If you’ve played the 2600, you probably thought it was the greatest thing in the world, but those rose colored glasses likely fell the first time you picked up something even as simple as an original NES controller.
The joysticks that come with the Atari have this large rubber boot on the bottom:
When you look at that, it sort of suggests that you can move this thing a few inches in any direction and it will happily move, and send a clean, meaningful signal to the Atari.
See, the joysticks, that I grew up with at least, were analog — you would start the software and it would read the current joystick position, treat that as the center, and then measure the deviation from there to get the position of the joystick — they allowed actual movement, and a degree of precision (usually 8-bit, or 255 distinct readings per axis -128 to +127).
BUT the joysticks in the Atari are basically a D-Pad with a big ass stick hanging off of them. Truly. You move it left, it doesn’t matter how hard or how far (this is getting sexual), the reading is either 1, or 0. On or off. To make matters worse, there is ZERO tactile feedback — you don’t know the moment the switch was pressed, the movement on the screen indicates success — and of course there’s lag.
The last bad part is that it is essentially a membrane switch before rubber was invented (I made this part up). Seriously, look:
I took my micrometer, put it over the button and the back of the board, zeroed it out and then depressed it. The entire motion of the button press goes from off to on at -0.31mm. In American, this is the exact thickness of a Maple leaf two weeks into fall when measured while holding a pumpkin spiced latte in the other hand.
Yes, of course the joystick amplifies that since it acts as a lever. It’s exactly 69mm in length (nice), or if you’re American, then it measures one Standard Atari 2600 Joystick tall.
I’m sure somebody can do the math of the 69mm portion, plus the portion through the boot and the width of the spread to get the actual travel of the joystick when playing, but I can tell you without math: It sucks really bad.
Still, the unit I’m showing you is broken, and the fix is replacing the connector on the end. I don’t really want to do a janky fix, so I ordered a replacement cable. Of course, instead of ordering one cable for like $8, I found a deal for 10 cables for $25. So, after I fix this, I’ll have nine other cables with nothing to do but clog up a box in the garage.
So, here’s what I’m thinking:
I did the same thing with these colorful, arcade-ish momentary switches. They have more travel than the Atari switch, they look kinda cool, and while they don’t have feedback, they bottom out predictably, so they should make a stellar controller.
If only I had a way to make a game pad housing…
This will be a project I’m going to have one of my kids help out with designing, after all, they enjoy playing it more than I ever have, so it just makes sense to make it fit their hands and styling.
See you in Part 2, when the parts actually arrive!
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