If you were a child of the ’80s, there is a good chance that you had a Nintendo console in your youth, the classic 8-bit NES. And if you were one of those NES owners, it’s therefore probably that the peripheral you lusted after was Nintendo’s arcade-inspired Advantage controller. This replaced the game pad with a full-size arcade joystick and buttons, and has become an expensive and sought-after accessory in the years since.
[Bbtinkerer] has a NES Classic, and having gone through more than one joystick that just wasn’t up to the pressures of intensive gaming, decided to have a go at building one himself. The Advantage was the obvious model to copy, and thanks to the Wii Retropad Adapter project, he was able to do so.
Faithful to the original in its layout, the new Advantage clone features a Turbo mode for rapid fire, though rather than the buttons you’d have had in the ’80s this model features a toggle switch. The joystick mechanism used was a Sanwa JLF, and the buttons were Sanwa OBSF-30s. He’s posted a video showing the finished item being put through its paces.
If the Nintendo Advantage has captured your interest, you might like to see the one we featured a few years ago that had a NES emulator board placed inside it.
Is it weird that I immediately recognized it was Kid Icarus from the screenshot yet I’ve never actually played the game? ;)
1. Nice build!
2. This could maybe be sweeter with the emulator INSIDE the joystick, making it into an NES Advantage Plug-and-Play System.
3. Those Start , Select, Home buttons and the knobs look weird. Are they… 3d printed, for some reason?
Seems like an odd project considering you can buy “the edge” joystick, which is a advantage clone for the nes classic that uses real sanwa arcade parts for around 25 bucks.
From the article:
I made this project after going through two defective Emio Edge joysticks. I wanted a second controller and the official gamepad is harder to find than a unicorn.