An enterprising hacker has rigged up an original Nintendo controller to play nice with an Android emulator, letting you hardened old-school gamers play NES games the way they were meant to be played. Except, y’know, on your phone, and not on the other end of a cathode ray tube. The NES controller plugs into an Sparkfun prototyping shield which has a BlueSMiRF Bluetooth modem attached, which then in turn talks to the Sprint HTC EVO 4G using the Arduino programming language on the board and the Amarino toolkit on the device to translate the code. After all is said and done, Android recognizes inputs as keyboard commands, letting you play Super Mario Bros. 3, as well as any other games you load up in the Nintendo emulator.
This project is still in alpha, but if you’re interested in trying your hand at getting the same results, details and code can be found over here. If you’re willing to sacrifice some authenticity, a Wiimote can give you some good manual control without all of the technical hassle, but apparently it’s not possible with the HTC EVO 4G because of some Bluetooth stack limitations.
Here it is in action.
[via Hackaday]