anyone own a commodore 64 ??

I'd like to get more details for sure too.
It just goes to show that still the simplest things are the best.

*shakes head* - sacrilege, some would say you should be cutting up a LX200 for parts for a C64! Ah no, good job, you could probably use any old joystick (pre 1990) for this as they don't use controller chips and are straight pass-through from controller to console, just switches and cables.

Exactly John,
This joystick is just 7 wires and switches, each switch has 2 points for wires, when you push the switch, it effectively joins the 2 points toghether.


So, one of the wires goes to the first terminal of each switch, the 6 remaining wires go to the 6 switches, for the 4 direction axis's and the 2 buttons.




As you can see, there is nothing complicated about it, its just 6 switches and 7 wires, no software/firmware or ICs.

Now this is where it got a small big hairy.

I then dismantled the handcontroller and found the seven points on the controller board the 7 wires, but this is not as hard as you might think.


If you open up the controller further, you can see that the actual keypad section is joined to the electronic board by a 20 line blue ribbon cable, one common line and the 19 are for the nineteen buttons on the front.

All you got to do is find the common line and each line that corresponds to each of the buttons you want, all you need do is press the button and use a multimeter to see which 2 lines short out, obvious the power is off when you do this!.
In my hand controller I found that there was a built in 50 ohm resistance in the buttons, so I had to get a resistor to conpensate for that in the joystick.

Obviously the autostar would be different, but the principle would be the same, you would just need to find the tracks on the PCB and "intercept " them with the cables for your joystick, which is effectively what I've done here.

I don't think the C64 will be in action any time soon again, but those joysticks were indestructable by modern standards considering the hammering they got, we even had one of those light guns where you'd point it at the screen and shoot targets, I wonder if it could be modified where I shoot at a star and the scope would slew to it

Ah now I get it.

Fire buttons implemented as slew speed control?

Ah now I get it.

Fire buttons implemented as slew speed control?

Exactly,
the left button is a middle slew speed and the right button is ultra slow so I can can center Jupiter on the screen when using astrosnap for example.

albertw wrote:

What would be cool would be to build a voice activation box to accept the commands!

"left" "left" "up" "left" "follow that star!"

if it only responded to "where is my beer"
it might point towards my fridge in the kitchen, now thats real GOTO.