carlsson
Veteran Member
The other year, I tried to build a PC to Apple II joystick adapter according to this schematic:
http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/faqs/R029PCA2XRF.GIF
As far as I can tell, the [4] and [5] on the PC joystick side really are GND lines misplaced on the diagram.
When I plugged this adapter into my Basis 108, an Apple II+ clone, I get good readings on the pots: up, down, left, right after some calibration, but the buttons don't work! I have tried five different PC joysticks, of which one reads out the fire buttons in cyclic patterns: on-off about once a second if the button is held down. On the other joysticks, they don't register at all. I tried to disable any autofire function with no difference. At least one of those five joysticks completely lacks autofire functionality.
So I rebuilt the above adapter to the slightly more complex variant to work with autofire joysticks:
http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/faqs/R030PCA2RF.GIF
However after this mod, no directions register at all. It might be so that I'm using bad transistors or wired something in the wrong way, but I really tried to look up the B, C, E to get them right.
Has anyone else been using these designs? Since I don't have a true Apple II joystick (and these seem to go for the very least $30 each, plus shipping so I didn't order one yet), I can't tell for sure that it is supposed to work but as one out of five joysticks makes the computer to register some kind of fire buttons, even if a cyclic pattern, something is happening?
I might try to restore the adapter to the non-autofire version and troubleshoot more from that state.
http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/faqs/R029PCA2XRF.GIF
As far as I can tell, the [4] and [5] on the PC joystick side really are GND lines misplaced on the diagram.
When I plugged this adapter into my Basis 108, an Apple II+ clone, I get good readings on the pots: up, down, left, right after some calibration, but the buttons don't work! I have tried five different PC joysticks, of which one reads out the fire buttons in cyclic patterns: on-off about once a second if the button is held down. On the other joysticks, they don't register at all. I tried to disable any autofire function with no difference. At least one of those five joysticks completely lacks autofire functionality.
So I rebuilt the above adapter to the slightly more complex variant to work with autofire joysticks:
http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/faqs/R030PCA2RF.GIF
However after this mod, no directions register at all. It might be so that I'm using bad transistors or wired something in the wrong way, but I really tried to look up the B, C, E to get them right.
Has anyone else been using these designs? Since I don't have a true Apple II joystick (and these seem to go for the very least $30 each, plus shipping so I didn't order one yet), I can't tell for sure that it is supposed to work but as one out of five joysticks makes the computer to register some kind of fire buttons, even if a cyclic pattern, something is happening?
I might try to restore the adapter to the non-autofire version and troubleshoot more from that state.