The Good Ol’ Atari Joysticks

The Atari game console has its glorious times back in the days. The Atari game console was at the peak on the golden age of arcade video games. The Atari helped define the electronic entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s.

Atari will always have a special place in my heart. I had a wonderful childhood because of this invention. I played long hours playing the games Missile Command. I also spent so much time playing Pole Position, being an F1 driver, at least on the video game.

Back to the present, I have this one interesting project in mind. My son always plays computer games, but not like the ones I used to play in the past. Today is the age of PC gaming, Atari have gone, not gone totally, but this era is for PC gaming. I wanted for my some to experience what I played, so I wanted to build this Atari joystick for his PC gaming.

The Atari joystick will be connected though the USB port. What I wanted to do is emulate Atari games on his PC. There are a lot of Atari emulators out there that’s free.

A cheap USB gamepad can be used in this project especially those without pressure sensitive buttons or analog joysticks but only digital inputs. This will avoid paying for unwanted parts for the adapter. The plastic casing of the Logitech Wingman Precision USB gamepad was removed and concentrated on the internals. The tracing of connections from input to the pins of the single IC was made easy because the layout of the circuit board is really sparse.

To power auto-fire circuits, most computers that have Atari joystick ports provide +5V on the pin 7 of the D-sub connector. The auto-fire function present in some joysticks can also be activated by connecting the D-sub pin 7 with the pin 10 on the IC with a safety resistor. A second fire button can also be produced by connecting the D-sub connector pin to pin 4 (Button 2) on the Logitech chip. The effective way is soldering the wires of the 9-pin D-sub connector into the pins required by the joystick and the other ends straight to the pins of the Logitech chip.

The board and the connector were installed in a small plastic box to make the adapter ready. It can be made smaller if the IC and other parts were unsoldered and placed on veroboard.