How to use your PS3 Controller to play games in a Nintendo Emulator on your PC

I’ve been all NES-ed up recently. At the boot sale the other week I picked up an old Nintendo 64 for £15, together with Goldeneye and F1 Grand Prix. Since then, I’ve bought Micro Machines 64 Turbo (the Nintendo 64 port of Micro Machines V3) and two additional controllers for some 4 player goodness. That put me into a retro mood, and thus I dug out my old NES. I have spent most of my time since to restore it back to its original colour and to get the pins working on the connector.

While I am busy working on that project, I wanted to just get on and play some NES games. So, I found Nemulator and the ROMs to the games I already own and away I went. But using the keyboard just isn’t the same. I wanted to use a controller. but as far as I know, you can’t get USB NES controllers. I do however own a Playstation 3. With the Playstation Network still down, and with no end to it in sight, my PS3 is still not being used to any great extent. So that made me think, can I use my Playstation 3 controller with an Emulator? The answer is yes.

Before carrying on, let me make a few things clear – you do this entirely at your own risk. It shouldn’t break anything, and it didn’t break for me, but its not supported and is certainly not official so only do this if you know what your doing.

1) Download the MotioninJoy drivers and Tool.
2) Install the drivers and the Tool.
3) Now reboot your PC.
4) For 64 bit OS owners, you need to hit F8 during boot up and choose “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement”.
5) Once you are backup and running, plug your PS3 controller in, hit the PS button and Windows will automatically install some kind of driver which won’t work.
6) Now, I will verge off slightly from the guide given on the Motion in Joy website as the following worked for me.
7) Go to Control Panel -> Device Manager and find “HID Compliant Game Controller”. Right click, go to “Update Driver”.
8) Now, navigate to where you installed MotioninJoy and you will find the drivers some where in there – MotioninJoy\ds3\drivers
9) These should install fine.
10) Now, go into the DS3 Tool and Game Controller Panel and you should see the controller and “OK” next to it.
11) Go to Properties and you should be able to test it out.

To get it working in an Emulator, you need to find out what keys correspond to what buttons in the emulator.

12) Now, create a custom layout and map your PS3 buttons to these keys. For the NES, I used X and O on the PS3 controller for B and A respectively. Map X and O to the keys that are used for B and A in your chosen emulator, map the D Pad to the Arrow keys, and save the configuration.
13) I found that everytime I wanted to use a Custom layout, I had to quit out of DS3 tool, unplug the controller, plug the controller back in and fire up the DS3 tool again so that it can find the controller and map to your custom layout.

Et voila, you should have a working PS3 controller in your chosen Emulator! Ok, its not the same thing as the actual console, and some day I will get it working, but until then, its NES + PS3 controller all the way!