Wednesday, 17 June 2015

A game pad for the Apple II

The Apple II joystick port isn’t as simple as an Atari or Commodore joystick port. Where the bog-standard Atari joystick is basically just a bunch of switches connected to pins, the Apple II joystick is analog. Weird, and even weirder is the value of the pots in these joysticks: 150kΩ. Somehow or another, nobody makes pots in this value any more. Luckily the hardware in these joysticks is well documented, and shoehorning in modern components isn’t that bad.

The Apple joystick has a bit of circuitry – a 556 timer chip that reads the values of each pot and converts that into a stream of 0s and 1s for the Apple. The joystick [Quinn] found for her game pad is an analog thumb stick on a neat breakout board manufactured by Parallax. This analog joystick has 10kΩ pots in it, and that just won’t work with the 556 timer chip. However, since this is just resistors and a 556 chip, adjusting some of the values on the original schematics does the trick. [Quinn] added a few capacitors to her circuit, and everything worked beautifully.

For more information click here



from electronic for robot http://ift.tt/1Bo60s1

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