This thing is super easy to make and works really well. it just requires about 5-10 minutes of soldering. So here it begins:

I decided to buy one of these super crappy g-tron sega saturn usb controllers.



It worked fine at first but the d-pad is so poorly made that it just snapped after 2 days of use. I tried fixing it but it didn't work out. Then i realized that the g-tron controller's case is so similar to the official saturn controller's case. i took it apart and swapped the motherboards and it fit fairly well. The only issue was that the shoulder buttons on the g-tron controller didn't fit correctly so i desoldered them and replaced them with the official controller's buttons.








This is what it should look like at the end:




Thats all there is to it. It is so incredibly simple and it works really well.

Nice work, and good use of the existing controller case. I take it the D-pad works better now?

SO much better. it feels exactly like its a sega saturn controller.

After seeing this thread, I decided to try this myself. I had an old Saturn pad kicking around. I ordered one of those cheapo knockoff controller and did the board swap. Desoldering the shoulder buttons isn't really necessary. The knockoff pad's shoulder buttons have these rubbery spacers glued to their undersides, where the button hits the switch. Just peel these off of the knockoff button and stick them to the real button. It'll work out just great.

I haven't played too terribly much with it yet, but it seems solid enough!

It truly works very well. I think there are 2 different companies that manufacture the knockoff controllers. Did you get the one manufactured by Retrolink? The one I got was from G-tron. The shoulder buttons on the G-tron version were tall and ‘clicky’. So I couldn’t get it to fit until I swapped the shoulder buttons.

When I used my controller, I was playing X-men: Children of the Atom and could pull off almost every super move flawlessly.

I just happened to come across this post. I wanted to get a saturn usb pad, but seeing how the official ones are incredibly hard to come by, your hack seems like a good alternative.

I was wondering how it's holding up after a couple years? I guess I would assume that if the knock-off controllers are made so cheaply, the circuit board might also have issues. Have you found that to be a problem?

I made this topic right after i made the controller (a couple of months ago) so i wouldn't know how it would hold up over the years. I think the circuit board works very well, the only problem was the d-pad which snapped from the inside after a couple of hours of use. It was a design flaw in the case IMO, which is why this mod works so well. At some point, i'll try to make a video of the controller i made to show how well it works.

Oh sorry I must have looked at the wrong date and thought it was when you originally posted this. Well thanks for the info. I think I'm going to give this a try.

Wow I just did this and it works amazing. I tried it with both the GLtron and retrolink gamepads. I think that they are the same exact parts. The only issue I ran into was that the shoulder buttons were a little too short when the circuit board was placed in the sega controller. I fixed this easily by just adding several layers of packing tape and sticking it on the underside of the L and R buttons.

The D-pad worked amazing, but I wasn't impressed with the sensitivity of the ABCXYZ buttons. I also added a few layers of tape underneath those and it seemed to fix the problem. I'll see if I can upload some pictures next time I take it apart. I think some buttons still need some sensitivity training

Here is a video about how to fix the buttons on SEGA USB controllers!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bia5VX6X3Gw
Out of the box, the buttons on bootleg controllers are not working properly.
Many people come to conclusion that they are broken and throw them away -
while they could be easily fixed and become just as good as the official ones!

Hey guys. Recently found this thread and I am super interested in swapping the PCB from a cheap saturn controller into one of my nice legit Saturn controllers.

My main goal would be to use the controller on the Playstation 3. Any idea how compatible either the GTron or the Retrolink controllers are with the PS3? Has anybody tried that?

You need controllers built for the PS3 for that to work.
It would be a real pain in the ass because of the PS3's analog button thingies.