Design flaw with Edladdin pre-built joysticks. Where left is right and right is left.

[netrogames]

The reason why I didn't buy a pre-built joystick from Edladdin was twofold. One was why have a separate joystick if you don't have to? However, because I'm such an electronics noob,   I was considering buying a premade joystick until I looked at it and did some of the paperwork and realized that two games will not work right for opposite reasons.

 

Let's take a look at a ColecoVision standard control there's the joystick on top and a left button and a right button. 

 

 

A Colecovision Super Action Controller has a joystick at the top and a vertical row of 4 buttons you grab like a boxing glove.  Let's just call them index middle ring and pinky 

 

In two button games index maps to L and middle maps to R 

 

A fight stick has joystick in the center and four buttons on each side of joystick that are mirrors of each other for left-handed and right-handed play. 

 

The way Edladdins joysticks come pre-built ours follows: 

 

P R M I - J - I M R P

 

The two games that are going to have problems for different halves of the video game population is Front Line and Tutankham.

 

With original back in the day Colecovision controllers, this issue is pre-resolved.  On the regular controller regardless of which way you hold it the left fire button is on the left side and the right fire button is on the right side.  On the super action controller the left fire button is the index button and the right fire button is the middle.  Not exactly intuitive but that counterintuitive either.  You won't be fighting your instincts by hitting the left button to fire right. .

 

On the Edladdin premade joystick Tutankham maps like this

 

X X M I - J - I M X X

 

which is 

 

X X R L - J - L R X X

 

If you play with a right-handed joystick you'll use the left buttons and the left buttons are backwards for Tutankham. 

 

What makes this worse is that the I button and the M button are on different grounds so whatever button you have to reassign them, It's appropriate ground has to be carried over with the signal of that button.

 

And Front Line has the same problem for lefties.

 

First of all this requires the super action controller. 

Second because index equals fire middle equals rotate right ring equals rotate left and pinky equals grenade / board tank / abandoned tank, the Edladdin mapping is this:

 

G L R F - J - F R L G

 

If you use a left-handed joystick you use the right buttons and the rotation is backwards of your gun.

 

This is a little bit easier to fix because they both use the same ground. 

 

However it requires a lot of readjusting inputs and stuff.  

 

So if you play both Front Line and Tutankham, Your either going to get confused by fire directions or you're going to have to play with your weak hand on the joystick for one of those 2 games.

 

I noticed this problem when playing sidearms on the Turbo Grafx 16 with the Beeshu SuperStick TG16.  The normal left-handed arrangements is correct but the right-handed arrangement for that one particular game is backwards. 

 

Hopefully this TRS solution could help me both play both games and I could show it to Edladdin so that he could use that knowledge make something that accommodates that.