I needed a new joystick for my C64. Since I had a couple of arcade joysticks and buttons left over from a previous project, I decided to make my own. It’s not very difficult and if you follow this article you can make your own in any design you’d like (provided you can design and print it out. You can download my .stl files if you’d like to print that). At the bottom of this article will be a link for the files and a link to the video for this project. So without further ado, let’s get on to it.
The first thing I did was had a look at my joystick and buttons. The joystick uses single contact switches. They are either on or off. So all you need to do is connect one pin of each switch to ground and the other to the corresponding wire from the cable. The buttons are a little different. At least mine were, you might get buttons that are simply on and off like the joystick but if you get buttons like mine they work like this. They have two positions, Normally Closed (NC) and Normally Open (NO). Normally closed means that the circuit is closed meaning the electricity will flow through it. In other words, it is normally on. Normally open means that the circuit is open and no electricity will flow through it, so it is normally off. Once you push the button, NC opens and NO closes meaning the electricity will now flow through the NO connections and not the NC connection. That is, until you release the button. Here are some links to the exact kinds of items I bought through Amazon, and full disclosure, they are affiliate links so they help me if you order from my links. Anyway, here are some joysticks and buttons.
So, let’s move on to the work. I start with using my calipers and measuring the dimensions of the joystick and buttons. All dimensions. We need to make sure the case has room for all of it. After that, I used Blender to design my case. Some of you might want to use a CAD program but I like blender and I find it just as easy to get the sizes precise enough, especially with a 3D printer that will never be perfect. But it gets close enough.
Once the case was designed I printed the parts out on my 3D printer and fit all of the pieces into the enclosure.
Now comes the time for wiring. The very first thing you want to do is look at your cable. Make sure you have the outer rubber stripped off a decent amount and check out the smaller wires inside. You need at least 6 and if you are using an old joystick cable that is likely all you will have. You likely will not know which wire goes with which pin in your connecter so you’ll want to do a continuity test with a multimeter. Put a thin pin or something that will fit into the pinholes of the connector and check each one to each wire. When you know which wire goes with which pinhole make a note of it via color or put a tag on each wire so that you don’t forget.
Now that you know which pin goes with which wire it’s just a matter of running wires from each switch on your joystick and your buttons. Below is an image of the pinout for both your system and the connector.
Now let’s look at how to connect your joystick and buttons to the cable now that you know which wire goes to which pin.
Let’s go over the image above. The top numbers are the wires from your cable. By now, you should know which wire belongs to which pin. As you can see, all of the ground wires are connected together and they will be either soldered or crimped onto the wire for pin 8. As for the other wires, even though they are crossing each other in the image they do not all connect. Only the same colors are connected together. So, the green wire from button 2 is connected to the up switch on the joystick and down is connected to button 3. This is because many games on these old systems used [up] for jumping and things like that. This allows you to use a button to jump if you prefer. Now, as you can see from the diagram, Up connects to the wire for pin 1, down to pin 2, left to pin 3, right to pin 4, fire to pin 6, and as already said, all the grounds to pin 8. The other wires, if you have them, can be cut and or covered and out of the way. They are not needed. Make sure that if you have buttons that are NC/NO that you connect your cable to the NO connection, otherwise the buttons will be pressed in their normal state.
And that’s all there is to it. It’s pretty easy to do. If you don’t have a 3D printer I’ll leave some links below, again, affiliate links, but also, you can use a project box too, there’s nothing stopping you. Have fun and enjoy your games. The video and links to my .stl files for printing are below. The files are on my Patreon but you don’t need to be a patron to download them, They are for anyone. Take care all.
printer links (I have to add these calipers too because they are great quality for the price. I mean it, they are really good)
.stl files for printing an enclosure are here https://www.patreon.com/posts/commodore-atari-64678182. I have several different designs, one blank, one with DLXXV, one with Commodore and one with the Atari symbol and Atari written on it. They are all bundled in one zip file.
If you’d like to watch the video for making this joystick here it is.
