution is to convert a spare xbox break away cable to usb-a male and plug in xbox control pads into you computer.

Incase you didn’t know the Microsoft xbox consists of an Intel Celeron 733 MHz CPU, an nVidia
GeForce 3MX, 64 MB of RAM, a 8/10 GB hard disk, a DVD drive and 10/100 Ethernet.  The four ports on the front of the xbox are actually USB ports with different connectors.  And not surprisingly this means the xbox controllers are USB.

What’s needed

Soldering Iorn
Solder
Wire Striper
Electrical tape
Scalpel knife
Breakaway cable (comes with xbox controllers)
xbox pad to test modified cable
Standard male a-usb cable

Building the cable

Firstly using the scalpel knife pry open the breakaway cable plug that plugs into the xbox.  As seen in fig.1 there are five wires.  You can either de-solder the wires from the plug or cut them.  If you choose to cut the wire you will need to use the wire strippers and remove 1cm of insulation so the silver wire is visible.

fig.1

RED > =5v Power
GREEN > Data -
WHITE > Data +
BLACK > Ground
YELLOW > ignore this wire its not needed

Cut the male a-usb cable, be generous its better to have more cable than less.  If there is foil around the cables peal it off then bend each wire out.  Using the wire striper’s cut off roughly 1cm of insulation on each wire so the silver wire is visible as seen in fig.2

fig.2

Using the soldering iron you will have to solder the matching colours together.  After you have made a successful joint wrap with electrical tape to insulate the joint. Example’s can bee seen in fig.3

fig.3

I chose to use the Official Street fighter controller which resembles the Sega Saturn pad as seen in fig.4.  Great for 2d Beat’em up’s. If you plan on using the pad in a Linux environment the pad should work out of the box provided you are running a Kernel above v2.6.xx

fig.4

Once you have plugged in the controller open the shell and enter the following

modprobe xpad
modprobe joydev
jstest /dev/js0

After the last command press buttons on the control pad and you should get an output.

For Windows download and install the XBCD utility then plug in the controller.  To test the pad go Control Panel > Game Controllers.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Emulation, Linux, Windows XP, Xbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.