Homemade paddle control.

[kensu]

I recently built a home-made paddle controller for my 7800. I used 1 MOhm linear potentiometers, as was indicated in the Atari field manual, and was confirmed in several other forum posts. However, 9/10ths of the dial's range is a deadzone, with the last 1/10th actually being registered by the game. (In this case, 2600's Super Breakout.)

Before I started this, I built a prototype using a Maxitronix electronics kit, and I had a brain-fart and thought that the 100 KOhm potentiometer I hooked up was the same as a 1 MOhm one, and I got the expected results when I played the game.

 

So my question is: why did the 100K one give me the expected results, but the 1 MOhm one is mostly useless? I've never acutally used a 2600 paddle controller, so I don't know how many degrees of movement it allowed.

 

(p.s. I'm pretty new to electronics, so please be kind. )

[0078265317]

Can we see some pics?

[BigO]

If you try different games, you'll see that they use different amounts of and different sections of the physical rotation. There's a lot of slop in the process, and you may have gotten lucky with the 100k, but it's unlikely to work for every game. Even if it did work, I think it'd seem quite slow in response because you'd have to turn the 100K pot through a lot more degrees of rotation to get the same resistance delta as in the 1M pot.