WTF?! If you, like many people, have spent thousands of hours playing Skyrim with a mouse and keyboard or a controller, maybe you’re ready to spice the game up with something a bit less sensical. Modder “nekomichi” recently demonstrated a new control method that brings a unique spin to the game while keeping iPods from becoming e-waste.
A Reddit post showing someone playing Skyrim with two iPods connected to a Steam Deck recently went viral. Despite the method’s absurdity and the age of the hardware involved, the modding process is surprisingly straightforward.
An earlier demonstration (above) from tinkerer nekomichi shows that, instead of rewiring the iPod to act as a game controller or keyboard, he found custom firmware for Apple’s iconic mp3 player that enabled additional interactions with external hardware. One added function allows a PC to interpret an iPod as an input method of the user’s choosing.
After configuring the mp3 player to act as a keyboard and discovering which keys it corresponded to, nekomichi realized that one wasn’t enough for playing a game as complex as Skyrim. So, he connected a second iPod to gain control over a total of 10 keys.
This was enough to remap Skyrim’s bindings without the keyboard and enjoy basic movement and attack functions. The most fascinating aspect of the alternate control scheme is that the modder had to map forward and backward movement to the click wheel scroll function, which quickly became painful.
Unfortunately, nekomichi couldn’t clear Skyrim’s tutorial with the iPod controls, but they could theoretically work with other games. Long before the iPhone and the Apple App Store, various games were available for the iPod, proving that the right kind of game could be enjoyable on an interface designed for scrolling through music playlists.
If nothing else, the experiment might prove that haptic touch pads and scroll wheels are underutilized in the gaming sector. The Steam Deck’s dual haptic pads are particularly useful for games designed around a mouse.
The firmware nekomichi installed on the iPods is called Rockbox. It hasn’t been updated since 2019, but it supports numerous mp3 players from Samsung, SanDisk, Toshiba, and others, likely expanding the range of software users can install on them.
Before long, we’ll likely see someone beat Dark Souls with the dual iPod setup on Awesome Games Done Quick.
