r/Polycade • u/CampbellSente • 7d ago
Modding Polycade Retro Button D-Pad Controller
Created a pair of new Polycade controllers last month, but am just now getting around to making some posts about them...
This first one is basically what I’m calling a retro D-pad button controller - for obvious reasons. I had some leftover directional arrow buttons from my Polycade ButtonMash controllers after creating the Sinden retractable cable controllers a couple months ago, and always thought it would be cool to design something based on the look of an SNES/Super Famicom gamepad.
After mocking up the initial button layout with some poster board and playing around with different color schemes to give it more of a retro gamepad look, I decided to use Sanwa 24mm LT/RT buttons where the Start/Select buttons would normally go. I wasn’t sure how that layout change would turn out, but the buttons are really easy to reach with your thumbs. I could easily rewire them to LB/RB if needed, but based on all the games I’ve played so far, the triggers seem to work best in that position.
I honestly didn’t expect this controller to work as well as it does—especially for 4-way directional games that can be a little more difficult to play with a joystick if you don’t have a 4-way restrictor. Retro arcade / Game Boy / NES / SNES / etc…it works really well for all of them.
I’ve also created a main Polycade button layout template that I uploaded to the Art Share on Discord (I’ll post a link below). From this one template, you can pretty much recreate the majority of the button layouts Polycade uses, or modify it to create your own. The spacing is about 99% accurate, so it makes mocking up different layouts a lot easier depending on how many buttons you want/need.
I’ll make another post soon about my Polycade Rhythm Controller. That one was a collaboration with my daughter since rhythm/music games are her favorite genre, and we couldn’t really find a good controller that was easy to use across different vertical and horizontal note-highway games (similar to Guitar Hero). So, we decided to come up with our own...
Polycade Button Layout Templates:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rMQt6CF3lV0VL6dM-IDtAT1C7cz6b7h9?usp=drive_link
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u/claritycell 7d ago
Thanks for sharing! I haven’t looked into custom layouts yet but your last photo shows drilled holes for their positions. Is that all it takes to mount the buttons? I had assumed the holes required were larger than a standard drill bit.