Redis on a crappy VPS gore
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One wonders how YOU would add several extra buttons to the Atari joystick without breaking compatibility.
There are three unconnected pins you could in theory play with. And I think at least some of the inputs were analog(ish?), so that the paddles could work.
Plenty of leeway to hack features in.
EDIT: Actually I think the Genesis controllers worked fine with the Atari, and those had three buttons.
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Do you have no European pride?!
Hey, all I had in my childhood was this:
Filed under: never experienced the blast processing *sob*
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There are three unconnected pins you could in theory play with. And I think at least some of the inputs were analog(ish?), so that the paddles could work.
IIRC the Atari 9-pin controller used a separate pin for each direction input and the button. The NES added, what, 3 buttons? I guess you could use the pot pins, but then the SNES added 4 more buttons (or did L+R come later?). Going from "each pin has its own wire" to a serial encoding scheme or whatever was, I think, close to necessary.
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but then the SNES added 4 more buttons (or did L+R come later?).
D-Pad + ABXY + LR + Start + Select, yup.
Seven-pin connector.
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Seven-pin connector.
Yeah, because, like I said, it used a serial line to encode the state of all the buttons.
The old 9-pin Atari dedicated a wire to each button. Doing that on the SNES would've required over a dozen.
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Going from "each pin has its own wire" to a serial encoding scheme or whatever was, I think, close to necessary.
AFAIR Genesis/MegaDrive basically multiplexed the inputs, that could've worked too.
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