Joystick to PC-style Digital IO pins

[danwinslow]

Does anyone have any insight into what's needed generally to hook up the atari joystick ports to a block of digital IO pins on a small 386 PC board? These are just generic AD pins such as you find on small embedded controllers. They are read and written via memory mapped ports in the 386 io space. Just looking for general hints, unless you feel like being specific

[djmips]

When you say AD does that mean Analog to Digital or is it a general purpose I/O pin (GPIO)?

 

If it's a regular GPIO, what you need to do is to get the pinout of the connector from Google (Deathskull labs for instance) and then you need to wire it up so that each of the GPIO inputs is pulled high through a resistor and the switches in the joystick (left/right/up/down and fire) pull the input to ground.

 

I've seen 47K and 100K resistors used as pullups on a 5V GPIO

 

Here's some information

http://arcadecontrols.com/arcade_sneskey.html#Amos

 

http://users.erols.com/tiltonj/games/tech/2600cont.html

[classics]

Assuming your pins can be configured as inputs with weak pullups, all you need to do is connect the common pin to ground and the other five pins to your I/O pins.

 

When a switch is closed it will pull an input to ground (zero). Debounce in software.

 

Steve