Re: Joystick cables with molded DE-9S connector?

I use HID2AMI on my Amigas. It works well although I have never tried on 8
bit machines. At least the mouse part will not work on them.
Istvan

On Sat, Apr 10, 2021 at 5:06 PM Marko Mäkelä <msmakela_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> After a long break, I fired up my Vic-20, sd2iec and UltiMem. Great
> stuff, but all of my joysticks suffer from worn cables. It is not fun to
> play games if the joystick movements are only intermittent.
>
> A few years ago when I was searching for joystick cables with a molded
> plastic connector, I found nothing. Today I found one promising shop,
> but still sadly nothing in the European Union.
>
> I also found some related forum discussion. The first one is about
> joystick cord extension and building a buffer to protect the CIA or VIA
> when using a very long joystick cable:
>
> https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/53439-joystick-kabel/
>
> But, I fear that a metal connector case could scratch the metal shield
> around the joystick connector. Here, someone came up with a DIY solution
> of removing the metal part of a DE-9S connector, adding a circuit board
> and applying heat-shrink tube:
>
>
> https://atariage.com/forums/topic/228399-replacement-atari-2600-joystick-controller-cables/
>
> On that forum, some people are also questioning the quality of some
> joystick replacement cables. I would guess that some of them could
> originate from used joysticks, or be old stock from decades ago, and
> thus be prone to failure.
>
> This Australian shop claims to have newly produced, 9-pin cables:
>
> http://ombertech.com/contcable9pin.php
>
> (As you may know, the +5V signal was often omitted, and the paddle
> signals were almost always omitted, so most original cables would be
> only 5-pin or 6-pin.)
>
> I found also this shop in the United States:
>
> https://console5.com/store/accessories/controller-cables.html
>
> Does anyone have experience with such replacement joystick cables?
>
> Last, thinking aloud, are there adapters that would convert modern USB
> or Bluetooth controllers to the Atari 2600 format? If not, maybe that
> would be a fun project for me. That would be a small box that would be
> powered from one joystick port, optionally with additional cables to
> other joystick ports. Somewhat related to that, one could want to equip
> and old joystick with a small battery-powered Bluetooth microcontroller,
> for a wireless playing experience.
>
> Best regards,
>
>         Marko
>
>