Question... 2nd joystick button?

[Bolton80]

Hi,

I'm curious to know whether the Spectrum can make use of a 2nd joystick button (or Master System pad buttons for example)?

I know that no games use a second button, but with some POKEs, could jump etc to allocated to it?

I've seen it done with Stay Frosty 2 on the Atari 2600.

[AndyC]

Technically, yes, but it would be highly dependent on which joystick interface was being used as well as finding a suitable two button joystick.

[Turtle_Quality]

Just to eliminate the obvious, many emulators can assign joystick / controller buttons to whatever keys you choose.

With real hardware, the question is "Which joystick adapters did support more than just four directions and fire ?"

[bob_fossil]

Just to eliminate the obvious, many emulators can assign joystick / controller buttons to whatever keys you choose.

With real hardware, the question is "Which joystick adapters did support more than just four directions and fire ?"

On my +2, the divMMC Future's Kempston joystick interface supports two buttons. I got a Sega Megadrive pad off eBay and that lets you use two of the buttons on that as independent fire buttons.

[Timmy]

Most Spectrum games are usually played with (some of) its 40 buttons.

I am planning to make more use of other keys in future games too. I haven't decided which of them yet.

So perhaps the problem is that our current emulators can't emulate more than 1 button very well?

I'd like to have an emulator that can emulate more than 4 buttons. But perhaps I can do that myself (some way or another).

Probably not hardware compatible, though.

[Joefish]

What you can do is wire a second joystick cable into a controller and that (through up, down, left, right, fire) gives you effectively five more buttons. But the circuits must be completely separate. You can't share a commond 0V wire with the other joystick cable. For a +2 Spectrum, you could also then re-wire both cables to fit the Amstrad joystick ports. The result is an arcade-style fight stick with 6 buttons, that operates Sinclair Port #1 as a joystick, but can also operate keys 1,2,3,4,5 via Port #2.

I have built one, but it was based off an old Wii fighting stick which used cheap-arse buttons. Once I'd de-soldered them from the board inside the joystick the buttons soon broke (the bottoms cracked and fell off). At some point I'll get round to replacing them all with better quality arcade buttons.

It's hard to rewire something as compact as a SEGA Megadrive pad, but there's enough room inside the 3-button joystick. Or just build your own from arcade parts from ArcadeWorldUK and a project box from eBay.

An alternative might be to rig a button (via two diodes) to operate UP and DOWN at the same time on a joystick. Since this is normally impossible, the game could detect it and interpret it as - for example - JUMP rather than FIRE, or a brief tap to SWAP-WEAPON or BUY-POWERUP in a Gradius style scheme. But it would have to be programmed into the game, and done in such a way that it wouldn't interfere too much with normal player movement.

But don't forget that in a game you could have TAP FIRE and HOLD FIRE do two different tasks, which works even in the middle of busy action. Though admittedly, that's not going to work for two quick-response actions like FIRE and JUMP.

[1024MAK]

I'm curious to know whether the Spectrum can make use of a 2nd joystick button (or Master System pad buttons for example)?

As Andy says, it depends on the actual joystick interface. By this, I mean both the type and the actual revision/version. This is especially relevant for Kempston or Kempston compatible types. You would have to identify which board is used and which chips are used, then modify it.

Modern Kempston compatible types often include a second fire/trigger button input as srandard.

For Sinclair Interface 1 (or compatible that provides both ports), you can use both ports with a custom cable.

Some joysticks did have two independent buttons, but these were often wired to the same circuit. The limitation being that the cable and moulded plug only had provision for one fire/trigger button circuit.

Mark

[AndyC]

I think, most crucially is that you are going to need some solution for single button joysticks: whether that bit assigning a second function to a keyboard key or something like holding down a button etc.a scheme which requires users to purchase new joysticks/interfaces etc is either going to be relegated to emulation only or just fall flat.

[cj7hawk]

Some spectrum joysticks could assign anything that had a key... The logical conclusion would be to avoid joysticks and have your control system specify keys. Then you can assign up to 40.

Way back I remember making a "cockpit" out of an old fridge box, lots of sticky tape, and rewiring a spectrum keyboard to switches and a joystick to make my own flight simulator... There's more than 4 buttons there.

Aside from that, Kempston and Interface 2 are the best joystick choices. Both support 2 buttons IIRC. Only mouse interfaces that I know of supported three buttons.

[Joefish]

The COMCON plug-programmable joystick interface supported two fire buttons.
To go with it, they re-wired a load of Quickshot II joysticks so that what was normally the +5V line to power the auto-fire circuit, was re-jigged to be the switch line from a second fire button. Most 80s joysticks' cables only had enough wires in them for Up/Down/Left/Right/Fire/Common Ground 0V.