I wanted to play Turrican 2 the other day so I fired up an Amiga emulator, but playing it via the keyboard really wasn’t cutting it, so I broke out a USB game pad I had floating around the place. Â That also didn’t feel quite right 🙁 Â What I needed was an old Atari style joystick to really get my Turrican 2 craving licked. Â I looked around and sure enough I had one, but how could I get it working with my Mac? Â I needed an Atari joystick adapter. Â A little googling and ebaying later I found that 1. they are pretty easy to make, and 2. those available online are too expensive. Â Time to break out the soldering iron and whip one up myself. Â The hardware is pretty simple, just a PIC32MX220F32B and a handful of other components.
 
I even found a nice box to put it into!
Once I’d removed the guts of the ADSL filter, it had just enough room to fit all the parts I needed 🙂
After coding up a simple HID based USB joystick (and forgetting yet again that the reason I couldn’t read some of the bits in PORTB was due to the analog inputs being enabled by default) I had a working USB joystick adapter. Â Time to play Turrican 2!
FRAK! Â Why can’t I jump?!? Â It turns out the plastic shaft inside the joystick has a crack in it which means that the UP direction doesn’t work reliably making Turrican 2 unplayable 🙁
I think I have another Atari style joystick about the place, but if not, it looks like ebay may be my only option 🙁
Ah well, I had fun anyway 🙂
That looks real good Daniel.
I’ll have to keep an eye out for any old joysticks in my “treasures”, and if found, send them your way. Dad.
Oh, another thought… Time to stoke up the Solidoodle?