The Backstory:

Super Smash Bros Melee is a wild game – its 17 years old at this point but still played both casually and competitively by many and considered one of the best games of all time. In part because of it’s extended age it has seen many mods (some by me) both in software and in hardware. This serves as an additional controller hardware mod

The Project:

The goal for this controller is to make an ergonomic controller in the spirit of fight sticks. The inspiration comes from the player Hax$ whose hands were hurt to the point of being unable to play the game with a standard controller — in response to this he assisted in designing a controller like this and then became the best player with it.

Fast forward a year, he still hasn’t started selling them. So I took it upon myself to make one. For this I used Simple Controller’s guide to get an idea of how to do it. I wanted a different physical design so I went ahead and rendered it in Solidworks. Inspired by the retro electronics I wanted a see through design, which would have lots of wiring implications later:

Looked nice! Because it was going to be clear I needed to make the wiring look clean and orderly cool — hence the huge grounding bar. Next I had to just build it. Two hardware trips, two McMaster orders, three Amazon orders, one broken piece of acrylic and one burnt thumb I had it assembled.

Next the code had to be edited. Thankfully Simple Controllers had created a good basis – however his controller was based on the Smashbox style controller — I wanted mine to be based on Hax’s B0XX. This meant changing some logic to reflect the changes Hax implemented, as well as those I wanted. The changes I put on github.

Just like that, its done! Now just to get good with it 🙂