I thought this was going about the Atari SIO bus[0], which literally was a forerunner to USB. The designer of the SIO bus, Joe Decuir, gave a talk at VCF East 2

I thought this was going about the Atari SIO bus[0], which literally was a forerunner to USB. The designer of the SIO bus, Joe Decuir, gave a talk at VCF East 2019[1] in which he spoke about SIO leading up to his work on USB (and, if memory serves, being used to quash a patent troll). --- As an aside re: the Atari joystick "standard": I have an Atari Flashback 10, which accepts Atari-style joysticks. The sticks that come with the unit are flimsy so I broke out some old Epyx 500XJ controllers from my youth to use. Unfortunately, that meant losing the on-controller buttons for game reset, game select, "rewind", and "menu" (which are implemented as "illegal" controller states-- up and down simultaneously, etc). On a lark I plugged-in a female to dual-male DE-9 Y adapter I had laying around and discovered that I could just connect both the stock controller with the fancy buttons and my 500JX simultaneously. I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me, given the simplicity of the interface (just normally-open switches). It was a nice hack to get both the on-controller buttons for emulator control and a good joystick. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SIO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SIO [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlVpu_QSHyw&t=2296 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlVpu_QSHyw&t=2296