Interesting! I hated the sucker cup ones. But, I grant you your point, because a good, leaf spring joystick well mounted is awesome! If it has the little clicky switches, I personally would rather hold it.
But, yeah fatigue did hit.
Agreed on the D-pad. First time I played an NES I was sold!
One of my favorite things about the VCS was all the controllers! Only Indy 500 used the driving ones, which is a shame. Another driving game or two seems like a great home brew project...
I took to that idea and made a button board for Asteroids. It was fun, but the game limits were too low. Then I found the STARPATH asteroids. The official version was changed enough to not be Asteroids. But, there was a great port that basically had the arcade feel and it had much better action and far higher limits. Was basically a sort of 160 ish x 192 ish bitmap game. The interleaved graphics were funky, and all part of the special charm in that machine. Jay Miner and team intended something far less great, and ended up with something far more!
And that has proven generally true of software driven video systems: C64, Atari 8 bit, Amiga, Coco 3 (to a lesser degree), PC CGA...
Where the CPU was coupled to graphics chips designed loosely, pure magic ended up the result. Literally almost every year, someone somewhere managed to squeeze a bit more out of those machines. The whole Demoscene essentially drove innovation in that way and still is!
Modern devices, like the Parallax Propeller being software driven ended up capable of more in the same way. It is really cool.
I also made analog sticks for my Atari 8 bit computer and created some simple projects that used it.
And the two button Apple style analog sticks always were great for me. Playing Robotron on the Apple, or PC for that matter as both were bitmap Atarisoft ports, was fun! One button rotated the firing, the other triggered it, basically creating a game variation on the usual two stick design the game shipped with.
But, yeah fatigue did hit.
Agreed on the D-pad. First time I played an NES I was sold!
One of my favorite things about the VCS was all the controllers! Only Indy 500 used the driving ones, which is a shame. Another driving game or two seems like a great home brew project...
I took to that idea and made a button board for Asteroids. It was fun, but the game limits were too low. Then I found the STARPATH asteroids. The official version was changed enough to not be Asteroids. But, there was a great port that basically had the arcade feel and it had much better action and far higher limits. Was basically a sort of 160 ish x 192 ish bitmap game. The interleaved graphics were funky, and all part of the special charm in that machine. Jay Miner and team intended something far less great, and ended up with something far more!
And that has proven generally true of software driven video systems: C64, Atari 8 bit, Amiga, Coco 3 (to a lesser degree), PC CGA...
Where the CPU was coupled to graphics chips designed loosely, pure magic ended up the result. Literally almost every year, someone somewhere managed to squeeze a bit more out of those machines. The whole Demoscene essentially drove innovation in that way and still is!
Modern devices, like the Parallax Propeller being software driven ended up capable of more in the same way. It is really cool.
I also made analog sticks for my Atari 8 bit computer and created some simple projects that used it.
And the two button Apple style analog sticks always were great for me. Playing Robotron on the Apple, or PC for that matter as both were bitmap Atarisoft ports, was fun! One button rotated the firing, the other triggered it, basically creating a game variation on the usual two stick design the game shipped with.