Teensy Adapter Lets You Use Your Steel Battalion Controller on a PC

Early video game controllers were purely input devices. They could send control commands to the console or computer, but received no data in return. In the '90s we got the Rumble Pak and Dual Shock controllers, which provided haptic feedback that corresponded to what was happening onscreen. The pinnacle of controllers came with the Steel Battalion game for the original Xbox. That controller had an incredible 44 input points and also received feedback as "dashboard" lights. In order to use that amazing controller with modern PC games, SantiagoSaldana created this Teensy adapter.

The Steel Battalion game is now outdated, but mech games are still very popular and this behemoth of a controller is perfect for playing them. It has dual flight control-style joysticks, a throttle lever, and a multitude of buttons and switches. There are also many lights that provided feedback in the original game. The controller only worked with Steel Battalion, which is a shame considering how cool it was. With this adapter, you can use the controller with any PC to play modern mech games — or any other game for that matter. It acts as an XInput device, just like controllers for the Xbox 360 and up do when connected to a Windows computer.

This adapter utilizes a Teensy 3.6 board to act as an intermediary between the Steel Battalion controller (a Mega-Jockey-9000) and the PC. The controller has a USB cable that plugs into the Teensy's pins and the Teensy connects to the PC through its own built-in USB port. It takes advantage of Teensyduino's libraries for emulating serial, keyboard, mouse, and joystick simultaneously. It interprets controller commands and sends those to the PC, while also interpreting rumble commands from the PC. The controller doesn't have rumble functionality, so instead rumble events show up as blinking lights on the controller.

If you have a Steel Battalion controller and want to use it with modern PC games, this Teensy adapter is a very affordable hardware solution that works without any complicated software configuration on the PC.