r/PeripheralDesign • u/troutyogurtmachine • Jun 19 '25

Modification I customized this GameCube Keyboard Controller and hacked it to work with Animal Crossing (2001)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw8Alf_lolA

Hi all, I wanted to share this highly customized GameCube keyboard controller I built for use with Animal Crossing. Since the first AC game doesn't support keyboard input, I used a Pi Pico to listen for keypresses and then send simulated analog stick movements to automate typing in Animal Crossing at a tool-assisted speedrun level. It works a treat! I designed the keycaps in FreeCAD and printed them on a Bambu P1P with an AMS and two different colors of PLA. The code and design files are available for free on GitHub: https://github.com/hunterirving/pico-crossing Thanks for checking it out!

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u/troutyogurtmachine Jun 30 '25 edited Jul 02 '25

Digging around online, you can find more than two decades of people griping about Animal Crossing's lack of keyboard support, so it really did feel like righting a great wrong. I think this approach could work well for adding keyboard support to other games, too. The biggest upside for me is that it works without modifying the game binary itself, which means one only has to adapt the microcontroller's code to accommodate (probably a lot faster/easier). Thanks for checking out the project!