I grew up with Atari computers. I liked digital joysticks and hated the analog sticks Apple computers used. So I decided to spread the gospel to my Apple-owning friend. Yes, only one; the rest of us had Ataris.
So I borrowed said friend's analog joystick and measured the resistance between its extreme deflections, took apart an Atari joystick and then soldered resistors into its circuits to simulate full deflection... then got some multi-conductor wire and laboriously soldered it to the tiny pins on a DIP connector, which was what Apple computers used for joysticks. I don't remember if I had to figure out the pinout or found it in the Apple manual.
This all worked, but the connector was too fussy and fragile to be practical. Funny how much stuff you could learn in a reasonable time with no Internet, no car, no access to an electronics clearinghouse like Mouser...
I must have gotten all of it from Radio Shack on my bike. I wrote the whole procedure up and submitted it to Compute! magazine, but I don't remember what their response was. They probably concluded that not enough people hated analog joysticks enough to go through all that trouble.
My first computer was an Atari 400, great days. I never played decathlon though, so I didn’t start customising joysticks until later, I think when I had an Amiga. I got a proper arcade joystick and buttons and built them into a box like the x-arcade sticks you can get now, and wired the contacts onto an old keyboard so the computer thought keys were being pressed. Lots of trial and error figuring out which combinations of keys the keyboard controller couldn’t detect together, but it worked really well and got years of use.
kstenerud
The parallel cable for the keyboard reminded me of a hack I did back in the day, stripping wires from two SNES controllers and connecting them to a DB25 connector to plug into the parallel port of my PC running MAME. The cool thing with the parallel port is that you can control most of the pins individually, so it was pretty trivial to write a driver to send/receive the control messages the SNES controllers expected.
Segv77
Love seeing this kind of dedication. Reminds me of the wild contraptions my own father made to fix our ancient NES controllers.
dole
Relatable path here. Fairchild Channel F, the cat chased the pixels around the Bell and Howell console screen. Hid the 2600 box in the garage rafters from my mom to cover up the purchase. My dad made an 2600 controller using big industrial panel pushbuttons for the directions and a sturdy red clicky button, trying for a good Defender controller but panel buttons were just not meant for fast gameplay.
Driftbench
My own dad just swore at the joystick when it broke. This guy's dad is a legend for sure!
throwawayk7h
Sadly this kind of thing is not possible anymore on modern consoles, due to the highly locked-down protocols they use.
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fwip
Back when DDR was still popular with the teens, my dad helped me build a dance pad to play Stepmania on, mostly out of plywood. We hacked up an old keyboard for it (using an Ethernet cable, but certainly not the protocol). Fond memories.
boltzmann-brain
you missed a trick with joysticks. the trick with decathlon was to hold the joystick by the base, upside down, and shake it violently. that always did the trick! i remember a friend of the family showing me that and my mind was absolutely blown.
I grew up with Atari computers. I liked digital joysticks and hated the analog sticks Apple computers used. So I decided to spread the gospel to my Apple-owning friend. Yes, only one; the rest of us had Ataris.
So I borrowed said friend's analog joystick and measured the resistance between its extreme deflections, took apart an Atari joystick and then soldered resistors into its circuits to simulate full deflection... then got some multi-conductor wire and laboriously soldered it to the tiny pins on a DIP connector, which was what Apple computers used for joysticks. I don't remember if I had to figure out the pinout or found it in the Apple manual.
This all worked, but the connector was too fussy and fragile to be practical. Funny how much stuff you could learn in a reasonable time with no Internet, no car, no access to an electronics clearinghouse like Mouser...
I must have gotten all of it from Radio Shack on my bike. I wrote the whole procedure up and submitted it to Compute! magazine, but I don't remember what their response was. They probably concluded that not enough people hated analog joysticks enough to go through all that trouble.
A fun story, but what really grabbed me was the story he linked to about the author's father, the engineer: https://lostincyberspace.substack.com/p/son-of-a-son-of-a
My first computer was an Atari 400, great days. I never played decathlon though, so I didn’t start customising joysticks until later, I think when I had an Amiga. I got a proper arcade joystick and buttons and built them into a box like the x-arcade sticks you can get now, and wired the contacts onto an old keyboard so the computer thought keys were being pressed. Lots of trial and error figuring out which combinations of keys the keyboard controller couldn’t detect together, but it worked really well and got years of use.
The parallel cable for the keyboard reminded me of a hack I did back in the day, stripping wires from two SNES controllers and connecting them to a DB25 connector to plug into the parallel port of my PC running MAME. The cool thing with the parallel port is that you can control most of the pins individually, so it was pretty trivial to write a driver to send/receive the control messages the SNES controllers expected.
Love seeing this kind of dedication. Reminds me of the wild contraptions my own father made to fix our ancient NES controllers.
Relatable path here. Fairchild Channel F, the cat chased the pixels around the Bell and Howell console screen. Hid the 2600 box in the garage rafters from my mom to cover up the purchase. My dad made an 2600 controller using big industrial panel pushbuttons for the directions and a sturdy red clicky button, trying for a good Defender controller but panel buttons were just not meant for fast gameplay.
My own dad just swore at the joystick when it broke. This guy's dad is a legend for sure!
Sadly this kind of thing is not possible anymore on modern consoles, due to the highly locked-down protocols they use.
Back when DDR was still popular with the teens, my dad helped me build a dance pad to play Stepmania on, mostly out of plywood. We hacked up an old keyboard for it (using an Ethernet cable, but certainly not the protocol). Fond memories.
you missed a trick with joysticks. the trick with decathlon was to hold the joystick by the base, upside down, and shake it violently. that always did the trick! i remember a friend of the family showing me that and my mind was absolutely blown.
Another Decathalon survivor here.