BlogO - Atari 2600: Playing Indy 500 With a Joystick

RSS Bot · July 18, 2007

From the "Stupid Atari Stuff I'm Doing" file:

I needed a relatively simple project to implement in the course of teaching myself PIC microcontrollers. Having recently built a 1-transistor adapter to allow playing Omega Race, I thought I'd try my hand at an adapter to allow playing Indy 500 with a joystick. I have a prototype up and running now.

Push left to rotate the car left, push right to rotate the car right. I programmed the microcontroller to output the necessary Gray code to steer the car the same way the driving controller does it. The software is hacked up at the moment, but it's running like a champ. The joystick firebutton acts as the accelerator without modification.

I think I've got the read/delay rate pretty close to right. I can't quite make the turns without backing off on the speed. It's more challenging than playing with the actual driving controller, but it's much the same experience as playing other driving games that use the joystick.

I'm using a Microchip PIC 12F629 (a 12F675 is pin compatible and works just fine with the same code). It's an 8 pin chip with 6 I/O lines and an internal oscillator. So far, I'm only reading the Left and Right joystick inputs, but am considering adding in Up and Down to rotate (steer) the car at a higher or lower rate: e.g. Left=steer left at medium speed, Left + Up = steer left quickly, Left + Down = steer left slowly.

I really don't think the added inputs will improve driveability so I might not do it, but the chip has 4 inputs available and I could use more practice.

Will post more detail at a later time if anyone happens to be curious. The chips are about $2.00 here and there on the internet, $0.69 from Microchipdirect.com. It's a pretty cheap project if you happen to have a programmer. Purpose built programmers can be built for these chips with a very small number of parts.

If you've got Indy 500, no driving controller and some time on your hands, this is the project for you.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=3586