Tech with Dave: gamepad

Showing posts with label gamepad. Show all posts

Saturday, May 23, 2026

Cardputer Game Station now has support for BLE controllers

The whole reason for my latest projects was to integrate and use controllers with Cardputer Game Station. It supports emulation of some of my favorite consoles and thus their games.

Link: https://github.com/davervw/Cardputer-Game-Station-Emulators

Firmware is also posted on M5Stack M5Burner

Atari 2600
Atari 7800
GameBoy
GameBoy Color
NES

I have some of the original consoles myself and a collection of games. I enjoy playing these on the go!

D-pad support is implemented, so use the d-pad on the Xbox controller. Set your controller to pairing, and this version of Cardputer Game Station should pair with it. Also works with other BLE (not Classic Bluetooth though) controllers. I also have a cute little BLE controller I bought from AliExpress for cheap.

Note: Classic Bluetooth is not supported by ESP32-S3. The newer ESP32's that have Bluetooth only do BLE.

Sunday, May 17, 2026

Gamepad Test

My goal is to play some games on ESP32 hardware. One step to get there is create a test app to pair with existing game controllers.

Classic (not the newest) ESP32 boards support Bluetooth Classic and BLE. ESP32-S3, C3, C6 for examples only support BLE. ESP32-P4 doesn't support wireless directly at all, it uses a C6 as a wireless coprocessor. Thus it's useful to see what controllers you can attach.

Instructions:

Auto binds to pairing device
gampad activity shows here
and see serial monitoring
for more devices & info

Also see: m5_minijoystickc_gamepad

BLE HID Gamepad firmware for M5Stack MiniJoyC

It's not just another pretty face. Time to get serious about retro gaming.

Up, Left, Right, Down, Fire (M5) and second button (click joystick). Not just a d-pad. Is also mirrored as xpot, ypot, so can do paddle games, or analog joystick games.

Go play some games!

Link: github.com/davervw/m5_minijoystickc_gamepad

Also posted on M5Stack M5Burner