Side by side The Legend of Zelda

I wanted to see if I could figure out how to play both the Japanese and US versions of the Legend of Zelda split screen with a single controller, but that would actually be super hard, and I'm lazy. Also the Internet only has people who will only explain why that is a bad idea, like I needed any help with that. Duh. Obviously the NES controller isn't just 8 switches, that would mean like 16 wires going back into the NES and there are only 5. The console communicates with a shift register in the controller to queue up button presses. Two consoles trying to talk to 1 controller wouldn't work, they would interfere with each other. Now if I used a separate Pi Pico, and HC-05 Bluetooth controller for each console that would allow me to setup a Bluetooth server on a Raspberry Pi to send the same commands to 2 consoles, yes, but the slightly different refresh rate of the consoles would mean at times the stream of button presses would be interpreted differently, and I would also be introducing home made wireless lag.
So lets Occam's razor this problem. Instead of custom coding & building my own wireless controller, which could use any controller really and would be super cool, I'm just going to invite my nephew over and give him his own cheap controller hooked to an old HVC-101. Oh, that will work nicely.