Original 1977 Joystick HELP NEEDED!

[the 5th ghost]

Hi,

 

I have a big problem and was hoping someone's expertise can help me fix it.

 

I have five Atari joysticks that are the original 1977 heavy sixer type that I can't get to work properly.

 

Here are some details:

 

1) Among the five joysticks there are 3 different types of circuit boards. One has Atari logo Rev. 4 c.77 on it, three have Atari logo rev. 5 co.77 on them, and the last one is brown on the bottom and has Santo 88 on it.

 

2) All five of them work properly when I manually depress the metal contacts on the circuit boards.

 

3) All five joysticks have good cables.

 

4) All five joysticks have the springs intact and none of them are damaged anywhere internally. The plastic plates that go between the springs and circuit boards are all unbroken and don't have stress marks.

 

5) NONE of them work when the joysticks are fully assembled.

 

What else can I do to get these to work when they are screwed together? CPUWIZ once suggested to me to try loosening the screws but this isn't helping me with these particular sticks.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[Adrian M]

I had a similar problem with my old style 1977 stick. I never could get it to function correctly, so I simply ended up selling it to CPUWIZ.

[Tsukasa]

I know for certain what the problem is. It happened to me as well. After heavy use, the metal contacts inside of the plug fatigue a little bit and spread out so much that they no longer make contact with the console. But when you stick a probe from a continuity tester into the plug, the probe is big enough to touch the contacts. What I had to do was cut off the end connector and replace it with a new one. If you replace the connector with a computer connector, the metal shielding on it gets in the way, so the plug will continuously fall out. You will have to remove the metal shielding with a pair of pliers or something similar. Unless you get an exact replacement, the cord will end up looking like a hack job.

[the 5th ghost]

I know for certain what the problem is. It happened to me as well. After heavy use' date=' the metal contacts inside of the plug fatigue a little bit and spread out so much that they no longer make contact with the console. But when you stick a probe from a continuity tester into the plug, the probe is big enough to touch the contacts. What I had to do was cut off the end connector and replace it with a new one. If you replace the connector with a computer connector, the metal shielding on it gets in the way, so the plug will continuously fall out. You will have to remove the metal shielding with a pair of pliers or something similar. Unless you get an exact replacement, the cord will end up looking like a hack job. [/quote']

 

All the plugs are good on my sticks.

 

The problem is that the joysticks won't completely work when they are assembled. For some reason they work perfectly disassembled. That's why I feel that the problem isn't the plug; if the plug was bad, they wouldn't work at all.

 

Thanks for the tip though, I'll remember that for the future

[Tsukasa]

I'm just curious, have you thought about what game you are going to choose for the HSC next week? I like it when the games are small enough to fit on the supercharger because I'm not too fond of emulation. But if it means not playing at all I'd rather use an emulator. :wink: