One Adapter to rule them all.

For the item I'm about to talk about ask yourself these questions, if you check one or more of these bullet points, you will want this item and you will not regret it…

Do you have a bin full of old retro controllers you like to use?

Do you like emulation with real hardware?

Do you own a collection of retro consoles?

Would you like to use retro controllers wirelessly?

Do you have a special needs to gaming, or need to do something controllers can't do?

Do you like Arcade setups, niche cases, tetchy things, with retro gaming?

Want to use a controller for ways it was not intended?

I could go on, but let's start there, if you said yes to one or more keep reading, otherwise thank you for dropping by :)

the info I'm about to give you is from firsthand experience and questions I asked the CEO. I believe most all of it to be accurate and true. The things mentioned above are all possible with a product chain. If you are into this as much as I am, you're going to skip a heartbeat. I'm no photographer but I'm going to drop an image here…

Bliss-Box has been around since 2007, if you do not know who they are then do not be surprises. There are two things that keep them out of the limelight.

1) They do not do opensource, which helps google find stuff.

2) They are not a money hungry company. It shows in how they sell their stuff. For example, the dongles they use are backward compatible with all pinouts. They made these things because no one else did, or no one did it right….

In 2015 Bliss-Box turned in to a company and start manufacturing these products. The first product was to take the homemade Bliss-Box adapter, and to make it a 4 player device. It was an adapter for all controllers, and I mean all. I do not own anything that does not work with but I'm sure there are edge cases. They have this list of over 200 controller that it works on and that is only what was reported to work. All of these controllers map to a global HID or in some cases Xinput device. So the main, secondary, etc button map up the same way.

There are also a tun of features. You can read more about them here. and if you prefer that can all be turned off. There is a tool on windows to configure and test all this adapter has to offer. Here is what that looks like.

But you may be thinking, "ok so what's new?" This is already out there in many forms. Well yes and no, this is not just a group of adapters, its 1 adapter, you can make your own cables, cables contribute to the tech. Not impressed yet? Wait, it gets better…

Let talk about the Bliss-Box Tech for a moment. Anyone that knows how "stuff" works should know these console do not read a wire per button, well some did but not most. You cannot just rewire a controller to work where it was not designed to. The Bliss-Box adapters all take the signal from all of these controllers and convert to USB. Well any non greedy company should expose this and not keep it to themselves. And that is what Bliss-Box did. All of these controllers can be read with 1 simple signal. They call it LLAPI and its 100% open source and free to use.

Whoa, techy right? Well not really, if you do this sort of thing it's just like any proprietary signal. You just read it. This is what the Mister Community did, before the methadone of the narcissistic Mister devs. Ironic, but true. A community that holds themselves at a standard of free net and open source, censors anyone invading against their beliefs. If you know Bliss-Box, you know they are not going to force anyone's hand, they are not going after your money, and they are not in this for gain. But the uptight Mister community felt they were a threat and close them out. However the ideology collapsed on its self. Because they do stand for freedom and a large part of them broke off and started the LLAPI fork. It is regular updated and the same thing as the main fork with LLAPI in it. Ok politic rant done! from this I give you the BlisSTer!

This is going to give you 2 players using either USB or LLAPI. It works on both cores. USB supports that mister 1ms polling so if you do not want LLAPI you may use it. But the LLAPI, auto maps, polls at the native game rate, and works with the NES gun. The LLAPI core is a bit incomplete because it was abandon but a team continues to let it live on.

Let's take a side step back to that first image up top, where a PlayStation was connect to a SNES. This also uses LLAPI to communicate to the Bridges. You will need 4 parts to do this.

The adapter ( can be any of the formerly mentioned ), an input cable, the Bridge, and the output. Cable are swapped out per needs. If using the Bridge on a USB console there is a dongle for that.

Now I could not possibly show you all the combinations you get with this. But Bliss-Box does have videos for this. here and here

Alright so now we just found a way to use nes on atari, snes, on play station, dream cast on tg16, pce on 3do, coleco on atari jaguar, pippin on 5200, 7800, on sms, n64 on GC, and so on. It does not matter what you want to do, you can now do it.

So now we take that leap to even more edge case stuff.

This adapter will mix up two controllers into one, or split one into two. Remap, invert and change up the controller in any way you want. It outputs to LLAPI or USB and takes in two LLAPI ports. 4 LLAPI simultaneous sports at once is possible. The videos above in RetroGamingGoodies show off a lot of situation like smash brother spookatron and robotron. Also one handed gaming, and inverted controllers. There is a interface to program it how you like.

This adapter is very cheap in cost. And just a gem to have. I use it to play on the mister in LLAPi mode and also use the USB mode for the menus where I have no BlisSTer. Also for fun I can play two consoles at the same time. Or play punchout with nun chucks. But that is just me.

Another crazy adapter is the A.I.R

This thing lets you use any of the adapter mentioned wireless. Really there need no introduction beyond that. Yes you still get wires, but its freedom to use them at 40 feet!

Last I will talk about the switch box APC, where if you have a large collection, you may want this. 16 in and 1 out Bliss-Box HDMI cables box.

Ok, let's go over what we have here. You want to get a core adapter and yes you can go crazy easily. Up to $200 to get it all in a 4-player form. But once you got all of that, it's a done deal.

The bliss-Box pages is here.

About Bliss-Box:

So I'm just a fan, been using the stuff for far too long, most of the community and talk is on Discord and support is like having an older brother. I do not think the show is ran be a company minded guy but just a gamer that loves what he does. Once you need support, if that even happens, you will not feel like it's a support call. you will feel like your family is helping you out of another bind. They do not get much attention because they do not make a lot of noise. You do not read much about issues on forms because it's so easy to use, no open source github repo's, and most all support is off the radar in Discord or email. I wish I was a market director and could put them on the map but I'm not. I do not have a fancy writing skills or a big well known webpage. So I wanted to at least speak out. I'm sure they will see this someday, and to whom ever takes satisfaction from what you do, Bliss-Box you have made my life much better. I hope this helps.