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Arcade Stick Bluetooth Upgrade RAC-J500S

 

I purchased a RAC-J500S arcade joystick to play some arcade games on Retro-Arch, I got the one with the Pac-Man art because my daughter liked it. The arcade stick comes ready to use and has ARC controller board that I can confirm works great on PC and Android, however there are problems with Android TV. The problems are in how Android TV maps the buttons of a USB controller, for some reason the buttons are mapped the same way as the remote controller. So one button on the arcade controller automatically opens Netflix, another YouTube, another Prime Video ... and so on. People has successfully gotten around this weirdness by using a button remapper app, unfortunately these conflicted with my other controller. When I purchased the Arcade stick I though it might be neat to make it wireless at some point in the future. Since apparently only wireless controllers work with Android TV I decided to go ahead swap out the controller board. I used  a Nice!nano clone because the it's uses very little power and has a built battery controller. This board doesn't come with firmware, for that  I used  the Slimbox-bt controller firmware, to load that up just plug the Nice!nano into a PC it'll show up as a USB drive the first time it's plugged in, just drag the Nice!nano version of the Firmware from the repository into the drive. The it should show up as a USB arcade controller after the firmware is flashed. Then it's just a matter of connecting all the common pins to ground on the board, and the other pins as listed in the pin table. I soldered all the common pins together to a single wire that i connected to the board. On the joystick the pin labeled VDD is common pin we are connecting to ground. On the buttons I chose to make the black wire the common wire. 


I connected the USB via a case mount connector.

 This is the pinout for the Nice!nano version of the Slimbox-bt

pin | button
--- | ------
006 | start
008 | select
017 | D-pad left
020 | D-pad right
022 | D-pad up
024 | D-pad down
100 | south
011 | east
104 | west
106 | north
009 | L1
010 | R1
111 | L2
113 | R2
115 | L3
002 | R3
029 | home
031 | button 14

Since we have less buttons the last four pins listed in this table aren't connected. 
This is the button configuration I used.

The new controller is tiny, but it works great.


The battery was back ordered, so I haven't gotten that it, just wanted to wire things up and see if they worked. More info about the controller, flashing firmware and syncing the Bluetooth Controller here.

 

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Update: Battery came and is installed, Controller is working great and my daughter loves The Simpsons Arcade game. We beat it a couple of times together. It's amazing how much easier those arcade games are when you have infinite tokens. 


 

 

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