Dad’s Custom Atari Peripherals

A fun story, but what really grabbed me was the story he linked to about the author's father, the engineer: https://lostincyberspace.substack.com/p/son-of-a-son-of-a

The parallel cable for the keyboard reminded me of a hack I did back in the day, stripping wires from two SNES controllers and connecting them to a DB25 connector to plug into the parallel port of my PC running MAME. The cool thing with the parallel port is that you can control most of the pins individually, so it was pretty trivial to write a driver to send/receive the control messages the SNES controllers expected.

Love seeing this kind of dedication. Reminds me of the wild contraptions my own father made to fix our ancient NES controllers.

Relatable path here. Fairchild Channel F, the cat chased the pixels around the Bell and Howell console screen. Hid the 2600 box in the garage rafters from my mom to cover up the purchase. My dad made an 2600 controller using big industrial panel pushbuttons for the directions and a sturdy red clicky button, trying for a good Defender controller but panel buttons were just not meant for fast gameplay.

My own dad just swore at the joystick when it broke. This guy's dad is a legend for sure!

Back when DDR was still popular with the teens, my dad helped me build a dance pad to play Stepmania on, mostly out of plywood. We hacked up an old keyboard for it (using an Ethernet cable, but certainly not the protocol). Fond memories.

you missed a trick with joysticks. the trick with decathlon was to hold the joystick by the base, upside down, and shake it violently. that always did the trick! i remember a friend of the family showing me that and my mind was absolutely blown.

Sadly this kind of thing is not possible anymore on modern consoles, due to the highly locked-down protocols they use.

Another Decathalon survivor here.

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