Wireless Atari Joystick

David J Barnes

Anybody have any experience converting an old Atari joystick to a wireless IR controller?

The only work I have done with IR is the Parallax Sony universal remote experiment. This project will obviously require more knowledge on my part, specifically sending data and decoding on the receiver(BS2) side. Any tips getting started would be appreciated.

Franklin

Get as much data as you can about the joystick so you know what kind of signal and codes it puts out.

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- Stephen

Beau Schwabe

Most of the original ATARI joysticks that I knew of had one switch for each direction... Up/Down/Left/Right ....An additional switch was used for the fire button. I would use standard Serial communication and assign each switch to a specific bit. granted you won't be using 3 of the 8 bits unless you add an additional button or switch of your own.

For some of the newer joysticks some of them tried to get tricky...
Since there are only four basic directions and you can't simultaneously go up and down or left and right at the same time there are only 9 possibilities with the 4 available directions which left 7 other functions including buttons that could be coded into a 4-bit value ... some of the more advanced joysticks used this method.


As Franklin mentions, find out what you have first.

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Beau Schwabe

IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.