NES Power Pad?

hooperre

Pi Model or other hardware: RPi3B
RetroPie Version Used: 4.2.2
Built From: (Pre made SD Image on RetroPie website)
USB Devices connected: Generic Dance Pad (works flawlessly with PSX Emu), USB thumb drive 64 GB
Guide used: (Mention if you followed a guide): Haven't seen any guides/threads on here, reddit, youtube
Emulator: Nestopia, FCEUMM, haven't tried quicknes)

Has anyone been able to use a generic dance pad in order to emulate a power pad? Trying to go back and play World Class Track Meet and Short Order!, but I see that iti isn't as simple as configuring inputs like with PSX and DDR (which was very simple). I read that Nestopia standalone has all peripheral support, but didn't see anything in the NES wiki regarding the power pad.

Has anyone been successful in setting one up? Thanks.

mediamogul

@hooperre

As you say, this ability is possible in the standalone Nestopia and the standalone FCEUX will also work. Unfortunately, support has yet to be added to lr-nestopia and lr-fceux. I'd love to play some 'Short Order' myself.

hooperre

@mediamogul Thanks. Heartbreaking. Haha. I'll have my dance pad ready for when the day comes.

mediamogul

@hooperre

Out of curiosity, did you have a hardware solution in mind for interfacing the pad itself? I've never see a USB adapter that's compatible, but if you know of one I'd love to go ahead and pick it up. Niche products like this have a bad habit of being discontinued by the time you can actually make use of them.

hooperre

@mediamogul I guess I was just hoping a generic USB dance pad would end up working some how. Similar to how an air mouse works as a zapper gun.

mediamogul

@hooperre

Gotchya. I bet that would work. The only remaining problem to overcome would be the lack of a few buttons. Most dance mats I've seen have nine buttons whereas the Power Pad had twelve on the 'A' side. Why aren't these things ever easy?

edmaul69

@mediamogul i have a power pad and i can easily modify it to actually work on the pi. My issue is just the emulators dont recognize button presses when playing those games. So as soon as that happens i will mod my mat.

hooperre

@mediamogul Yeah. I was looking and Short Order only uses 8 of those 12, so it would work, but would be imperfect. I think that generally, the 12 were used to accommodate 2 people being on the pad, so I don't see why 2 dance pads wouldn't make up for it for most games. Wouldn't be perfect, but better than nothing.

Not sure if this puppy would do the trick or not:
Amazon LINK

mediamogul

@edmaul69

i have a power pad and i can easily modify it to actually work on the pi.

Is there an article you favor that you can link for the conversion? I still have my old Power Pad and I wouldn't want to cut into that, but they're pretty cheap and I wouldn't mind picking up another one to mod.

edmaul69

@mediamogul it wouldnt work on the nes. I would remove all the circuitry in it and install a small board like raphnets 12 buttons to usb board making it a usb power pad. Or in my own personal case, i might just wire a 15 pin cable so i can just plug it into the connectors on my ipac.

arpruss

A single dance pad can't be used even to get half of the Power Pad because the center square on dance pads is not active.
Assuming the Power Pad works inside like a Konami dance pad, the sensors are analog (pressure sensitive resistance), so you can't just hook up the guts to a PI, and you need a microcontroller with 12 analog pins. I don't know if the Power Pad's digital electronics can work with the PI's 3.3v GPIOs.
A full solution for the Power Pad 12 button side is to overlap TWO dance pads and use bleeding edge fceumm libretro core: https://www.instructables.com/Playing-NES-Power-Pad-Games-in-Emulation/