Recently acquired TRS-80 CoCo Model 2 -- Joystick Support?

[bronze]

A very long story short, I finally got my hands on another TRS-80 for the first time in ages. So I now have the TRS-80 CoCo 2 itself, handful of games, and the cassette player & few random cassettes with BASIC programs. So I got everything I needed except for a video cable and joystick(s). I've gotten the video cable part taken care of, but that brings me to my question about joysticks.

Will a joystick from a Tandy 1000 work with my TRS-80 CoCo model 2? I know it has all kinds of extra buttons, but the port seems to be the same and after forever of looking around on the internet, it looks like it could work. Below is a link to a joystick I'd love to be able to work with my Coco 2:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Nice-Tandy-Joys...984?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f08a1a160

Any info you can provide at all would be amazing. Thanks so much!

 

[RetroHacker_]

Yeah, the joysticks are the same. The CoCo supports a two button joystick, even though the ones you commonly see with it only have one. I used to use a Tandy 1000 stick on the CoCo, as those little black non-centering ones were pretty crummy. I also built an adapter to convert Atari sticks to work with the CoCo - they worked great on some games like Pac-Man, but were useless on the games that actually used the analog nature of the sticks (Atari sticks are digital).

-Ian

 

[bronze]

Thanks so much for the lightning quick reply. That's exactly what I needed to know and VERY good to know. I haven't played with a TRS-80 in at least 10+ years, so if I have any other questions I'll definitely be posting here for assistance.

Thanks again!!

 

[dabone]

You should grab either drivewire or coconet, they allow you to use the serial port of the coco hooked to your pc as a disk drive.
The Coconet is harder to get in your system, as it needs a cart to mod (He doesn't seem to be selling just the rom pak currently.) or comes on the sd drive pack or wireless pak.
It's the more advanced of the 2, as it also supports the sd drive.

Drivewire you can order just the rom pak or use the audio version as a boot strap.

Drivewire

Coconet Home Page (Forum -- kinda here)

Both are great and are still in active development.

Join the coco mailing list...

http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco/


Later,
dabone