Which 5200 Games Use Keypad During Play?

[BigO]

Which, if any, of the 5200's games require the use of the numeric keypad on the controller during game play?

[Lord Helmet]

Star Raiders and Defender for sure. I think you can use it to jump in Frogger as well.

 

I'm sure there are others

[PacManPlus]

Stargate

[Brian R.]

Stargate

 

Thank goodness the keypad isn't required too much for actual game play. It can be bad enough having to rely on the flaky things to simply be able to start a game!

[ymike673]

Counter Measure

Edited September 12, 2007 by ymike673

[Lord Thag]

I *think* Space Shuttle requires it. So does Gateway to Apshai and Quest for Quintana Roo

[rxd]

Tennis for sure.

Football and baseball too...

[BigO]

Thanks for the feedback.

 

I finally realized that there's an archive of overlays on this site. It looks like all of the Realsports games also use the keypad significantly during play. I don't have many games and haven't yet played the few I have. Have spent most of my time fixing the console and studying those controllers.

 

More games need them than I hoped: I was considering adding reliable keypad,start,pause and reset buttons directly to my console. I may still do it, but it won't come close to allowing me to get rid of the ones on the handheld controller.

 

Maybe I'll purse my "Plan B": modifying the daylights out of a controller to replace the mushy, failure prone contacts with itty-bitty higher reliability switches. I know it's a lot of time/work and is likely to never get finished and I know there are rebuild/upgrade kits and such, but I have most of the parts I need and the rest of the teensy switches I need won't cost much. I got the console for basically nothing and fixed it with dirt cheap salvaged parts. Why disturb the trend now by spending real money?

[Lord Thag]

Maybe I'll purse my "Plan B": modifying the daylights out of a controller to replace the mushy, failure prone contacts with itty-bitty higher reliability switches. I know it's a lot of time/work and is likely to never get finished and I know there are rebuild/upgrade kits and such, but I have most of the parts I need and the rest of the teensy switches I need won't cost much. I got the console for basically nothing and fixed it with dirt cheap salvaged parts. Why disturb the trend now by spending real money?

 

You're making this WAY harder than it needs to be. Best Electronics sells new, re-engineered flex circuits and buttons. $20 and you have a %100 working controller that stays that way permanently. It's far better to go that route than do all that other stuff.

[BydoEmpire]

I *think* Space Shuttle requires it. So does Gateway to Apshai and Quest for Quintana Roo

Was there an official Gateway to Apshai for the 5200, or is it a homebrew port of the A8 version?

 

[Edit]Nevermind, I see it's an Atarimax release. I might have to pick that up!!!

Edited September 14, 2007 by BydoEmpire

[BigO]

Maybe I'll purse my "Plan B": modifying the daylights out of a controller to replace the mushy, failure prone contacts with itty-bitty higher reliability switches. I know it's a lot of time/work and is likely to never get finished and I know there are rebuild/upgrade kits and such, but I have most of the parts I need and the rest of the teensy switches I need won't cost much. I got the console for basically nothing and fixed it with dirt cheap salvaged parts. Why disturb the trend now by spending real money?

 

You're making this WAY harder than it needs to be. Best Electronics sells new, re-engineered flex circuits and buttons. $20 and you have a %100 working controller that stays that way permanently. It's far better to go that route than do all that other stuff.

 

Thanks for the "heads up". I'm aware that Best offers rebuilt controllers and rebuild parts. It's as much about the hacking as it is about the end result for me. The tinkering is as interesting if not more interesting to me than playing the games. I'm not saying I won't end up buying their stuff, though. As much as I like tinkering with this kind of stuff, the tedium sometimes gets to me.

 

I'm not sure I'd call the $20.00 standard carbon dot rebuild "permanent". Their gold stuff is probably pretty close to it, but if I interpret their site correctly that's $32.00 per controller with exchange and the same price if I just want to buy the parts to rebuild my own . I'll admit that I'm impressed that they came up with such a low volume, high quality item at a price that low, it's just more than I want to spend before I completely fail on my own.

 

I'm still leaning toward modifiying the controller myself, doing away with the flex circuits completely. The way I see it, I have the parts on hand and it's only about 1000 times as much work as going with Best's rebuild parts.

[phaxda]

Soccer

Rescue on Fractalas

 

those are the only two no one else has mentioned.

 

 

1000 times the work--that is my kinda project !

[Jess Ragan]

Bah, work is overrated! Why not just buy a keypad from an electronics retailer like BG Micro, and use it in conjunction with an adapter of some kind? The best way to enjoy the Atari 5200 is to distance it as far as possible from the craptastic stock joysticks.

[cyberfluxor]

You need to use the keypad in Baseball? I didn't read the manual so I didn't know but sounds about right since I suck so bad at it. Does the numeric pad help with selecting whom to throw the ball to?

 

Edit:

Oh dang! I just looked at the scanned manual (because I'm at work) and apparently it requires a decent amount of the pad.

Edited September 13, 2007 by cyberfluxor

[tjb]

Rasteroids uses the keypad to activate powerups and hyperspace

 

tjb

[BigO]

Bah, work is overrated! Why not just buy a keypad from an electronics retailer like BG Micro, and use it in conjunction with an adapter of some kind? The best way to enjoy the Atari 5200 is to distance it as far as possible from the craptastic stock joysticks.

 

I have located several workable keypads for just that purpose. I'm not thrilled with the idea of having to deal with two separate controllers for those games that require the keypad, so am still thinkin' on how to create a single package (better than the stock one hopefully). One keypad I spotted appears to be the chrome plated ones that were used in pay phones. Something like that should last a long while.

 

Anybody have any thoughts on an analog joystick to which a keypad could be effectively grafted?

 

I don't like to expose all of my goofy ideas at once, but I also have a pile of 5200 trackball controllers, some of which have functional keypads. Was thinking about grafting a joystick into something like that in place of the mechanically destroyed trackball mechanism. Should work well enough if used as a "laptop" controller when seated.

Edited September 14, 2007 by BigO

[Jess Ragan]

I dunno, man... I'm all about the digital over here. It would be relatively easy to build a wooden joystick housing with a micro-switch arcade stick, two buttons, and a sixteen button keypad. Making the same product with an analog stick could prove more difficult.

 

One thing that crossed my mind is building a very, very small analog joystick using a thumbpad from a Nintendo 64 controller. However, I don't know what the resistance values are for that thumbstick... they'd have to be pretty close to 0-500 Ohms for them to be of much use.

[BigO]

I dunno, man... I'm all about the digital over here. It would be relatively easy to build a wooden joystick housing with a micro-switch arcade stick, two buttons, and a sixteen button keypad. Making the same product with an analog stick could prove more difficult.

 

One thing that crossed my mind is building a very, very small analog joystick using a thumbpad from a Nintendo 64 controller. However, I don't know what the resistance values are for that thumbstick... they'd have to be pretty close to 0-500 Ohms for them to be of much use.

 

I agree with your assessment of the relative ease of digital. I have exactly that sort of joystick sitting on a shelf here and have thought seriously about doing what you propose. But, according to some things I've read, there are certain games that actually use the analog inputs to produce a proportional response. I don't really want to take the time to build a controller that wouldn't work properly with some games. Somewhere, I've got a self centering analog joystick assembly from a radio controlled airplane transmitter. I'm kinda thinking along those lines for the joystick to integrate into the former trackball controller. Still haven't gotten around to measuring the value of the pots in the 5200 controller.

 

I also have a totally custom controller for the 2600 on the back burner and I recently thought of a possible way to get over my biggest design issue, so I may tackle that before I do this 5200 controller project. Then there's the research I want to do on the 5200 expansion port...

 

I'm not very familiar with the N64 controller or any recent stuff for that matter. I do have a Dreamcast controller with a little analog-joystick-ey thing. Is that similar to what you're talking about for you mini analog stick?

[BigO]

Talking about the Dreamcast controller got me to wondering how they implemented the analog feeling triggers and the little joystick, so I cracked one open. It's pretty slick. They're using magnets and hall effect sensors to implement the analog controls. Each trigger has one magnet and one sensor. The little joystick thingy has 4 hall effect sensors under it and one magnet that moves with respect to the 4 sensors when the joystick is moved. Nifty.

 

I don't know for absolute certain that they're hall effect devices, but they're labeled HED1, HED2, HED3, etc. so I think I'm on pretty solid ground with my speculation.

 

That's an approach I hadn't considered for analog controls. Though the workable physical distances are small with such an arrangement and amplification and filtering and the like are required, it does produce a nice analog output proportional to the physical proximity of the magnet to the sensor (more technically, it's an output proportional to the strength of the magnetic field affecting the sensor).

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_effect

Edited September 14, 2007 by BigO

[Jess Ragan]

http://cgi.ebay.com/2-X-Nintendo-64-N64-Jo...1QQcmdZViewItem

 

This is what I'm talking about... and the five tiny cables suggest that it uses a hall effect device similar to the one in the Dreamcast thumbstick. I can't say that for sure, but generally speaking, older analog controllers use three cables (X, Y, and ground) rather than five (one for each direction and ground). There's probably a way to convert the signals, but my experience with electronics isn't quite that advanced.

[BigO]

http://cgi.ebay.com/2-X-Nintendo-64-N64-Jo...1QQcmdZViewItem

 

This is what I'm talking about... and the five tiny cables suggest that it uses a hall effect device similar to the one in the Dreamcast thumbstick. I can't say that for sure, but generally speaking, older analog controllers use three cables (X, Y, and ground) rather than five (one for each direction and ground). There's probably a way to convert the signals, but my experience with electronics isn't quite that advanced.

 

Yeah, to use it for a 5200 you'd have to have just one signal each for the two axes of motion. I was thinking about that issue of how to convert the combination of the two, say horizontal, sensors into one progressive signal. I'd have to do some testing. It might be possible to use just one of the existing sensors for each axis. That would depend on the strength of the magnet and/or the sensitivity of the hall effect device and the geometry of the controller mechanism. Not sure I'm ready to sacrifice a Dreamcast controller, but I think they're fairly plentiful at the used gaming shop up the street.

 

I think it would be relatively trivial to adapt that 4 sensor thumbstick for use with a 2600 by using some sort of comparator circuit to "digitally" fire the U,D,L,R signals. I might look into that. It might be overkill, but I think the use of a microcontroller with A/D inputs could ultimately allow the creation of a thumbstick with both 2600 and 5200 modes (and, by extension might be used as a substitute for the 2600 paddle controller).

 

That link didn't work for me, but I found what you were referring to. It probably is the same technology as the dreamcast. I'll have to keep an eye out for the thumbstick style controllers at thrift stores.

[Chris-in-NJ]

Miner 2049er uses it on one of its screens to summon the elevators.