If you want to hook up an old-school Atari joystick to your PC and play your favorite games via an emulator, it couldn’t be simpler. All you need to do is build a direct pass-through cable connecting the 9-pin Atari joystick connector to a 25-pin PC LPT (parallel) port.
There’s no complex circuitry or schematics required—you are literally just wiring the pins straight from one connector to the other. Anyone can do it! I just used a standard piece of unshielded twisted pair (UTP) networking cable for mine.
Software & Drivers:
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For DOS (Atari800DOS): The cable works out of the box using the interface method created by Petr Šumbera.
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For Windows (Atari800Win): You will need to install the Atajoy driver, which was developed by Robert Petružela.
How to Install on Windows:
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Open Control Panel $\rightarrow$ Gaming Options (or Game Controllers).
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Click Add, then select Add Other.
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Browse to the folder containing the Atajoy driver files, select it, and you’re good to go!
Interconnection:
[ CANON 25 Male ] [ CANON 9 Male ]
(acknowledge) 10 4 (right)
(busy) 11 3 (left)
(out of paper) 12 2 (down)
(select) 13 1 (up)
(error) 15 6 (button)
(strobe) 1 7 (Ucc)
(ground) 25 8 (ground)
I use LPTjoy all the time, and it works completely flawlessly. If you ever get the itch to play PC games with this setup, you might run into a few quirks with the axis settings, but you can usually tweak things to trick the system.
The biggest thing to keep in mind is that an Atari joystick is digital, not analog. Moving the stick registers as a full, 100% tilt in that direction with zero gradient. Trying to use it for something like Colin McRae Rally 2 is hilarious and near impossible—your car will constantly slam from side to side because you can’t make minor steering adjustments! 😉
Note: For this guide, I pulled information from RASTER’s classic Atari archive (http://raster.atari.org).
Download “Atajoy” atajoy.zip – Downloaded 445 times –