Amiga 500 - DB9 FEMALE?

[Lamaman71]

Hi Folks,

A bit of an odd question - but has anyone ever seen an Amiga 500 with a female joystick port before? An old friend has pulled his fathers A500 out of the attic and has resolved most of the usual issues only to realize that the joystick port is Female....

I suggested it has been replaced, his father cant remember doing anything with it.

What earthly reason might there be to de-solder and replace the male DB9 with a female?

Nor does it work - the icing on the cake is when he used an adaptor to convert back to male all that happens is the mouse in the other (Male) DB9 port stops working....so more fun there I suspect.

[Jope]

No, it definitely won't work with a commercial gender changer!

The footprint of the male and female D9 connectors is the same on the circuit board, but the pins are counted in the opposite direction between these two.

Hence when the female D9 connector was soldered on, what used to be pin 1 is now on pin 5, 2-4 and so on. Everything flipped.

A commercial gender changer has two male or two female connectors back to back. If you look at them closely, you'll see that the connectors are not in the same orientation to each other, the other one is upside down. This is so that they can connect male pin 1 to the other male pin 1 in the minimum amount of space.

You get where this is going? With the commercial gender changer, you now had a mirrored male port and voltages and signals went into the wrong places. I hope nothing burned inside the machine.

The best way to make this generally useful again is to reinstall a male joystick port into the Amiga.

Otherwise you should solder a non-mirroring gender changer yourself by connecting two male D9 connectors together back to back with both connectors the same way up. But this kind of changer is not useful in any other situation and might cause problems later if it gets separated from this machine, so I recommend just reverting the computer back to stock.