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Commodore missed a huge opportunity by not implementing its own joystick standard with the C64, with more than one fire button. The usefulness of a second butto
by TMWNN 4y ago
Commodore missed a huge opportunity by not implementing its own joystick standard with the C64, with more than one fire button. The usefulness of a second button was already known, on consoles with Intellivision and on computers with Apple II and the PC. Had it done so, Commodore would have benefited
* itself, by being able to sell its own joysticks (even against the inevitable third-party competition)
* game developers, by giving them more fire buttons to implement
* game players, by giving them more fire buttons to use
* the industry, as the "Commodore joystick port" would likely have become a widespread standard on its own the way the Atari port was
I suppose that the desire to be backwards-compatible with the VIC-20 (the first time Commodore use the Atari joystick port) was too important. (This desire is partly why the C64 disk drive is normally so slow.) Instead, as the article discusses, Commodore went its own way with the joystick and other ports on the later C16 and Plus/4 machines, exactly the wrong time to do so. (The fact that the Plus/4 joystick still only has one fire button implies that any Commodore-proprietary joystick port for the C64 would have only one button too, the worst of all worlds. But one can always dream.)
- djmips 4y agoThe Commodore Games System supported two buttons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_Games_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_Games_System And in fact you can use these on the C64. I have built a two button NES controller for the C64 - the second button is actually using one of the paddle inputs and the button on/off is the extremes of the paddle resistance. A few games were commercially released and several homebrew games support two buttons like for example the port of Super Mario Bros. to the C64.
- TMWNN 4y ago>And in fact you can use these on the C64. I have built a two button NES controller for the C64 - the second button is actually using one of the paddle inputs and the button on/off is the extremes of the paddle resistance. Earlier support than that for two buttons came in the Commodore Mouse. Both the 1350 and 1351 have two buttons. The 1350 is basically a joystick, but the 1351 is a true mouse. I'd forgotten or not known (not sure) that the C64 console has two-button controllers (of course, far too few by 1988); I wonder if its two-button support is compatible with the 1350/1351's approach?
- djmips 4y agoNot compatible. For the mouse, the Fire Button and the Up are used for the two buttons and the PotX and PotY are used for the mouse X,Y data. For the two button joystick the up/down/left/right/fire are as usual but the PotX is used for the second button.
- TMWNN 4y agoThat's unfortunate, but not surprising given how obscure the Commodore mice were even in their time. Had a single gamer (an Intellivision owner, say) at Commodore c. 1982 advocated for even one more fire button on the forthcoming C64, and used the "We'll be able to sell Commodore-branded joysticks" argument, the entire C64 gaming landscape would have immeasurably changed.