Did you know all Amigas support 3 buttons? :)

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

Now that I am on my desktop i can give further info...

This is the thing in question.


Input with those buttons was so much faster that the players using regular joysticks were completely lost.

Seems a lot of fighting games could be exploited by holding more than one direction at once and then just releasing one for instance.

Seems it wasn't outright banned, but a few rules put in place:

That thing would be nightmare for Mortal Kombat 1 move the joystick around in a circle moves

For PC i have a Qanba arcade stick, works great when emulating Amiga games, maybe not so great with Turrican pixel perfect jump up & right or left mechanics but great for the majority of Amiga arcade style games.

[malko]

Good to have the precisions. Thanks.
And interesting to see such controller that is finally a big keyboard with less keys.
Like we say : "no stick, no joy"

[stx2199]

Originally Posted by jotd

Are there some native amiga joysticks with 3 buttons? (no hardware mods)

.

nope never existed and they don't exist yet

however, the Amiga joystick port supports 3 independent buttons which can be programmed easily for use in any game

The Amiga 500 should have been sold with some cheap pad and 3 buttons, this would have encouraged/forced the game programmers to use them in games instead using only 1 button for most of them

[giantclam]

There is this in diy/maker ... https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2416808 ...

[sokolovic]

Since the CD32 pad also works for the A500, I suppose that we can say that there is now an official solution for the multi button problem.

Bubble and Squeak OCS even have an original CD32 pad controlling option. Not a whdload patch.

[jPV]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Why would it be reserved for Sega consoles (actually, just the Master System btw) ? It was perfectly compatible with the Amiga out of the box.

I bought a bunch of NOS two button Speedkings 10+ years ago. They were marketed as "For use with the SEGA Master System", but yeah, they work perfectly fine as two (separate) buttons joystick on Amigas without any modifications (Mega Drive / Genesis joysticks wouldn't work).

There were hundreds of them available when I bought them... a photo what I bought attached

[Megalomaniac]

Never knew that Master System controllers could be used as two-button Amiga controllers. I can understand why Amiga games weren't generally designed around two-button controllers though - many people kept the same joystick they'd used on the C64 / Atari 8-bit / Amstrad (Spectrum needed a different connection type, though lots of joysticks had both ports), and of course most early Amiga games were developed alongside versions for systems with no two-button controllers.

We got set in our ways on home computers, we were used to home computers having one-button controllers and consoles being multi-button - was it snobbery on our part? When developers did release games designed around two-button controllers (such as Kick Off 3 and FIFA), reviewers slagged them off as uncontrollable, and FIFA especially has a low average on LemonAmiga from people who clearly haven't played them on the recommended system

[alain.treesong]

@Photon

I've just post an Amos conversion of your little code to read button 2 and 3 of joysticks.
The Amos source is available here : https://github.com/alain-treesong/am...rdwareJoystick

Thanks for your article

Aghnar / Agima

[malko]

^ Nice idea
Maybe others knowledgeables coders could post code for blitz, c, etc. as well.

[Daedalus]

In Blitz anyway, buttons 1 and 2 are supported by the standard Joyb() function, and CD32 buttons are supported by the Gameb() function. Reading the 3rd button / middle mouse button would be done the same way as the AMOS example, setting the potgo register and then reading the relevant bits. For "politeness", particularly if you want to multitask or restore the system as it was before suspending multitasking, it might be a good idea to allocate the relevant bits using potgo.resource, as banging the hardware directly without it will interfere with anything else that might be using those pins, e.g. a scroll wheel driver, middle mouse button commodity etc.

[Photon]

Yep, awesome Alain and great to see so many answers!

I've also chimed in with field3d in his WHD slave tutorial request thread. I promise to not put all the burden on "someone else" to see this idea come through but want to contribute some work myself as well.

On 18 May I will also show how to convert your favorite joystick to 3 button on my Twitch livestream, to show that it's not so daunting. E.g. Megadrive, MSX, USB sticks and pads.

Originally Posted by Cylon

There are no 3-button-joysticks.
Only the CD32 pads and MegaDrive controllers.
New stuff not included.

Cheers Cylon, however my thinking is that "new" is now, we see many new games coming out, and since the 80s we see complaints about controls on C64/Amiga, and I see it as a problem that can be solved.

There were certainly multi-button joysticks even before the Amiga. The MSX would be a great example, and Quickshot joysticks were not expensive, but unfortunately MSX didn't follow the Atari standard. OTOH, the simplest mod is very simple: move 1 wire inside.

During the heyday of the C64 and Amiga, there were several options for multi-button joysticks compatible with both systems: Competition Pro, Speedking and similar hand-held ones, and arcade style sticks from Germany and Greece advertised in magazines. And of course Megadrive pads as you mention (and third party pads and sticks for it).

Originally Posted by phx

Maybe because they are happy with their joysticks and can control all Amiga games just fine, like decades ago?

Why? Good game design has simple controls.

Using "up" is the most natural and effective control in jump&runs, if you use a joystick. Not so much if you prefer a gamepad.

Thx phx, but hmm shots fired. I think many disagree with this view, and you can see some complaints even in old C64/Amiga magazines by reviewers. Pixel platformers were especially bad with "up to jump" and the response mostly was to play them and curse and smash things , or simply not play them. On console these lingered for ages, but I bet they would have died out quickly the same way if they used up to jump.

I bring up the subject of shared controls because this is the real reason why e.g. Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands, Rodland, Parasol Stars (and Turricans, Gianas, Beasts, etc) didn't feel good to play. Snow Bros is an early-ish supporter of native button 2 to jump, and it makes the game more playable enjoyable - both with stick and pad.

I'd rather say that game ideas that did anything at all special, like shoot a bomb or missile, open a box or activate a shield, even simple stuff like this, were forced to these shared controls on the 1 button and became worse games for it. Prime examples would be Super Cars 1/2, any car game with accel AND brake (often brake was made auto, and forget about gearboxes, even just Hi and Lo...), Paradroid 90, and many more.

It's also up to the difficulty of the game and whether you want to complete it or just play for a few minutes and not care. As soon as good controls are required to avoid mistakes, such as in these cases or in competition, you quickly notice which games have bad controls.

I propose that we can fix this now and retro-improve those games! (And closer to arcade, which went through the same 1, 2, then 3 button evolution during the years 1983-87. For those, the task was harder - you needed to make a new panel or cabinet, we can do it much more easily than that!)

Originally Posted by jotd

Are there some native amiga joysticks with 3 buttons? (no hardware mods)

A few games need 3 buttons, specially with 2nd button jump and say, 3rd button for special weapon. Turrican 2 maybe? But the great majority only needs 2 buttons, then 3rd button is pause.

There's no such thing as a 3rd button in a CD32 pad. There's a "play/pause" button though that most games use for pause.

Yes, see list above and yes, my idea is secretly inspired by your questions about the CD32 buttons this can be done as a second stage - maybe.

I say maybe because the problem is that you are then forced to use a pad or slaughter one and put inside a joystick, and it's a little more complex and time-consuming to add CD32 support, which could then cause stutters (you address this below). And if we skip the already built in support for 3 buttons in a normal joystick, emus and games that support button 2 but not 3 won't get that support, which means the wrong wouldn't be righted! If you know what I mean.

There's a great chance here to say to Master/NES/Megadrive users who tout their pads, that of course you can play games with 3 buttons on Amiga with a stick or pad that follows the standard, instead of their custom not so good pads!

Originally Posted by jotd

most whdload slaves that have CD32 joypad support also support 3 buttons. By default, 3rd button is mapped to "pause", but can be mapped to something else if useful in the game.

button 1: normal fire
button 2: second button (on sega controllers, also right mouse button)
button 3: middle mouse button.

Unfortunately, last time I checked, the 3rd button is not the same 3rd button as sega joysticks 3rd button. So maybe a HW modification is required on those to work. Or my sega joystick had a problem? Not sure.

CD32 buttons aren't read with the same code: it can read all 6/7 buttons but it's a serial read with a small delay (which consumes some CPU), as opposed to 2nd / 3rd button read that just need 1 read and 1 write to POTGO.

Ooh, this seems good! - but only if the slave doesn't require the "CD32 version code" i.e. AGA or CD32 hardware features. (Don't some of them also "remove" the music? Or at least rely on a CD being present and removing music+SFX options in game? This is what happened to me when I tried some of them recently.)

I think it would be good if the "main/latest" did this i.e. support both controller types and therefore button 3 on standard Amiga joysticks. I'm assuming button 3 for pause requires a recompile to map to a game control?

Megadrive controllers are modded similarly to MSX - just connect button 3 to pin 5 wire. I don't know if MD converters support button 3.

Even better might be something like this USB to Amiga converter, but again - IDK if it supports button 3. If so it would be great, because this would give you tons of options for pads, sticks, and reissues-for-USB.

I've ordered one, let's see.

Nice to see sentiments echoed by many e.g. Dreadnought and TCD.

First step is to add button 2/3 "hooks" to a few slaves, for emu and real Amiga to have actions to map inputs to.

I have also shared my joystick routine on Coppershade, although slaves should already have something like it. But just for completeness.

[Bren McGuire]

amazing that is 2024 and some people still defend joystick+1 button operation it wasn't good by 1992 it is awful to still have it nowadays

[Daedalus]

I still don't really get it. It's a problem that has long been fixed already. 2-button controllers are relatively common, as is support for them in games. And there are two standard that already exist for multi-button controllers and have controllers readily available: CD32 and Megadrive (with simple adaptor), along with a third standard being introduced by Abstraction for twin-stick, multi-button controllers that's already supported in a couple of games. If another, incompatible standard is used for new games or WHDLoad slaves, it seems silly to have to go get or make yet another different, incompatible type of multi-button controller.

If you need multiple buttons with a joystick, you don't even need to gut a CD32 or Megadrive pad - both have primitive logic that is easy to solder up on a bit of stripboard. There's no need to destroy any existing controller for the sake of £2 of parts. And because there are no 3-button controllers without modding anything, you'll be soldering and replacing cables anyway, so it's not that big a jump.

Yes, reading a CD32 pad is a little more complicated. But if the timing of the game is really that tight that simple reading the pad causes frame drops, then the Megadrive scheme is much quicker, reading all 4 buttons in less time than reading the first 2 buttons of a CD32 pad. And building the adaptor required is no more complex than modding an existing controller.

I would be very surprised if the various USB->Amiga adaptors support the 3rd button for game controllers, even if they do for mice, simply because the 2-button and CD32 methods are standard, and the CD32 scheme matches the standard controller layout quite well.

To be clear though, I have no problem with any amount of different control types as options in games or slaves, so long as it's not at the expense of other established options, i.e. certain controller functionality is only available with 3-button controllers. It just seems like a lot of effort for no significant gain.