Most people in the world give up and try another route when things aren't going their way. They accept that something is 'just the way it is' and make peace with it, quietly grumbling to themselves about how the world is unfair. That's 'most people', but we retro gamers are a different breed entirely. We're stubborn and refuse to give up, exhausting every possibility and coming up with outlandish workarounds to solve problems.
When Hunter Irving got out his Nintendo GameCube to play Animal Crossing again, he enjoyed the nostalgic gameplay with the anthropomorphic animals we were all introduced to back in 2001. While the game itself fills us all with happiness, the clunky keyboard is, admittedly, quite tedious to control. In an email to me over the weekend, he explained that he did 'what any rational person would do - ordered a rare, Japan-exclusive, keyboard/controller hybrid on eBay that doesn't work with Animal Crossing, and then used a Raspberry Pi Pico W to listen for keypresses and send simulated controller events to [his] GameCube, automating typing in Animal Crossing at a Tool-Assisted Speedrun level.'
See what I mean about not giving up? The ASCII Keyboard is one of the strangest GameCube peripherals out there and takes the chunkiness of controllers like the original Xbox Duke controller to a whole new level. It's definitely one you'd need to use on a table or on your lap, unless you have arms like The Mountain from Game of Thrones.
The technical thought that needed to go into sorting this out, from wiring and programming to 3D-printing and remapping is very impressive, and Hunter has put all of the code and the design files up on his GitHub page for anyone who wants to try the project out for themselves.
Hunter had to watch a 10-hour FreeCAD tutorial to discover how to model the keycap profiles and create custom, 3D-printed keycaps to get everything married up perfectly. He then went on to create Python script to turn 'arbitrary images to the game's 32x32 pixel custom design format, ' manipulate algorithms to get access to all the items in the game, and then get Snake running within Animal Crossing.
It's safe to say at this point that Hunter had gone past the realms of simply ever considering 'not giving up' and gone into 'Ultra Mod Mode,' and honestly, I respect it. We didn't need Snake running at 1 FPS in Animal Crossing, but we got it nonetheless!
Head to Hunter's YouTube channel to check out other examples of his determination to teach old tech new tricks!
