A Look Inside a GC Controller Prototype

I thought I’d share a teardown of my NR Disc (Full Speed) controller as a followup to the page I wrote on the Ver.B devkit controllers. The seal (sticker on the handle) was already peeled off when I bought it – the controller however was never opened before, as the screws were sealed with thread lock.

You can see the blue sticker that is half peeled on the right.

The front side of the main PCB. The stickboxes are bigger than on the final version.

You may notice that some of the contact pads have some sort of metallic paste on them. It is conductive paint, and it’s used to short the B, Y, X and trigger buttons and the four direction on the d-pad. When plugged into a console, it inputs this impossible combination of buttons – this was used to boot special hardware on NR Reader units (teal development GameCube). For more info, see the page on the Ver.A devkit controllers.

This controller works on a retail GameCube console, but the inputs are limited.