Train Simulator Controller: July 2026 Progress Roundup

August 5, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

For the past three years [Christopher Mitchell] has been working on his replica of a British Rail Class 800 control cab for a physical train simulator, with the July blog update providing many details on the progress.

The Class 800 series of trains is relatively new, having first entered service in the UK in 2017 on the Great Western Railway (GWR). Designed and built by Hitachi as part of their modular AT300 product series, they come in both purely electrical and diesel-electric hybrid configurations to deal with non-electrified rail sections.

British Rail Class 800 in service with LNER in 2023. (Credit: Foulger Rail Photos, Wikimedia)

Replicating the experience of driving a train is always a trade-off between what one would like and what is practical or affordable. With only a corner of his apartment to work with, [Christopher] has opted to focus on the instruments and controls in the cab, using real components where possible or building replicas for the remainder.

This entire control panel is to be used with simulators like Train Simulator and Train Sim World, using their controller APIs to both control the in-game train as well as to get feedback to be displayed on the real instruments and the various LEDs, such as those that indicate the state of the external lights. These are all controlled internally via a CAN bus, as is typical.

These instruments include genuine AWS sunflowers, part of the safety system that ensures that a driver has acknowledged a non-clear signal along the track. It’s another nice touch to a control cab simulation that’s shaping up to be rather close to the real deal.

Even if for the average person something like a Densha de Go! copy and associated controllers will likely suffice, there’s a lot to be said for having something closely resembling the real deal for a realistic game, whether it’s a train, car or airplane controller and associated instrumentation.

Making A Retro(ish) Game Console From Scratch

August 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

As easy as it is to make a late 1980s-style game console using a modern microcontroller, there’s arguably more fun in doing things the traditional way. This is the challenge that [Throaty Mumbo] took upon himself when he embarked on his retro game console project, called simply the Game Console V2.

In the accompanying video the development process and other details are covered and demonstrated. Most notable perhaps are the proper cartridges with ROMs on a parallel bus rather than something like SD cards, and the absence of any modern ports including even VGA. This means only composite AV output like in the good old days of RF splitters and other assorted fun.

The NTSC output signal is generated by an RP2350 MCU in the form of the PGA-shaped PGA2350 breakout board that’s wired into a 6-bit R-2R network for RGB332 output via the RCA jack, while audio is fed into a PCM5102A I2S DAC. For controllers you get 4-pin Bulgin SA2367 connectors and an N64-compatible protocol.

It’s noted that the use of an RP2350B MCU is temporary, as the goal with the V3 version of the project is to take it into a proper 8- or 16-bit CPU direction. We’re certainly looking forward to seeing this next revision of what looks to be a pretty interesting game console.

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Bike Trainers As Video Game Controllers

August 1, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

While we’ve largely settled on analog sticks and digital buttons for controlling video games, there’s all sorts of projects to create truly esoteric controllers that allow playing games in unique ways. This one from [sukolupo] lets you use data from standard bike trainers to get your virtual character moving.

Called Deck de France, it maps the data coming from one of the supported bike trainers to a virtual controller which can then be “plugged in” to a Linux system, in this case a Steam Deck mounted to the trainer’s handlebars. Although a bike trainer doesn’t have the same number of inputs as a modern gaming controller, it does have enough to play games like Rocket League. As you might expect, it’s also perfect for biking titles such as the Tour de France series.

As far as unique controllers for video games go, this one is surely up in the rankings with a real trombone or a controller purpose-built for riding virtual horses. It’s also a great way for those who are getting a bit bored of riding their trainers to breathe some new life into their exercise routine. We’ve also seen some open-source alternatives for modern bike trainer software as well, which is another great way to get excited about exercise equipment too.

A Compact Game Controller For Your Phone

August 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 9 Comments

[Gil Yankovitch] noted that playing games on a touchscreen phone gave up a certain something in terms of the tactile feedback one gets from real buttons. To that end, he was inspired to build a controller specifically for phones that solved this very problem.

The result was JoyFon. It’s a small gamepad built around the Raspberry Pi Pico, and can be put together around an RP2040 or an RP2350 as desired. It has four face buttons, a directional pad, and start and select buttons, as well as additional shoulder buttons up top in later revisions.

The JoyFon enumerates as a standard USB HID gamepad, so you could use it to play games on just about any PC, laptop, or tablet. However, the JoyFon is specifically designed for use with smartphones in the vertical orientation. This guided the design of the 3D printed enclosure, which positions the USB-C port to plug into the base of a phone, such that the buttons sit neatly beneath it. It does cover some of the phone screen, but that’s not always a problem when playing emulated games with a 4:3 or similar aspect ratio. The result is a button and screen layout not dissimilar to that of the original Game Boy handhelds.

We’ve seen some other great custom controller builds over the years, like this fantastic design using keyswitches.

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NES Advantage Stick Gets Bluetooth Upgrade

July 31, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

The NES Advantage was a cool bit of hardware back in 1987, bringing an arcade stick to the home console gaming experience. Naturally they don’t get much use these days, unless of course they’ve been modded to work with modern systems, as [Aaron] has done.

[Aaron]’s goals were straightforward. The stick should work with modern systems over Bluetooth, but the mod should not involve cutting the case or making any new holes. All controls, including Turbo and Slow Motion, still had to work, too, and there would be no adding extra buttons for configuration or control.

To achieve this, [Aaron] whipped up a custom PCB which replaces the original cable attached to the NES Advantage. Power is via a small LiPo cell, charged via a TP4056 and paired with a TPS63900 buck-boost converter. An ESP32-WROOM-32E interfaces all the original controls, reading the stick’s CD4021 shift registers to do so. It then either emulates a Switch Pro Controller over Bluetooth Classic, for use with a modern Nintendo Switch, or it acts as a standard Bluetooth Low Energy gamepad for use with PCs, SteamOS, phones, and other compatible hardware. All that and the stick can still work with an original NES if so desired, when placed in the Switch Pro Controller mode. You merely need to plug in an 8BitDo NES Retro Receiver and you’re up and running.

We’ve seen other fun retro controller builds before, too, like this classic Xbox controller modded to work with the Xbox 360. If you’re cooking up similar projects, we’d love to hear about it on the tipsline.

Behold The Most Beautifully Ambitious Starship Simulator Yet

July 29, 2026 by Donald Papp 24 Comments

[Kevin Kelm] created something wondrous: Halcyon Dawn, an utterly unique and desperately challenging game that is equal parts intricate starship simulator, imposing hardware console, video game, and love letter to John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War book series. Grab a beverage for this one, because it’s chock-full of detail.

First, how is it played? The simulator represents the ship Halcyon Dawn, a stolen and renamed vessel, and the player representing its sole crew member. The ship’s new mission is to establish a home for its payload of genetically-engineered unfortunates, escaping a cruel sort of indentured military servitude. The former masters of course have a very different view of the whole situation, throwing around terms like “treason” and “theft” and in general preferring the version of the desperate protagonist they had the most control over.

Aluminum extrusion, laser-cut panels, and custom PCBs for interfacing physical controls and displays make up the bulk of the build.

As the player is meant to be operating the ship on their own, the cockpit is imposing. All 152 controls and six screens are meaningful and will be needed to pilot the Halcyon Dawn, survive hostile actions, repel boarding attempts, mine and refine vast amounts of raw materials, and in general keep the ship running and intact until an autofactory can be deployed in orbit of a suitable planet to create a new home.

All easier said than done. It’s one thing to pilot and tweak a temperamental ship, but doing so while also performing damage control and thwarting a boarding attempt by manipulating life support is quite another. Want more details? Gameplay is documented here and the physical controls have their own library.

The product of a year of focused work, [Kevin] – now retired – pointed his decades of hardware and software experience at Halcyon Dawn after realizing one night that everything he needed to create it already existed. How this whole project came to be is also a tribute to the amazing tools and equipment that hobbyists and hackers of all kinds now have to turn an idea into something that actually exists in the world. Even so, it was a load of work he is not keen to repeat. Don’t miss the technical deep-dive and photo gallery of the build.

While the game itself — being a fan-made derivative of Scalzi’s work (and useless without the custom-made hardware console) — isn’t being released, [Kevin] has shared the underlying hardware framework it is built on. Enigma is an ESP32-based set of input and output PCBs made for integrating switches, knobs, displays, relays, and more with a Python library to make them easy to work with.

Starship simulators are a wonderful subset of projects, and every one is different from the last. Something about physical builds really works for them, and while we’ve seen a camper trailer converted to starship simulator [Kevin]’s project focuses the whole experience beautifully into the single-person console you see here. Watch a video of Halcyon Dawn running in an arcade-like “attract” mode embedded just below.

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3D On The Playdate Handheld

July 25, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 21 Comments

The Playdate is a small handheld console with a dedicated fanbase. Among them is [Cristina Ramos], who recently decided to try and push the limits of the hardware by implementing a 3D renderer for the platform.

[Cristina] began by implementing a raycaster. This is a very simple way to do 3D on limited hardware, and this technique was used by some early games like Wolfenstein 3D. However, for [Cristina], it was more a test to get an idea of the performance limitations of the Playdate. After getting her feet wet with that, she stepped up to implementing a renderer that relied on binary space partitioning, which could load map files in the same format used by the classic Quake engine. There was naturally plenty of work to do to handle things like texture mapping and lighting, too, particularly given the vagaries of working with the Playdate’s 1-bit monochrome screen. Using a simplistic, cel-shaded like approach for textures gave things a good look while preserving visual readability on the low-resolution screen.

The 3D engine and associated game remain a work in progress for [Cristina] — we look forward to seeing where the project goes next. We’ve seen similar projects on resource-limited platforms before, too.

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