Sky Gamepad - RS232 protocol

Intro

The sky gamepad was introduced around 2002 when sky wanted to push some of their interactive games. There's lots of information about them on the main sky game pad website,

What is it?

It's one (or more) infra-red handheld 'game controllers', along with an IR receiver unit.

The infra-red receiver unit connects to the sky box using:

The RS-232 protocol

This information has been arrived at by observation only, so it is quite likely to have errors and/or omissions.

Serial Port Settings:

Data format


[Header][Address][Button Code][\x00\x00][Checksum]
All commands are 8 bytes long

Header

\xAA\xB1

Address

\x00 = Gamepad 1
\x01 = Gamepad 2
\x02 = Gamepad 3
\x03 = Gamepad 4

Button Code

\x00\x00 = Button released       0000000000000000
\x00\x01 = Red (A)               0000000000000001
\x00\x02 = Yellow (C)            0000000000000010
\x00\x04 = Green (B)             0000000000000100
\x00\x08 = Blue (D)              0000000000001000
\x00\x10 = UNKNOWN               0000000000010000
\x00\x20 = UNKNOWN               0000000000100000
\x00\x40 = Help                  0000000001000000
\x00\x80 = Backup                0000000010000000
\x01\x00 = Select                0000000100000000
\x02\x00 = UNKNOWN               0000001000000000
\x04\x00 = X                     0000010000000000
\x08\x00 = Y                     0000100000000000
\x10\x00 = Up                    0001000000000000
\x20\x00 = Down                  0010000000000000
\x40\x00 = Right                 0100000000000000
\x80\x00 = Left                  1000000000000000

\x00\x00

These two bytes have never changed during testing, so there is currently no clue as to what they might be used for.

Checksum

The checksum is the lower 8 bits of the sum of bytes 2 to 7

Credits

The information above was provided by Andy Purkess, reproduced here with permission.
Joseph Heenan, joseph@heenan.me.uk