Hardware Dual mod an xbox 360 controller?

[flame6753]

Hey. I want to know if it is possible to dual mod my xbox 360 controller to work on both PS3 and 360.

To be more specific, I do not mean by using an adapter. I also do not mean the PS360 where you put a ps3 controller in the shell of a 360 controller.

I mean an original wired controller that works plug and play for both consoles. Xbox 360 fight sticks can be dual modded to work plug and play on both consoles by using the chimp and several other means. I see no reason why it should not work on a normal xbox 360 controller.

I asked a friend who does mods and he told me that theoretically there should be no reason it shouldn't work as it is the same concept as dual modding a fight stick, but the parts will all not fit inside the controller or it is very diffuclt to make it all fit, which is why not a lot of people bother dual modding a controller.

However, it is still something I am interested in. Is there any one who has done a project like this and if so can you direct me to it? Or if anyone has any information, or a complete explanation on why it cannot be done, let me know.

Thanks!

 

[FAST6191]

Personally I would head down the signals path and go adapters (although probably best to start with a 360 others reading). I have not really done anything with flight sticks since people used their sound card as a game port and a quick search has little there so I will do some further reading after this. I am working under the assumption that the PS3, like most unmodded modern consoles, does not have provisions for such a thing to happen in software (it has nicer mouse and keyboard but nothing much else as far as I know).

Straight case swap is probably out of the question as you say, to this end I would find debug ports (looking a dead wired one here there are some little through hole ones) for the buttons or scratch down onto the trace ( http://learn.adafruit.com/usb-snes-gamepad/disassemble-the-snes-controller ) and solder points off there and back into the PS3 one- switches are just mechanical devices after all. You might gain something from taking it a step further and say tapping into a DAC or something later in the chain but we can debate enhancements later.

Sticks and triggers- my 360 controller looks like it uses spring loaded variable resistors as opposed to say a rotary encoder. Again viable debug ports appear to exist although this could get marginally tricky as I can well see the PS3 using a different set of reference levels. Changing reference levels is classic electronics (serial and parallel resistances) but there might be something to be gained by using a proper ADC to DAC chain (whether it could be done on an arduino or teensy type thing I am not sure about) or even going a step further and changing the resistance curve (essentially creating a variable sensitivity controller).

The PS3 lacks any trigger mechanism which is another resistor on the 360. How you want to play this I will leave to you- you could wire it to a transistor so you just have a simple workaround but it would be simple enough to have a variable depression autofire.

http://revision3.com/tbhs/episodes has done quite a lot with 360 controllers over the course of things so you can get some nice worked examples of various things that are done and most of what he did for that is adapted quite easily to this. I was thinking effectively just make a debug port coming out of the 360 controller and then have a connector that can go into a sacrifice PS3 controller with any extra conversion being done on the PS3 controller side of things. That way just throw across the debug cable when you are on a PS3 and it will work as normal for a 360 at all other times.

If you do end up playing with a programmable device remember you can also remap buttons and perhaps more importantly sticks for those that prefer things some games omit (various combinations of turn and strafe on different sticks, inversions of the y axis and such things some people like) although with a bit of thought at the design stage the same could probably be done on an analogue pinout (feed the output of left stick horizontal to whatever as you might on a breadboard using connectors of the IDC variety or something similar).