Damn Joysticks!!

[Chris]

Is it just me, or when you all had your original Amigas, did you tend to have a habit of breaking/smashing against a wall or your opponent's head/standing on/throwing or generally destroying at least one joystick per week?

Maybe it was just my uncontrollable rage after being beaten at Kick Off?

[CHiEF]

hehe

mine always broke after a good thrashing on summer olympics and the good old joystick waggler games.

could usually be fixed with some cocktail sticks and some sellotape though! hehe

[RetroMan]

Hm, not for me here I still have the FIRST Joystick from my Amiga times, which is a Competition Pro without autofire and slow-motion ! Ok, it´s in no good shape, since I hammered it onto a chair and throw it onto the wall BUT it really still works well

[Chris]

I seemed to spend every other weekend replacing microswitches!

Ah, those were the days!

Good old discrete control, not like today's analogue monstrosities.

I've got a microswitch CompPro for my PC, which would work perfectly with WinUAE. Unfortunately - surprise surprise - it's broken. I really must get round to fixing it.

[Bloodwych]

There is a reason why the earlier joystick models last longer than the newer ones.

The first ever Cruiser multicoloured joystick I bought (with the batman pack) still works 100% fine even today after hundreds of hours of abuse. As do many of my older joysticks I bought before this.

Several I purchased at a later date (including more cruiser models) seemed to break much more easily.

For example, the newer cruisers would last 6 months before a microswitch would give out luckily still under warranty.

"Why?" I thought, so I opened them up.

To my surprise ALL the "solid" earlier models had METAL microswitches installed.
The later "frail" attempts had cheap plastic microswitches.

The plastic microswitches may have been cheaper, but with the amount of returns and high failure rate they can't of been a sound choice. Yet still they used them. Oh well.

[Chris]

Ah well, "they don't make 'em like they used to". And that's a fact!

[Overdoc]

Well, I always had Quickshot-II sticks. Didn't like the Competition-Pro although it was a fine stick, but I am the type of guy that wants to have the joystick fixed to the table and also the first Competition Pros didn't have no autofire which I absolutely needed as a shoot'em up fan
Obviously I broke several joysticks, but never in rage, although I always lift them up from the table and then smashed them on it again when a game was unfair
But those Quickshot-IIs had the habit that after some time the small metals inside broke off, and since I didn't have enough money to buy a new one every month or so I always replace the metals with ones I took off from old batteries, cut them out to fit in the joystick and it worked perfectly again.
I even got used to my repaired stick after some time because it could be pushed into all directions more easily than the original I think I even still have that first one, athough I must have something like 10 Quickshot-IIs by now from various Commodore machines I got over the years.

[TikTok]

I think I did more damage to myself than any joystick I had. The number of times the suction cups would suddenly give up and leave the table during a game of Sensi Soccer, sending my whole arm flying into a wall or a bloody sharp table edge...ouch .

[Drake1009]

I've ruined a couple of joysticks in my time. I'm down to 3 of them now.

The dog ruined 2 though, chewed on the connectors. My dad fixed those though, then they had nice metal connectors. Then I tried to connect one to the C64 while it was on and that seems to have fried something somewhere. It didn't start or anything. Somehow my father managed to get a replacement and it works again.

[Amiga1992]

I have destroyed a few in my C64 days, but none when I had my Amiga. Strange. Perhaps it was Summer Games, Winter games, Decathlon and all that jazz

[Drake1009]

I didn't play summer games or winter games that much. But if those games were really the sinners then wouldn't people who had played games like summer or winter games on the Amiga end up with broken joysticks as well? Or maybe aquatic games?

And how come I haven't destroyed any PC keyboards though I've played winter and summer challenge on the pc quite an amount of times.

Yup I remember those sports games to (mostly used keys on those ).

By the way does anyone know if theres an PC Joystick to Amiga converter as I would love to get into my good ol miggy games again, just my joystick busted.

[TikTok]

By the way does anyone know if theres an PC Joystick to Amiga converter as I would love to get into my good ol miggy games again, just my joystick busted.

A couple of different ones used to be made (Golden Image did one), but I haven't seen them anywhere for a long time. I had a quick look on Power Computing and couldn't see any. Perhaps you could try EBay.

There are several plans on the net for a Amiga/Megadrive etc to PC converter, so perhaps if you are electronically minded you could modify these plans to work the other way around? My very non-electronics capable mind wonders if it would just be a case of swapping the genders of the connectors.