u/Turbulent-Spell-319

I've been working on an analog joystick for the Atari 8-bit computers. I got it to be pretty stable last week. So now I'm trying to port over the analog controls from the Atari 5200 Star Raiders to the 8-bit version. The controls are now "working". Turn rate is now controlled by the thumbstick position. Unfortunately I've messed up the sound effects. I'm guessing there's not a lot of room for the extra calculations I shoved in.

The Star Raiders mod request from a few months ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/atari8bit/comments/1s5ama1/star_raiders_mod_suggestion/) got me thinking about making an analog joystick for Atari 8-bit computers. I think I could make a large 3D printable joystick to work with 1M Ohm pots from a paddle controller, but I really prefer thumbsticks.

Unfortunately 10K potentiometers are a lot smaller than 1MOhm, so I can't really use them directly. I've seen a few things for making 5200 controllers, but settled on trying out this blog post ( https://jeffpiepmeier.blogspot.com/2020/02/atari-pokey-actuation-with-arduino.html ). I have an Arduino (Elegoo) Uno R3 reading the thumbstick pots and sending out timed pulses to the Atari paddle pins to simulate the 1MOhm charging times. It mostly works but there are some bugs to work out.

If I ever get this working reliably, I'll try to Frankenstein the Atari 5200 Star Raiders controller code into the Atari 800 version.

There was a mod request a few months ago to add some key commands to Star Raiders. I took a look at Lorenz Wiest's reverse-engineered code https://github.com/lwiest/StarRaiders and figured out how to build it.

I've added several keys

• '<' decreases speed

• '>' increases speed I left the default behavior of speed changes canceling hyperwarp

• '*" cycles through the views ( Forward, Galactic Chart, Long-Range Scan, and Aft )

I'm embarassingly bad at 6502 Assembly so I haven't posted the changes yet. An .xex is available at https://www.greggallardo.com/public/starraid.xex