uXe I am down and would love to collaborate on this!

Awesome!!

Yes, emulating two controllers at once shouldn't be a problem at all - in fact, with the extra I/O of something like an Arduino Mega attached to 6 shift registers you could emulate all four controllers and the Four Score interface itself at the same time!

Sync with cynthcart sounds exciting too! Another project I had in mind was using the Family Basic keyboard for a NES-based cynthcart-type synth!

Believe it or not the project I am currently working on is something very similar but with regards to syncing the nesk-1 and cynthcart. I am working on updating the cynthcart code to send an 8 bit value out through the c64's user port.  Then update the nesk-1 code to read that value through the nes controller.

I like the On/Off & Note # format you mentioned, and it would totally work for both projects.

Just brainstorming but would you be able to send a second value out? Then we could use controller 2 to change some settings via midi as well.

So when reading from Controller 1, bits 6 to 0 would represent a MIDI Note value between 0 and 127, and then bit 7 could be used to represent Note On / Off - what do you think?

I was making plans to write my own MIDI-controlled NES synth from scratch, and realised I would want to include all of the features of NESK-1 - so I figured it couldn't hurt to see if you would be open to collaborating on an adapted version? I would be more than happy to do all of the work on the Arduino side of things!

2011: Year of the NES (Part II)