Twistedsymphony spent two and a half months to get a Sega Saturn controller working on his Xbox 360. Now why, you ask, will he "waste" as much time getting an old gamepad working on a next-generation console? Because upcoming Xbox Live Arcade titles Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 are best played with a good 2D gamepad. Aah...now aren't you glad twistedsymphony was able to finish the project before either games come out?

V1 Prototype of the Sat-2-360 Controller Adapter connects to the Saturn controller using a cut-up cable extender, which was wired to a pin header in the same order as the controller socket. Then the adapter goes to a Microchip PIC16F690, where the "joypad protocol is decoded into a parallel output". The hardworking twistedsymphony gives us a summary of what else was done to make the Saturn controller adaptable:

I was able to do ever button but the "Start" button due to the PIC chip being one I/O port shy of what I needed, being the least integral to gameplay that was the button that got the axe. Once the data is in Parallel form you could easily adapt the Saturn controller to just about anything you wanted to.

Truly amazing. However, a flexible Saturn gamepad does not necessarily mean it's flexible enough for use with the 360. Since twistedsymphony was using a wireless 360 controller, the Sat-2-360 project presented a "challenge". To help reduce the pin count of the next-gen console's encoder chip, Microsoft implemented an "interesting" button matrix - making the buttons non-compatible with a logic high/logic low interface. How did twistedsymphony worked around this? He shares:

Without the equipment to properly analyze the controller to work with this unique system I simply used an array of Analog Switches that emulated a button press on the 360 controller. This proved to work well.

Now the outputs of the analog switches were wired to another custom pin header and into a ribbon cable that connects to the right points in the 360 controller. For easier construction, twistedsymphony "chose points that were easier to solder to as opposed to points that were apparent as to what they attached to".

The result? A working wireless, battery-operated adapter that allows a Sega Saturn controller to work on a Xbox 360. Awed? Still finding it hard to believe? Here's a video that shows that the feat has been done: