Joysticks and other controllers

I have not tested with a mouse yet. I will be doing it, once I get to test Arkanoid.

Yes… It does NTSC. You can set the machine to do both PAL and NTSC. However, I do not think it will autoswitch between the modes. In the menu, you can choose what machine it should boot as. However… Why? The output is HDMI only, so the only reason would be if you want to run some specific NTSC software. Most and the best are PAL anyway.

Personally I do not see any issues with joysticks. Software (games) are coded to use a single button anyway, and if you play with a joystick, then you place it on a flat surface anyway. I have seen reviews were people complain about joysticks in general, and they all hold the stick up in the air like it was a controller. Wich it is not. Obviously. It is also those people that are calling it a controller, and the same people that are referring to a Commodore64 as a console. Yup… It is the young ones that thinks that the only computers in the world, are a Windows computer and a Mac.

Sorry for my rant…

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Outside of arcade games where they’re bolted to the cabinet, I’ve never placed a joystick on a table. I’ve always held it.

Only things that go on tables are mice and trackballs.

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You need to place it on the table. That is how it was designed to be used in the first place. You see the idea in arcade machines as well. The difference is, that the arcade cabinet is the base and table at the same time. Also a reason as to why so many joysticks have suction cups under them. Holding a joystick like a controller results in a really wierd gaming experience, and is the reason why controllers on consoles, have evolved to the shape they are today. You see it in the Playstation controller and the Xbox controller. They are designed in a way, that you can have a firm grip and the buttons and the analog sticks are designed with that in the mind as well. Hence the sticks being so small on controllers and the stick so big on joysticks. Also, a joystick is designed to take a beating like this. Placing a Playstation controller on the table and moving it with one hand, pushing buttons with the other hand, makes a really strange and crappy experience. There are after all, some 15 years design evolution, parting joysticks and modern controllers in their basic form/design-idea.

If you want to keep using joysticks like they were a Ps3 controller, then be my guest. It is just, that using a table, makes a way better experience. Not telling anyone that one way is forbidden here. Just that it is designed to be used in a specific way.

Well… It is just nice that the machine can do: C64-NTSC, C64-PAL, Vic20-NTSC and Vic20-PAL. :wink: I have it running in PAL, as I am using it for gaming, and the majority of the best games were European PAL releases. If you have software specifically for NTSC, then it can do that as well. What I find the best about this system, is that the video output is perfect. Like in really perfect. There are 3 different settings for PAL and 3 for NTSC. Basically just scanline emulator. Just do not go past 24 inch in screensize. The image will become ugly. Just remember that 12 to 14 inch were the standard back then. In some cases, 24 is stretching it a bit. Go for 16 to 18 inch, and it will be perfect. Not too big, not too small. The pixels are big enough anyway.

Really?

image
(That, by the way, is the Speedking joystick, a true classic loved by many. It had fantastic swiches.)


My first console was the Atari 2600, which of course came with a couple of the classic Atari joysticks that I still love to this day:


While these could be placed on the table (they did have small rubber feet on the bottom), you still had to hold them down tightly with your hand and when on the table the fire button was unquestionably more awkward to use. I think that most people would agreee that these joysticks work better when held in the hand.

You’re free to disagree, of course, but keep in mind that your passion does not override other people’s comfort.

Actually, more than twice that: the first mass-market gamepad was introduced with the Nintendo Famicon/NES in the early '80s.

See also the Spectravision Manta-ray (I once bought two of them for suitable Spacewar! gaming using a DB-9 to USB adapter):

P.S.: I think, the thinking behind the game pads was to have a simple, low-cost controller that wouldn’t break (which cheap joysticks inevitably did). I don’t think that they represented substantial progress over handheld joysticks, regarding reaction times, etc.

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Those sticks were not the most commonly used ones at all, back then. I saw the first 50 different sticks, before I saw one of them. And they were not really the most populair ones back then. There are also that hand grenade stick. Everybody hated those type of sticks in the 80’s and well into the 90’s. Before joysticks went out of fascion. However, a select few people loved them. No rule without the exception.

I know they introduced those with the NES. However. They were not controllers, they were gamepads. Controller is a thing of the early/mid-90’s, with the introduction of Playstation1 era. Even on the CD32, they were called gamepads and not controllers. Controllers belong in the 90’s and to this day. Gamepads belongs in the 80’s and into the 90’s.

I may be wrong, but I do not recall that big sticks like the Competition Pro (introduced in 1983) and the various flight sticks were much of a thing before the mid-1980s. Before this, there were all those video game consoles, and most of the 8-bit computers had been on the market for a while, at the time, these were beginning to enjoy some spread.

Yup… They were low cost. Like really low cost. Most people used a good microswitched stick. Like ZipStick, The Arcade, Competition PRO, Wico Command Controll or Quickshot-II Turbo. Those were the most commonly seen sticks of the 80’s and into the 90’s. Well… At least here in Denmark and elsewere in Scandinavia. Nobody had consoles, as the 80’s were a time of recession. You had a choice between one computer or one console. If you had the money that is. People automatically chose C64’s and Amiga’s, as they were universal machines, and not only a gaming platform. That stuck well into the 90’s, as the fear of loosing ones house and living on the street was still a very real thing in peoples mind. Those that had the money, were getting the good stuff back then and people bought those things that was useable for more than one task. So no gaming consoles were really sold back then, unless you were a millionair or something. If you wanted to see one in the mid-80’s, then you had to visit the toy store. That again, left parents with the thought that it was only an expensive toy, and as money were not what people had, then they did not buy a toy at that price tag. It was all Lego, Playmobil, Dolls and stuff like that, children played with in the 80’s. Heck… Even CD players did not become everyday thing’s, before around 1993/95.

It really depends on what part of the globe you grew up on. :wink:

It was in the midst of C64 territory. At the time we had a) Commodore Joysticks (very bad idea, poor mechanism, breaks easily), b) Atari 2600 joysticks (and look-alikes, as well, – a slightly better bad idea, but they didn’t age well and hurtled in the hand), c) Atari 7800 joysticks (slightly better, medium bad idea). Microswitched joysticks weren’t available at every corner and still a bit fancy, probably also expensive. (I do not recall using them anywhere, since, as the Competition Pro & Co became a thing, I had left the C64 behind. Similarly, dedicated RGB monitors were rare, since not exactly cheap. Small TVs on the other hand, were not that rare in a kid’s room. Therefore, a C64 displayed usually with the sharp double edges to any color boarders, which were a typical artifact of the sharpening circuits of analog TVs applied to still images.The typical C64 setup, as it is perceived now, is not what I experienced.)

A TV in every childrens room, was something we looked at, as being an American thing. That was a 90’s thing here as well. More or less, every home had only one TV, and that was typically between 14 and 16 inch (18 top’s). It was all mono, and not everyone had colour on their TV back in the 1980’s. That was reflected in the TV license you had to pay. There were the expensive one, the Colour TV license. Then there were B/W-License and finally there were the Radio-Only license. Some people thought that TV was eighter bad, or they did not have money for even a B/W TV. When people bought a C64, then they used the TV in the living room. RGB monitors were expensive here as well. However it was not more expensive to buy a C64 or Amiga plus an RGB monitor, than it was to buy a complete PC with everything. Actually. It costed less to get a complete Commodore-Computer setup. However, because they were able to be used on a TV, then people skipped the monitor and used their TV instead. Then came the 90’s and it was all Amiga, and kids delivered news papers, and saved up for their own Amiga with an RGB monitor. Yes, they got help form their parents. Yet it took aprox one year to save up, and they used the Confirmation money they recieved at the party, in order to get enough. Too much technology was looked at, as something too American, and that was kind of a bad thing back in the 1980’s. People joked about people being slaves to technology, and having a TV in the kitchen, was something dystopian. Like people would be glued to the screen, instead of having a dinner conversation. Also. We only had one single channel. As far as I remember, there was only TV from around 3 or 4pm to 10pm. Yup. Things were less technologically advanced back then.

Well, now I’m suspecting that you’re just making things up, or at least generalizing from limited and regional experience. The Speedkings were certainly one of the most popular joysticks, if not the most popular joystick, I was selling back when I worked in a consumer-oriented computer and video game shop in the early to mid 1980s. But if you have sales figures (preferably broken down by region), please post them!

Many native English speakers would disagree with your prescription of how the language is to be used. Wikipedia has settled on:

A game controller , or simply controller , is an input device used with video games or entertainment systems to provide input to a video game, typically to control an object or character in the game.

and:

A gamepad , joypad , [or] controller , is a type of game controller held in two hands, where the fingers (especially thumbs) are used to provide input.


I agree. Certainly the membrane switches and their associated housings and actuators were cheaper to manufacture than most of the more traditional joystick styles, particularly once you started adding more than two buttons.

I saw one single handgrenade stick and one single of those red/black striped ones, posted here. And that was not untill the age of the Amiga. That was an Amiga500, that the local library had bought. Yes. It is based on what I saw in Denmark, and not based globally. How on earth would I have known what people used in Germany or Australia, when I was 13 in 1990?

And I am from Denmark. Hence English being a second language. The same with German. Here they were called gamepads. That is a well used 1980’s term.

Ohhh yeah… Joypads… That was used as well back then. Controllers were not a word that you would find in the everyday Danish spoken language, before well into the 1990’s. It came to be, when Sony introduced the Playstation1 or Nintendo came with the Nintendo64. Before that, it was gamepads on consoles, and joypads when you had something like that on a Commodore computer or a Dos based PC.

Speedking joysticks were trash anyway. I am not a fanboy or anything. It is just, that it’s only a good joystick when you can nearly use it as a hammer. Those speedkings broke in the hands of 8 year old kids like flies drop dead from DDT. The library must have bought the first 4 speedkings in 6 month’s. As the Wico were used for like 5 years, before they got rid of the Amiga500 and Amiga600 they had. No sir. Something like Wico Command controll are the best. You can freaking throw it into the wall, or use it as a hammer. It just keeps going.

Perhaps that is why you sold that many of those flimsy things?

Right. So all I’m suggesting here is that you phrase things as, “this is what I saw, in my particular time and part of the world,” rather assuming that you know what things were like in, say, North America several years before your time. And in particular, don’t tell North Americans that they’re using English wrong.

And here, too, you come across as telling a lot of people who very much like Speedking joysticks that they’re wrong,. They’re not trash, they’re simply not to your taste.

This is interesting – I did not know this.

Where I live (Austria), the license was/is much oriented on the BBC model, while allowing the national broadcaster still some amount of advertising. The license is more about copyright and compensations for businesses, who may have suffered from the popular consumption of broadcasting, like cinemas, fashion shows that were traditionally shown before a movie, tradional cultural institutions and other entertainment. (About half of the license fees are about compensations like this. The other half goes to the national broadcaster to finance the program, which was, up to the early/mid 1980s, a monopoly.) As a result, there are just two types of licenses, radio only and a general license including TV and any secondary homes, cars, and so on.

Therefore, there wasn’t much of a hurdle, as soon as there was at least one TV set in a home. Previously, TVs had been quite expensive (I guess, significantly more expensive than in the US) and multiple TVs were considered explicit luxury. However, this changed radically at the beginning of the 1980s, when small, cheap, but good quality Sharps, JVCs, etc became available and secondary TV sets became quite common. (It may have been sheer luck that the respective authorities missed that train to modify the traditional licensing scheme accordingly, since this happened quite fast, just in two or three years.) As a result, if there wasn’t a TV in the kids’ room yet, the acquisition of a home computer was often followed by a small TV set.

PS: It must be said, without any notable impact of the various Sinclair computers on the local marketplace (I guess, the Sinclair pocket TV was more common than a Sinclair computer), home computing was very much a middle class thing. Meaning, most of the households in questions were realitively well to do and could afford a cheap, small TV set as an extra. (E.g., regarding price relations, you could definitely get a small TV for the price of a C64, when it was still relatively new, and a 1541 floppy drive was at least three times this price. Much depended on costum fees, import duties, etc, which varied much with respect to the country of origin and category of products. And there was a quite favorable trade agreement with Japan, while importing tech from the US was a bit of a hassle in the Reagan years, if you were located outside of NATO.)

Yes. That was what people reported in computer magazines, what we heard at copy parties and what went on between friends. Remember. There was a big and vibrant scene back then, that stretched well into DDR.

So basically, all the +4 major magazine’s reviewed Speedking wrong? And why did it break so often? It was inferiour build inside and broke when you played stuff like winter games.

Yup… Things were different regarding TV’s all around the world. Regarding computers. Denmark were Sinclair and Vic-20 up until around 1984. Then people began to buy C64 only. Around 1987, the intellectuals (academics) began getting buying Dos machines. However that was around 10 percent of the market. A few percentage had CPC’s, and Apple was nowere to be seen. Apple only first really came to Denmark, after the introduction of iPod or iPhone. When Commodore fell, then people began to swap their Amiga’s with PC.

We never saw any BBC or any other machines like that here eighter. In school we did have a special program, a bit like what BBC and the English gouverment did. Yet those machines were extremely expensive. It is these here: Piccoline

The project was not aimed at having a computer in every home. It was exclusively used as a tool, to learn students how to program and get them ready for future jobs.

No. As far as I can tell, the Speedking never got a bad review. (For some examples of good reviews in European (British) magazines, see Commodore Horizons, Amiga Computing, ST Amiga Format and Your Commodore.

It did not. In years of selling hundreds of them, I never heard a single complaint. Nor have I read any.

It was popular for its good build, particularly in using microswitches rather than leaf spring switches.

It was excellent and heavily used for “quick jiggling” games such as some of the games in Winter Games.

(Incidentally, the Speedking was a European invention, if you consider Britian to be part of Europe. I didn’t know that.)