This is a joystick.
It might not look like one, but it is electrically very similar.
It has four white buttons, for the four joystick directions, three fire buttons, and a power LED.
You plug this into something which is expecting a standard Commodore / Atari 9 way D joystick, and can operate it using the buttons.
This is useful for testing, and also for things like operating the menu on the divMMC.
Especially when you don't have a keyboard to hand.
Or when you are testing and don't want a long cable pulling on delicate bodge wires.
Pinout
The pins as wired as per a standard Commodore / Atari joystick port. This will not suit an Atari 7800 or the Spectrum +2 side ports or anything else with a non-standard pinout.
- Up
- Down
- Left
- Right
- Fire 3
- Fire 1
- 5V
- GND
- Fire 2
Pins 5 and 9 have various different functions, sometimes one or two extra fire buttons, or analogue paddle inputs etc. Here they are wired to buttons Fire 2 and Fire 3. Fire 1 on pin 6 is the standard single fire button.
The LED is connected to the 5V pin, not all ports provide this (e.g. my PET dual joysticks), and some have 5V and 0V reversed so the LED with not light (some Spectrum Kempston interfaces and the original RC2014 joystick interface).
I couldn't decide which version of the schematic to use, so there you go, have two.
Or three.
Kits
I have listed these on my Tindie store.
This is quite a simple through hole kit, but it can be supplied assembled if you don't fancy it.
I designed these quite a long time ago, so they don't have the rounded corners I talked about in the last post.
Although the reason for the shape is that it was designed to fit into a case, or rather half of a case.
The full case is the one I use on the USB joystick adapters.
Whilst I have some of the cases left, there is an option to include the half case.
(C64C and grubby power supply cable not included)
Adverts
You can find the joystick emulators in my Tindie store, alongside all sort of kits, test gear and upgrades and recreations of the ZX80, ZX81, Jupiter ACE and Commodore PET.
Patreon
You can support me via Patreon, and get access to advance previews of development logs like the ones these posts are based on, and progress on new projects like the Mini PET II and III and Mini VIC and other behind the scenes updates. The new Mini PETs are coming on well, so watch this space. This also includes access to my Patreon only Discord server for even more regular updates.
