On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Siebe Berveling wrote:
> It may be a silly question but is it possible to use MSX(-compatible)
> joysticks on a PC?
I did it under Linux. You can easily connect an MSX joystick to the PC
parallel port. Linux has a joystick driver especially for MSX compatible
joysticks. So you can play Linux games with an MSX joystick.
I also modified fMSX so it would accept the joystick. So now I can play MSX
games with an MSX joystick, but running on PC.
To make it more complicated, I resoldered a PSX joypad to be MSX
compatible. So now I have a PSX joypad acting as an MSX joystick connected
to a PC playing Penguin Adventure. Confused yet? :)
However, if you are looking for a hardware solution to connect MSX
joysticks to the PC joystickport, that's a bit more difficult. The PC
joystickport uses analog signals for left/right and up/down.
The resistance is measured for both the X and the Y axis. 0 ohm means left
or up, +/- 50k ohm means center and +/- 100k ohm means right or down.
I have no idea how difficult it would be to make a circuit that converts
the digital MSX signals to these resistance levels. 0 ohm if left/up is
pressed is easy: short-circuit. But how to give right/down more resistance
than the "neutral" central setting?
What you could try is to buy a cheap PC gamepad and solder wires to its
switches. After all, these switches are probably of the digital
"connection/no connection" type, just like MSX joysticks. Using this
strategy, you don't have to build the digital-to-resistance converter
yourself, but use the one in the PC gamepad instead.
By the way, if you need diagrams of the ports (PC joystick, PC parallel or
MSX joystick) or info about the Linux driver setup, mail me.
Bye,
Maarten
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