My 7800 Gamepad with Pause Button!

[Nabuko78]

Finally I made it! It´s my new atari 7800 compatible gamepad, done by myself and has no Atari original parts on it. And has a new feature: a Pause Button! (or a pair of buttons). The making of this gamepad took me like 8 years of planning, because I interrupted all repairing on my console since this stopped working, along with other unnecessary fixing.

 

To do this i had to remove the player 1 controller port and see what was laying down there, in order to link the pause wire to pin #7 (+5V) so I removed part of +5V circuit line without affecting the rest of the circuit, but then I lost the original 9-pin port and for my bad luck it was unavailable on every electronic store I visited. That's why I stop fixing it. Then, two weeks ago I was in a new attempt to fix my mistakes in no time, and found the proper pieces: the 9-pin port, a new AC adapter port, a new soldering equipment, lots of wires, epoxy, a new LED and a AC Power Adapter stolen from other device. It took me a whole week to make my Atari runs again with success, and its LED turns in blue!

 

And then I was in the need for a new game controller. After making a test controller with buttons mounted on a plastic plate, soldered to a cable I took from an older mouse, which for my surprise it had the 9 cords I needed, I tested the pause button and it worked, and failed the two fire buttons, 'down' and 'left'. And I said : "What a mess! I need a real gamepad to make it work properly. Where I'm going to find one? And cheap!" So I went to a flea market at downtown and found one easily, among with other gamepads for Playstation, Xbox, Famicom clones and SNES. All cheap and probably faulty. And I got one which is a Famicom pad with Playstation form (You know, "Polystation", #1 console in Hong Kong and Taiwan). Cute and cheap, that's all I needed. The other pads looked plain ugly and lame. This one is kinda lame too, but not for my needs. So here are the pictures of the gamepad:

 

 

The next pics are from the circuit board I made with an acrylic plate and copper tape stripes soldered to the wire directly. The shape of the circuit its almost the same of the circuit inside the gamepad case, probably I would never make it fit to the case without a Dremel to make the holes.

 

 

The gamepad actually works. The response in buttons misses sometimes, but mostly time is good. I already played Ms. Pac-Man and Xevious, obtaining great results. So what do you think about my gamepad?

[FireTiger]

how does it cause the pause to work?

 

how much time working (not looking for parts) did it take?

 

Have you ever made one of the standard NES gamepad -> Atari 7800 2 button gamepads?

[Lord Helmet]

That's a really cool mod. I'm surprised no one has thought of this before

Edited August 14, 2007 by Lord Helmet

[Nabuko78]

how does it cause the pause to work?

 

how much time working (not looking for parts) did it take?

 

Have you ever made one of the standard NES gamepad -> Atari 7800 2 button gamepads?

 

It's very simple: substitute the pin #7 (which is not used in a regular pro-line joystick but used in paddles and lightgun) by cutting the +5V circuit line before the first solder joint, solder a wire between the pause switch line and pin#7 and restore the port back to its place CAREFULLY. I don`t guarrantee you that this works at the first time you try it. But I'll be posting here pictures of my modified Atari 7800.

 

It may take many hours just to remove the port, as long as necessary to make it functional.

 

This is my second gamepad I made but not in this way. The first one was a SNES/SFC-like pad for NES/Famicom using my original pro-line cable and the circuit was printed in a phenolic board (with only one copper side) using a chemical product, ferric chloride (FeCl3) spilled in the board with the circuit drawn with pen marker or other methods that implies ink. That's a traditional method for people that studies electronic engineering (not my case, of course) I'm just a hobbyist.