3 ms·
> You probably never noticed this, but physically, an Atari joystick port is just a serial port with a lightly modified design It's not any kind of serial port
by Turing_Machine 4y ago
> You probably never noticed this, but physically, an Atari joystick port is just a serial port with a lightly modified design
It's not any kind of serial port, modified or otherwise. What makes a port "serial" or "parallel" is the way the data is transferred, not the shape of the connector.
Each joystick signal (up, down, left, right, trigger, paddle A, paddle B, plus power and ground) has its own pin. That makes it a parallel port.
Now, the Atari SIO port, mentioned by another poster, and used to connnect peripherals (such as disk drives and printers) is a serial bus, but the joystick port is parallel.
- jweather 4y agoI found this out for myself as a kid by taking a 2600 joystick apart to figure out how to wire it to my LEGO Mindstorms kit. By carefully choosing resistor values for the four cardinal directions, I could read 8 unique resistance values out for the cardinal and diagonal directions at a single analog I/O port on the RCX brick for control. It was a huge boon to me that it used simple contact closures and not a digital serial protocol!
- lstodd 4y agoMore than that, paddles are actually analog signals. So it's neither this, nor that or two in one, the second not being serial ofc.