The Gravis advanced classic PC joystick

we never had a PC when we were younger so we sorta missed out on having a PC joystick - but this Gravis Advanced (https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=gravis-front) design was rugged enough to survive 30 years - there's a datecode of 1991 on the PCB. PC joysticks are fairly simple: there's three mechanical buttons but actually you can only map them to 2 possible pins - the mapping is done with these rotary switches which confused us at first but turns out they have contacts that switch around which pads go from the onboard PCB to the DE15. the X and Y positions are changed by the joystick moving the wiper on two pots (https://allpinouts.org/pinouts/connectors/input_device/joystick-pc-gameport/). note they aren't connected up as a resistor divider - that's because there were no ADC's on PCs at the time - instead the resistance was fed into an oscillator like the 555 and then the pulse width measured! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port) Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #adafruit #gravis #retro