Hate Your USB Joystick With Emulation? Make your own! I Did.

Shift838 · October 7, 2016

I did not want to put this in the Development area since this is really not for the TI (YET).

So, I was attempting (badly i might add) last night to play the Game of the month for the High Score competition (Protector II) and quickly realized that my USB joystick I dug out I can't stand. Too many buttons and axis. So since I have a few Teensy Micro Controllers laying around and I knew I had a Parallax 2 axis joystick still in its package I sat out to make my own.

A 2 axis, single button joystick. So I got it proofed on a bread board and pounded out some code for the Teensy. After a couple of changes to the code (one to add a 'DEADZONE' for the joystick) it all works great. I also had to reverse the logic for the button for the TI Emulators like 'Classic 99' to see that the button was not actually pressed.

So now I have the circuit and will be buying a button to be used for the fire button and put it in its own enclosure. But I wanted to share the photo of it on a bread board. If I want to (I did test the code to do this) I can add more buttons with ease.

My intent for this is to hopefully end up using some of the code and circuitry to create a joystick interface that will allow us to use a USB joystick on the TI eventually. Once (and if) that happens I will start a new thread in the development forum.

But until then here is the pic. Of course I still suck at Protector II !!!!

If anyone wants the code just PM me.