Nintendo Rumblepack

[EnzoMatrix]

Hiya, I've been scouring the internet for an idea of how the interface to a Nintendo 64 Rumblepack works. I've opened the thing, and offocurse the designers figured it'd be WAY cooler to put in some black-boxes in it, instead of a single transistor, to just trigger the motor.

I was actually hoping to get a clue about how the movement is triggered.
Could anybody help me?

Tanx.

 

[dknguyen]

It'd probably be best to rip out those blackboxes and stick in your own transistor and a controller to interpret signals on how the motor should move. My guess is that the rest of the system just sends the rumble pack some parameters on the movement (like intensity and time) and the black-boxes in the rumble pack actually take care of what signals are sent to the motor to accomplish that.

Short of calling Nintendo...not sure what else you could do.

 

[Tomble]

Damn, I remember a year or two ago spotting there were Nintendo controllers on sale cheap (they may have been N64 or they may have been Gamecube, I've no idea if they're compatible), and looking up how hard they'd be to use to interface to something random. I distinctly remember finding a page where somebody had reverse-engineered a substantial amount (all??) of the digital protocol for communicating with the things.

Despite my compulsive bookmarking of anything remotely interesting, I can't find it amongst those. But this (via Google) looks like the page I saw:
https://www.int03.co.uk/crema/hardware/gamecube/gc-control.htm

It looks like yes, that was something for Gamecube, but it does make mention of a project about N64 controllers, and some of the details may carry across, or it might give you some ideas for where to look next, or how to work it out for yourself if you're up to that (I don't think I would be).

 

[Tomble]

Hmm, or about 5 seconds more looking found this page even, which wasn't what I had been looking at originally, but does appear to be exactly what you're after: https://www.mixdown.ca/n64dev/

Hope this helps, not sure what sort of electronics stuff you're ok with