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Mystery gamepad controller

category: general [glöplog]
 
Let's try this again with a bit more info.

I'm trying to find out what console this gamepad works on:
https://twitter.com/psenough/status/1478885460877393922

It has 12 buttons: the 4 from the dpad, a start, 6 buttons on front and a right shoulder button.

The connector is a regular db9 (as the megadrive, thus why i originally thought they were for the megadrive). But inside only uses 5 wires, not the whole 9.

It ain't for the megadrive because megadrive gamepads use the 9 wires, not 5.

They can't be for the master system or the saturn because they have same style of using the whole 9 wires like the megadrive does.

The back of the PCB has nothing but a switch for the shoulder button. So the screenshot of the PCB shows all the relevant stuff it has: a single blotted out chip and 5 out wires. Plus scribbling saying NF MJ-I, some reference to the model i would venture.

From what i learned on the last couple days the gamepads that have 5 wires out are usually the nes/snes kind (ground, clock, 5v, data, latch), where the button info is encoded into the signal wire instead of having one button per wire being sent. But the nes/snes type of connector is different from this.

So it's likely this is for some sort of clone of either the megadrive or the snes or something in between. I guess it could also be a gamepad that was bundled with some sort of adapter and aimed to be used on some computer or console of the time (PC or ZX Spectrum extension or something similar).

Pad letters info says Maxwise Technology MJ-I/Turbo, but searching for those words on the internet revealed nothing interesting to me.

They were bought in downtown lisbon some 20+ years ago. Bought to replace the megadrive controllers, since they looked similar i guess, but they probably never actually worked with the megadrive itself that they been lugged together with all these years. Maybe they were cheap/fake imports never aimed for the Portuguese megadrive market that just sold because they looked like megadrive controllers, either way, i would like to figure out where they belong, so i can donate them to someone who could actually use them instead of trashing them.

And yes i do have a multimeter to test stuff, no osciloscope though.

Anyone got any insights? They're worth 2 scenepoints a piece!!!
added on the 2022-01-07 16:23:24 by psenough psenough
Quote:
And yes i do have a multimeter to test stuff

So... any result on which connection does what? (I.e. closed loop testing?)
added on the 2022-01-07 16:45:00 by Gargaj Gargaj
did you check's hitchhiker's url in the oneliner? they look similar at least
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Some clone of the nes, snes or megadrive. It seems to exist with many different brands.
https://www.ebay.fr/itm/184725447939?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=709-53476-19255-0&campid=5338722076&customid=&toolid=10050

I don't know about Portugal but in Spain there was a lot of these clone consoles going on. Could be either nes or megadrive clones.

I remember visiting my cousins in the late 90s/early 2000s in spain during summer vacations and playing Dune on Megadrive from a cartridge. However according to the internet, that game was only released on MegaCD. So it was probably a bootleg cart and possibly also a bootleg console
gargaj:
1 empty, 2 brown C (i'm guessing clock), 3 empty, 4 black P (for packet maybe??), 5 empty
6 empty, 7 yellow G (i'm guessing ground), 8 empty, 9 red V (i'm guessing voltage)
missing continuity of the blue wire (coincidentely the one that has no initial scribbled on the board), might be unused or just defective on the wire/pin slot.

maali: yes i checked it, it's not that one, that one has no shoulder button and the name is different. they all kinda look alike, probably same plastic injector factory in china or taiwan.

pulko: an mx being a brand of clones might be the closest we'll ever get without actually owning one to test if they work. probably not many people have them anymore though.

conferenced with the wife about this whole quest again and she concluded she doesnt really know where her father bought the things from, could easily have been imported from spain/france.
added on the 2022-01-08 00:46:23 by psenough psenough
Quote:
gargaj:
1 empty, 2 brown C (i'm guessing clock), 3 empty, 4 black P (for packet maybe??), 5 empty
6 empty, 7 yellow G (i'm guessing ground), 8 empty, 9 red V (i'm guessing voltage)
missing continuity of the blue wire (coincidentely the one that has no initial scribbled on the board), might be unused or just defective on the wire/pin slot.

No but can you close a loop between any of the pins by keeping the buttons held? I don't think any of the non-Nintendo consoles used a shift-register, did they? (i.e. they didn't need a clock-signal?)

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added on the 2022-01-08 01:16:24 by Gargaj Gargaj
Given how the thing's got more buttons than the connector has pins (not even considering only 4-5 are actually going anywhere) there's got to be some shifty business going on in there.
added on the 2022-01-08 02:38:29 by dojoe dojoe
no closed loop continuity between any of the pins regardless if buttons are being pressed or not
added on the 2022-01-08 15:42:19 by psenough psenough
Some famiclones had useless buttons on the controllers, or some buttons would behave as turbo buttons.

If you look for models produced a bit later, they moved on to playstation-like controllers.

Looking at the pcb, you can see that the two right-most button are connected to 3 pcb tracks each, and there is no common track for all buttons (unlike on the d-pad, where there is one common ground, and one track from the blob to each direction).

So this looks like a famiclone with turbo or buttons that act like a+b at the same time or some weird other thing like that. This matches the pinout and behavior for famiclones described at https://nesdev.org/w/index.php/Controller_port_pinout (it is mirrored from what you listed, but otherwise seems identical)

The buttons would be: A, B, "C" (A+B) on the bottom. And turbo equivalents on the top row. The extra button you mention on the back was probably added when they noticed they also need a select button?
makes sense
added on the 2022-01-08 16:12:25 by psenough psenough

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