Old games never die, their hardware just becomes wildly outdated. Howeve if you're chasing the original Mario Bros experience and have the emulations in place on your PC - you can now complete the system by converting an original NES gamepad into a USB joystick. Doing so doesn't involve creating a separate interface device, as with the guide created by Instructables user "osgeld". With a bit of work a bare Arduino-compatible circuit can be installed into the gamepad, and with the supplied sketch it can then appear as a HID joystick in Windows and Ubuntu Linux. The creator hasn't tried it on a Mac.
Nevertheless, an interesting example of hardware hacking. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
If you're prototyping Arduino projects on solderless breadboards, blown the MCU on your board, or making your own such as the gamepad mentioned above - save time and hassle with our new ATmega328 microcontroller pre-loaded with the Arduino Uno bootloader:
It's the same one as found on our Eleven, KitTen and the original Arduino Uno, plus it has a very useful pinout sticker attached to save confusion when wiring it up. So for more information and to order, click here. And we also sell the stickers!