Just a quick update: I got the bluetooth in. It was a pain to get it all wired, but it works!

I decided to give it a good beating with a couple of bullet hell and manic shmups, which is what I mainly designed this controller for. It worked amazing. Here I'm trying out DoDonPachi, which works beautiful with this controller.

This thing may be bluetooth, but it doesn't lag at all. Very snappy, and the NGPC thumbstick is every bit as good in this controller as I hoped it would be.

fun!

This isn't exactly music related, but since the closest to chiptuning I get these days is listening to chiptunes and occasionally modding consoles, I figured I might as well share this here.

I have here a Neo Geo Pocket Color (AKA NGPC) and an old Gravis Gamepad Pro. The Gravis has excellent button placement and feels great in the hand, but the d-pads on them always sucked because back in the day Nintendo still had a patent on the good kind. Well, as it turns out, there was one directional input which was still better than a cross-shaped d-pad, and that's the clicky thumbstick on the NGPC. It's amazing, and is the only thumb-control I've ever liked for shmups or fighting games, because you can actually pull off a dragon-punch move without breaking your thumbs. IMO, the thumb stick of the NGPC was the very best part of the whole system.

So I'm transplanting the thumb stick into the Gravis, and converting the whole thing to bluetooth.

Operations have begun. I used the laser cutter to contour the front face and cut it out.

Need to desolder the joystick next. Haven't got to it yet.

Fits like it was meant to be there.

I'm using a Bluefruit module from Adafruit to run the bluetooth portion of this build, and it will have a 500 mAh lipo and charger built in as well, so it ought to run for about 12 hours on a charge. More updates when I have the electronics built.