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.
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.
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.
You can still just direct solder to any of the shelf controller pcb to make your own devices. There are also more resources out there than ever before for creating your own inputs.
I don't know about the Xbox side of things, but ps4/5 there's an 8 minute lockout if it's not an officially license controller[1]. Ways around this are taking an official PCB from a ps4/5 controller and soldering external buttons to it. Another is getting a pcb with a usb passthru, which you can use something like a magicboot, which you load up with controller firmware/binary file, which is not an officially supported method, you're technically supposed to dump your own from an existing controller you own, but still I don't know the real legality of that all either.
I've got an arcade stick that only works on Xbox if you daisy-chain an official controller to it. There is some kind of authentication passthrough required.
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.
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.
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.
Love seeing this kind of dedication. Reminds me of the wild contraptions my own father made to fix our ancient NES controllers.
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.
You can still just direct solder to any of the shelf controller pcb to make your own devices. There are also more resources out there than ever before for creating your own inputs.
https://youtu.be/Ug06dhahqg0
All the recent generations accept USB controllers, is there really much locked down in there?
I don't know about the Xbox side of things, but ps4/5 there's an 8 minute lockout if it's not an officially license controller[1]. Ways around this are taking an official PCB from a ps4/5 controller and soldering external buttons to it. Another is getting a pcb with a usb passthru, which you can use something like a magicboot, which you load up with controller firmware/binary file, which is not an officially supported method, you're technically supposed to dump your own from an existing controller you own, but still I don't know the real legality of that all either.
1) https://gp2040-ce.info/faq/faq-console-compatibility/#why-do...
I've got an arcade stick that only works on Xbox if you daisy-chain an official controller to it. There is some kind of authentication passthrough required.
Have you seen the xbox adaptive controller?
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.