An Engineer Dad's Custom Atari Peripherals: From a 'Joystick Killer' Fix to a Hand-Built Keyboard
Dad's Custom Atari Peripherals – By Jim Trageser
Jim Trageser recalls how his father, an electrical engineer, customized their Atari 400 with surplus parts and homemade ingenuity. Highlights include a single-axis joystick built to survive the brutal 1,500-meter race in Activision's Decathlon, a rewired Fairchild Channel F joystick, and a full-size Atari 800 keyboard connected via a custom parallel cable that Jim used for college homework. The story is a warm tribute to a dad's practical creativity and the golden age of home computing.
It was never as popular as Epyx’ “Summer Games,” and with good reason: The 1,500 meter race was nicknamed “The Joystick Killer.”
- kstenerud
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.
- jamesgill
A fun story, but what really grabbed me was the story he linked to about the author's father, the engineer:
- throwawayk7h
Sadly this kind of thing is not possible anymore on modern consoles, due to the highly locked-down protocols they use.