Bluetooth Retro Things (But Should I?)
28The thought of converting all my retro consoles over to wireless controllers is intriguing. I mean less cable mess is always a good thing isn't it? But do you give up too much? I mean more batteries to charge and possible interruptions or added latency could be tradeoffs that's aren't worth the added convenience. I dunno. But I guess I'll give it a try. So far the SNES setup is working great. I don't really notice any latency but I'm certainly not the one to be testing for that! I'm sure there's some but it seems good enough for most uses. For some reason the first 3 times I turned on the SNES I had to re-pair the BT controller to the dongle. But the 4th time and every time since then it just pairs on its own as you'd expect. I'm not sure if there's a battery in the dongle to remember the pairing and it charges when it gets power from the SNES??? No. Can't be that. Maybe it was just that the first few times I paired them I immediately turned the system off and then on again. Maybe it has to be paired for a certain amount of time before it remembers it? I'm not sure but it's working great now. I can leave it off for an extended period of time and when I come back I just have to turn the SNES on and the controller on and they'll pair right up. For the Genesis controller it turns out Retro-bit does indeed sell a BT dongle for the Genesis 9-pin controller port. That would be nice to get eventually but the price on Amazon at least right now is way to high! Again, maybe I'll stumble across one somewhere else.
I really do want to lower cable clutter going forward into the future. The other day one of my two SNES power adapters died and that got me looking into getting a USB Type-C PD power adapter with Type-C PD 9V to SNES/Genesis cables. The idea of having one power adapter that could in theory power my RPi3, Classic Mini's, NES, SNES, SMS, Genesis, TG16 etc is tempting and certainly possible now with these new cables. The 5V USB Type-A port could power all the micro-USB powered clones while the Type-C PD port could power almost every retro console that can run off 9V DC. One brick to rule them all! Definitely going to look into these Type-C PD 9V cables in the future.