Colecovision Controller Information

[Draugr]

Hi everyone.

 

I'm tossing around the idea of making my own custom Colecovision (Super Action Controller comaptible) arcade sticks. What I'd like to know is if there is information on the wiring so I know what wires go to the directional stick, the 4 fire buttons and of course the numeric pad.

 

I've never done something like this before, but I did put together my own arcade stick in my Bartop Arcade cabinet. I don't think this will be too difficult to do. What I'm hoping for is to not make the casing too large. I'm hoping to be able to keep the housing to a shape similar to the original Atari 2600 CX-40 controllers. You know a square base, but a tad bigger to at least fit the 4 fire buttons and then the numeric keypad.

 

If I can make my Colecovision compatible arcade stick the one thing that I'll truly love is that the stick itself can be used in real 4-way mode or 8 way. I'm excited about the 4-way mode for games like Donkey Kong, Pac-man Collection and other arcade games that used 4-way joysticks in the arcade. I'm hoping to negate that annoying split second delay that sometimes happens when trying to turn pac-man with a 8-way joystick, etc... I know it makes a big difference in my arcade cabinet as the 4-way mode seems a lot better when responding to movement over it's 8-way mode in a 4-way game.

 

John

[sqoon]

Have you tried google search for super action controller wiring schematics?

[hardhat]

Yeah, this page:

http://www.colecovis...k/joysticks.htm

has some general information, including a nice PDF of the regular controller:

http://www.colecovis...oController.pdf

 

For the super action controller, the extra two fire buttons are actually implemented as keypad 13 and 14 (so you can't press both at the same time, but either one can be pressed in combination with the first two buttons (arm and fire buttons).

 

Finally there is the spinner, which has a direction, and an interrupt pin.

 

From the Adam Technical Manual ( http://drushel.cwru.edu/atm/atm.html ):

 

 

2.2.7 Game Controller Circuitry

 

 

The two game controllers are connected to the CPU Board via two "D" type connectors. Each controller is accessed by the system through its own port. See CONT_SCAN in the OS-7 Source Code listing for details.

 

For each controller, 18 switches are read on a single 8-bit port. Therefore, once a port has been read, some decoding is required to determine which switches have been depressed.

 

Two spinner switches that are not wired in the controller are used in some games. To ensure that the spinner switch closures are processed as soon as they happen, they are connected to the CPU maskable interrupt, and the cartridge software determines which switch caused the interrupt.

 

Controller Connector Pin Out

 

Pin Type Comments

1 Indirect D0 input Refer to Table 1

2 Indirect D2 input Refer to Table 1

3 Indirect D3 input Refer to Table 1

4 Indirect D1 input Refer to Table 1

5 Strobe signal output, Common 1

6 Indirect D6 input Refer to Table 1

7 Indirect D5 input Refer to Table 1

8 Strobe signal output, Common 0

9 Indirect /INT input

Strobe signal: typical 350 µsec pulse width, -0.7 V low, +2.8 V high typical.

 

For further information on the game controllers, refer to Chapter 2, Section 5.

 

Edited July 18, 2012 by hardhat