Radica Space Invaders, a great 2600 joystick!

[ArugulaZ]

Classic gamers know that controllers from the early 1980's were generally pretty awful. They were designed without much thought for ergonomics, responsiveness, or precision, which is odd because those are pretty important things for a video game controller to have.

Fortunately, there are modern alternatives available for classic video game fans who love everything about the experience but the lousy controllers. The Sega Arcade Pad works really well with the Atari 2600 if you're a fan of joypads, but what about gamers looking for an arcade-style joystick?

Well, I've found that Radica's Space Invaders plug 'n play fills that void quite nicely, especially for the price. You can put together your own solidly constructed controller with the tight feel of an arcade stick and the modest size of a joypad for ten to twenty dollars.

Of course, you'll have to do a little, ahem, surgery on the device before you can use it. First, take out the screws on the back of the joystick. Next, take out a pair of scissors and remove the wires that connect the circuit board to the joystick and fire buttons. This is pretty easy, as they're all appropriately labeled... U is up, B is the B button, and so on.

Once the circuit board is out, you just take a discarded 9-pin joystick cable and strip away enough of the rubber shielding to expose the wires inside. Strip the top of each wire, then solder it to the appropriate microswitch or button wire using this pinout list as a guide:

http://pinouts.ru/Game/sega_ms_joy_pinout.shtml

Once you're done, you've got yourself a joystick that's surprisingly good for the price, which can be used with either the Atari 2600 or the Sega Master System. It's even got a Space Invaders decal on the top of the stick for added retro appeal!

There's one caveat... the buttons on the stick are really mushy, so you'll either want to replace them or just use the stick for maze games like Pac-Man. I'm not sure if there's enough room on the face or inside the stick for Sanwa arcade buttons, but there's plenty for the tac switches used in a lot of Ben Heck's projects.

You could also expand the joystick's sphere of compatibility with a little ingenuity, but right now, I'm just happy getting it to work with my Atari 5200 using an adapter. Pac-Man's never played better!

[Life of Brian]

Excellent tip Thank you!