Incredible! I had always wondered how Nintendo got away with such a compact controller compared with the likes of Microsoft and their giant rumbling controller. Who would have thought they used both contact pads and cables! (Why didn’t I just delete this footage?)

Have you ever wondered what’s inside a Nintendo GameCube controller? Well, it turns out there’s a GameCube controller circuit board inside. Incredible discovery, I know!

I’ve had a couple of these apart today and noticed something interesting. Despite looking rather similar from the outside, the circuit boards aren’t quite identical. There are differences in the markings on the main chips, and one version has a small connector arrangement where another uses a ribbon cable.

It’s not an enormous change, but I do find this sort of thing interesting. Manufacturers are forever making little revisions to their hardware, and sometimes you only notice them when you’ve got two examples sitting open on the desk.

We’ve got the main analogue stick, the smaller C-stick and the enormous rumble motor tucked up towards the top of the controller. That certainly helps explain why these things can give you such a satisfying shake when a game decides something exciting has happened.

The triggers are quite clever too. Inside the shell there’s a sliding mechanism for each trigger, along with a separate contact for the button action at the end of its travel. It’s a neat arrangement, and there’s a bit more going on here than you might expect just from looking at the outside.

Then there are the ordinary button contacts and the rest of the surface-mount components scattered around the board. The whole thing is rather compact, especially compared with some of the older controllers I’ve had apart over the years.

And there you have it. Nintendo managed to pack two analogue sticks, analogue triggers, rumble and all the other buttons into a reasonably comfortable little controller.

Not a bad piece of engineering. Even if the most exciting discovery today was that it contains a circuit board!