Commodore 64 joystick with 3 buttons
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- Опубликовано: 11 дек 2024
- Commodore 64 arcade joystick with 3 buttons - this very simple cable allows You to enjoy all of Your favourite C64 games in a brand new way - adding 2 more functional buttons alongside the standard fire button, plus giving Yout that unforgettable true arcade playstyle feel.
Not really much more to say here, just enjoy the video and short playthroughs of few example games picked to demonstrate the "Space Bar" utilization as an additional button.
I'm sure You can find much more great titles that will benefit from a controller setup similar to this one.
Music playing in background by Emre Bulsat - Strike Force Intromusic
The standard atari joystick port,introduced in late 70's, officially, didn't support more than one fire button. But with the revolution of the 8bit and the 16bit home micros in the 80's, many computers supported extra "undocumented" fire buttons (on the pins where the POTX and POTY signals used to be for atari paddles) . The hole situation ended like this:
wiki.icomp.de/wiki/DB9-Joystick
As you can see, many home micros (like amiga, atari st, c64 etc) had the same pinout for joystick ports and supported up to 3 seperate fire buttons, although in practice 3rd fire button rarely used. Note also that, although many games indeed supported 2nd fire button, the grteat majority of games developed, where not.
For exampole, take a look at this list for amiga games supporting 2nd fire: eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=57540
They may look many, but dont forget that games developed for amiga where MANY thousands!
Finally, the other "problem" was that, back at the 80's, most joysticks were made with only one fire button support (although usually had 2 physical buttons) , and it wasn't so easy to find a joystick with 2 seperate fire buttons.
Awesome!!! Could you help us on building up this cable? What do we need to buy and the soldering procedure. That would be so helpful!!!
Fabulous!
Piękny. Zamierzam zakupić taki arcade stick do C64 w obudowie pulpitowej.
If you are already going to occupy both joystick ports, why not assign the remaining 4 directional pins in port 1 as buttons. The games obviously have to be able (or modified) to handle it.
And since some games use port 1 and some port 2; circuitry with a switch could be added, so you didn't have to swap them manually.
One or two of the controllers extra buttons could also be fitted with NE555 IC timer circuitry for auto/rapid fire. So you would have the 2 normal fire buttons and the same 2 mirrored, but with auto-fire. The user port also has the potential for registering 8 extra button presses. Or adaptor circuitry could be made to go inside on the keyboard connecter, giving access to any of the keys as extra buttons.
Taking those ideas to the extreme; if you were able to control the keyboard and joysticks with the GPIO pins of a Raspberry PI (level shifters are most likely needed). In the sense controlling the C64 by proxy... that would give you all kinds crazy possibilities; auto-fire, configurable buttons and even recordable combo keypresses (macros) assigned to individual buttons... even play games on your C64 via a Bluetooth controller, since a Raspberry IP can handle Bluetooth... My bet is you would quickly run out of free buttons.
Thanks for Your comment - and thats why electronics is fun :) You can come up with a lot of creative ways that in the end will fit Your requrements - I wanted this one to be as simple as possible - check out my other projects if You like - joyport swapper, userport player3&4 and some other more or less advanced stuff
That is what was so great about the home computers from the 80's. They were actually based off the designs of the DIY electronic hobbyists of the 70s. Which made them very simple and easy to comprehend on all levels.
The Arduino's, Raspberry PI's and other single board computers are designed to be today's equivalent. But once you electronically try to dive further than the control pins, into the circuitry and the processors, they get integratedly more complex... not less, like with the retro's.
Yep, cant agree more. Back in the day everything was well documented and simple for a single look of an eye - you got Your schematics and ML programming book with the home computer - noone was trying to hidde their technology concepts. Now what You get? A mistery box with some notes on ISO348837734 bullshit how not to throw Your used PC into the trashcan ;) ... and the best thing about retro
computers is - You can learn a lot from them since the basic concept didnt changed - we still use "zeroes" and "ones" just with the wider data/address busses :) and we swapped KB's into MBs and GBs. Not to mention the through-hole technology was so much more friendly for a hobbyist - try to figure something out now under that 300+ pin BGA microprocessor
Some of the SMD's are so small, you need a magnifying glass to even spot that they are there... and you need better skills than a brain surgeon to swap them out. Intentionally designed not to be repaired.
I stopped interpreting binary as 0's and 1's some time ago. I found that I tended to tie it more to math than to electronics and physics. Better to view it as one state or another; low or high voltage, magnetism, frequencies, light, short or elongated holes... etc... Removes it a bit away from the realm of the abstract code and puts it back into the real world :)
All your ideas are doing is adding latency
Excellent !
hey strike force remix yeah
Which capture card did you use? How is the latency with it? Great video!
Thanks :) latency is nice on this card, it is Hauppauge Impact VCB-e capture card - it has a "game mode" feature that minimizes the input lag, it is still there but it is not as bad as on the other devices like EasyCAP for example. The video output of C64 is connected to the old DVD recorder and the output of DVD recorded is connected to the capture card - I had to make it like this becouse C64 connected directly to the Hauppauge capture card creates a annoying Horizontal Jitter effect - check it here ruclips.net/video/1-jM-TOdzDo/видео.html i tried many different things to fix this, but I couldnt, passing the signal through the DVD recorder did the trick.
Where to get this cable?
Have to make one Yourself :) it is not complicated, a basic skill of using soldering iron is required, as far as I know a cable like this is unfortunately not available for purchase.
I want it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!