About This Project

This is a replacement circuit board for original Super Nintendo/Super Famicom controllers based on my original design but using all through-hole components in an effort to be easier to assemble by individuals with novice soldering skills.

Features

• All through-hole components. If you're a novice at soldering or just not confident in your ability to solder some (admittedly tiny) surface mount components by hand, this version is for you!
• Compatible with all Super Nintendo/Super Famicom regional variants. This design contains pull-up resistors for all important signals, so it works with both PAL and NTSC region consoles.
• Drop-in replacement. If you can salvage the wire header from an original SNES controller PCB, then this becomes a true drop-in replacement that is the exact size and shape of the original board (minus the mousebites).
• Common off-the-shelf components. This design uses commonly available (read: cheap) modern components. No expensive microcontrollers. No impossible-to-find custom components.
• ESD Resistant. Large ground plane fills and modern logic ICs with diode-clamped inputs combine to produce a design that is more resistant to static damage than the original!
• Certified Open Source Hardware. Kind of explains itself, really.

Story Time

This project variant was sponsored by PCBWay.

Wow. Now there's a sentence I never expected to write in connection with any of my projects. I don't consider myself to be any sort of influencer, and certainly not a (shudder) social media influencer. I really just do this for the love of my favorite retro console of all time, and I've never sought to make any money from my work.

So, imagine my surprise when I found a sponsorship offer from PCBWay in my email Spam folder after I updated my other PCBWay+ Project. Honestly, I thought it might have been a mistake at first. I was asked if I had any future revisions or projects that I was working on that they could sponsor.

Well, as a matter of fact, I had this idea for an all through-hole version of this board sort of kicking around in my head for a couple of months, but it was on the back burner because life happens.

I am pleased to release the result of that partnership here today.

Assembly

You can find complete assembly instructions on my web site, but I want to call attention to a very important detail here:

It is very important to trim the resistor array legs as flush as possible after soldering. I had to make a compromise on positioning and routing, and in order to avoid altering the size and shape of the PCB itself, the resistor arrays ended up being placed in a position where the solder side of the board happens to overlap some PCB supports inside the front face of the controller housing.

Reporting Issues

If you encounter an issue with this design, or even just want to suggest an improvement, please submit an issue in my repository.