Controller cord question

[Herbarius]

Well, now that I got myself a soldering iron, I started to take my controller cords apart again... What's that supposed to mean, you ask? Well, I had used cables from broken controllers to make those of the working controllers longer, so I can sit back at the couch easily without having to put the VCS on the floor. Until now I just had twisted them together by hand, without soldering, so the connection wasn't very good and after a while they started to get loose. So now I'm soldering them to hopefully get more solid and lasting connections.

 

 

Okay, my question is this: Some controller cords only have 6 wires in them - looks fine to me - while some have 2 additional ones, a red one and a yellow one. Turns out, if you cut them... nothing happens, the controller just works like normal.

 

What are these wires for? Why are they there in the first place? I noticed that already quite some time ago, but didn't really care as long as it works...

 

I'm talking about normal joystick controllers, not Paddles.

Edited January 28, 2010 by Herbarius

[zylon]

They might be 7800 joystick cables, they use a yellow for one of the fire buttons.

[Herbarius]

Yes, now that you say it, one example actually are the 7800 joypads...

 

I don't have any system that supports two buttons, and on the Atari 2600 and C64 both buttons of course do the same... and even with the red and yellow wires missing, both buttons still work...

 

I find that rather weird, how can it be that there are two different buttons, but on the systems that only support one button they magically both work the same, instead of - what I would have expected - one buttons works like normal and the other does nothing.

 

I figured maybe the two buttons don't have seperate wires, but the system knows which one you pressed by some kind of timing trick... but when you say the yellow wire is for the second button this possibility is out of question.

Edited January 28, 2010 by Herbarius

[chriswhit]

There is two wires but inside the controller on the 7800 the button inputs are connected so the current will take the shortest route to ground through button ones output instead of button twos output.

[chriswhit]

There is two wires but inside the controller on the 7800 the button inputs are connected so the current will take the shortest route to ground through button ones output instead of button twos output. The white is actually yellow but aftermarket cords don't follow color codes and the yellow should be an orange jumper for power but building the stick I ran out of orange wire.

 

[Herbarius]

Okay, that explains it. Thank you.

 

 

Any guesses on the purpose of the red wire?

[tetrode kink]

No, I believe the two extra wires are actually for the paddles. Paddles 1 and 2 connect to port 1, and I think those two wires go to the pots in the paddles. Since joysticks don't use the paddle lines, to save money they probably just eliminated the two extra wires in some joystick cables.

 

-tet

Edited January 28, 2010 by tetrode kink

[jaybird3rd]

The yellow and red wires do indeed go to the paddle inputs, and are not used in the original CX-40 joystick. Atari/GCC also used them in the 7800 ProLine joysticks to upgrade them to two action buttons: the buttons are connected to red and yellow independently, and for backward compatibility, both are also connected to the original action button input. This is why the CX-40 cable uses six wires, and the ProLine cable uses eight.