Shift register question EDIT: A failure!! Need help! :D

[Vellywio]

Not really a portable NES question, but I figured this was the best place to ask this. I would like to be able to use my NES controllers to play roms on my PC, but I don't want to alter the controllers in any way. My plan is to dremel some holes in one of the blank CD-ROM drive bays of my PC, and install a female NES controller plug there to plug in my controllers. Also, I don't feel like spending $25 on a pre-made kit to convert to USB, so I'm going to hack/cut up an old USB keyboard and do it by hand. So my question is, would I be able to use a serial-to-parallel shift register to "read" the signals from the controller and convert them back to parallel, so that I could then feed the parallel inputs into the old USB keyboard? I realize it'd be easier to just convert the darn controller to USB directly, but I feel like preserving my controllers (they were my childhood, after all ), and also would like to learn more about shift registers in the process. So does anyone know if this is even possible/likely to work? Thanks!

EDIT:

Hey all!

Ok, so I purchased a serial-to-parallel shift register as planned. I hooked up the shift register as follows:
[ external image ]
Except that where latch comes out of the controller (and turns into ???) I have it connected to pin 9 (the other ???). Pin 9 is the "clear" pin on the shift register. With that setup (shown below) LED1, which comes on when the controller plugs in, turns off when any button is pressed on the controller. Also, anything grounded goes to the USB ground, and the 5 volts comes from the USB cord as well. (Not using the data lines quite yet obviously, just getting some power from the USB).
[ external image ]
So I know that the basic idea when the controller is hooked up to an NES is that the NES sends a pulse down the latch, telling the controller to store the current button press states. The NES then pulses 8 times down the clock, one time for each button, to receive the serial data. LED2 should in theory light up if one of the buttons is pressed (not sure which one, but there are only 8 outputs on the register, the same number of buttons on the controller, so ONE of the buttons should output to the current position of LED2). So basically the current setup obviously won't work, and I was wondering if anyone had ideas at all about how to make this happen.

Some infos:
Data sheet for my shift register: http://www.kynix.com/uploadfiles/pdf882 ... CT164E.pdf

Some thoughts:
- Should I have something else producing a constant clock pulse (I think it should be 60Hz, I think thats what the NES does) hooked up to the controller CLK and the chip's CLK?
- Do I need something to send a pulse down the latch every 8 clock cycles?
- I'm not entirely sure what place the CLR on the register should play in the whole scheme lol.
- I know a lot of people will say "just use a programmable PIC," which may be what I end up doing. I want to avoid this for the obvious cost reasons, and I really think this shift register thing could work!
- Definitely starting to think I'll be needing an oscilloscope for this, with all the high and low states involved with those shift registers

Thanks for reading, sorry it is so long!! If there's any confusion in my description, just yell at me and ill try to give more information!

[EmuandCo]

Yes, the subforum is called Off-Topic, but I think you are a bit wrong here ^^

[PurpleGurl]

Why would you convert serial to parallel to feed to a universal SERIAL port? I think you need to rethink the logic, and until then, you'd do better to use an existing adapter.