Jolt Country

New USB "retro-style" (Atari 2600) clear joysticks, with your choice of red or blue LED lights inside. $34.95 each. I think they look cool, at being USB you could use them with Atari 2600 and C64 emulators and MAME, but with only one fire button they're kind of limited. Still, they look awesome.

Limited run of 500 of each color.

http://www.retrothing.com/2010/12/new-v ... stick.html

Man, they come out with a Slik-stick USB and I'm on it like Michael Jackson in a Chuck-E Cheese!


THE
SCHWINGGG!
AARDVARK

AArdvark wrote:Man, they come out with a Slik-stick USB and I'm on it like Michael Jackson in a Chuck-E Cheese

Metajoke:

A: Did you hear the joke about how Michael Jackson is going to a clothing store because kids pants are reduced in price 50%?
B: No, you stupid fool, the joke is that Michael Jackson is going to a clothing store because boys pants will be half off! Just beat it, will you?

Tdarcos wrote:

AArdvark wrote:Man, they come out with a Slik-stick USB and I'm on it like Michael Jackson in a Chuck-E Cheese

Metajoke:

A: Did you hear the joke about how Michael Jackson is going to a clothing store because kids pants are reduced in price 50%?
B: No, you stupid fool, the joke is that Michael Jackson is going to a clothing store because boys pants will be half off! Just beat it, will you?

That was Bad.

I just bought one of these.



More when it comes in the mail...


THE
RETRO-BLUE
AARDVARK

The Golden Competition Pro is a special edition of the legendary classic of a joystick, finished with an exclusive, stylish gold lustre. Each of these limited edition joysticks includes a certificate bearing its unique serial number, identifying the joystick as a real collectors’ item for gaming enthusiasts.

The accompanying CD-ROM includes 50 original C64 and Amiga® games from the golden age of home computing that will revive the 80s on your Windows® PC.

- Digital USB joystick for the PC
- Original Competition Pro design
- Micro switches for that original sound and outstanding robustness
- Extremely rugged stick with metal springs
- 4 fire buttons and a switchable autofire function
- Special limited edition; includes serial number certificate
- 50 classic games on one CD: comprising 25 of the best Amiga Classix® and C64 Classix® titles respectively
- No driver needed

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/cat ... ts_id=1011

I looked into one of those first at Amazon but they wanted $125 bucks for the regular kind. Ug! Cant imagine what they would want for the special edition. That would have been really cool though. I'll have to settle for an emulator and my
Atari repro.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/ ... dition=new


bastards! the one in England is only 25 bucks plus shipping

I have one of those. I don't know how much research you've done, but you can hack the shit out of those things. There are solder pads on the board that will allow you to connect a keyboard and a disk drive, and it puts out 256 colors compared to the original 16 colors of the 64.

As for the original topic ... I probably wouldn't buy a dedicated retro stick converted to USB at this point. There are a lot of DB9>USB boxes out there at this point. Actually there's pretty much Anything>USB at this point (NES, SNES, etc).

I just ordered 2 wireless Xbox 360 pads with the PC wireless adapters off of Amazon. Both together were < $100 w/shipping, they work with pretty much emulator, and they're wireless which is a plus in my den now.

My problem is that I don't have ANY joysticks. I donated them with all my Commodore stuff back in the early oughts. I have a sidewinder gamepad but it's just not the same. Now I want to hook up with Vice and actually play some D64s on on my laptop.

I would have bought one of the Commodore ones in a heartbeat if they weren't so expensive on Amazon. Oh well. S'what I get for not researching more thoroughly. I have something on the way and that's good enough for me.


THE
NOT ALL IS LOST
AARDVARK

The gold plastic Amiga joystick, isn't the all in one that was created by Jefi Ellsworth for QVC - just a generic USB stick that includes a licensed CD of Amiga and Commodore 64 roms.

And I picked up a PS3 Controller for my emulation needs - it requires a bit of coaxing along with third party drivers to work (wireless is a bit hit or miss) however, the button layout is optimal for everything from Nights Into Dreams for the Saturn (pesky 3d controller) and NES to PS2 & GC emulators. Just generally not that enamored with the Xbox 360 controller because of that and various other reasons (they don't age as gracefully and damn it, that d pad is beyond horrible, it steps into vulgar).

I just played the crap out of BoulderDash and it still rocks after all these years. Tried Raid on Bungleling Bay and Wizball. Not too shabby after fifteen years

THE
SOUNDS
AARDVARK

Nice! You playing them in WinVice or what?

Here's a few shots of my new setup:

Schweet wireless setup! Who needs a dedicated console system.
At one time I built an xbox-to-usb adapter for those xbox controllers. matter of fact I just threw it out a week ago. (those are original xbox controllers, right?)
But I never really liked playing any of the keyboard/mouse games I had with them. Just wasn't used to the gamepad style But I could see having a mame system for hours of fun.


THE
NEVER LEAVE THE
HOUSE
AARDVARK

They're Xbox 360 controllers, but the originals would work too.

I don't plan on playing a lot of keyboard/mouse games on this rig (although I could). Right now I have Atari, NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators (plus MAME) installed. If nothing else it just saves me from having 30 video game consoles hooked up.

Just finished downloading the files for another MAME / Emu frontend called 'Hyperspin' (compressed, totals to 1.6 TB of ROMs and videos). Part of the issue, is that I'm looking for a complete system replacement for every system that has been emulated up to the Wii, so I'll need to drop a bit of money on a high end mini-itx system and finish building my NAS / Fileserver (which won't actually happen till hard drive prices fall (if they ever do)).

Sadly, it'll be awhile until I have something comparable to Flack's set up under my computer monitor but its a very realistic venture at this point in time.

Retro

PS Actually just spent last night playing Dreamcast / Saturn / SNES games until 2 or 3 am: the PS3 controller works remarkably well (D-Pad is inferior to the one on the Dreamcast cotnroller though). Quite an enjoyable evening.

pinback wrote:

Tdarcos wrote:

AArdvark wrote:Man, they come out with a Slik-stick USB and I'm on it like Michael Jackson in a Chuck-E Cheese

Metajoke:

A: Did you hear the joke about how Michael Jackson is going to a clothing store because kids pants are reduced in price 50%?
B: No, you stupid fool, the joke is that Michael Jackson is going to a clothing store because boys pants will be half off! Just beat it, will you?

That was Bad.

If they say why, why? Tell them that it's human nature.

AArdvark wrote:But I could see having a mame system for hours of fun.

I found someone had already done all the controller mappings for MAME and Xbox controllers. You can download someone else's gamepad layout and stick it under the CTRLR directory in MAME and voila, instant reconfiguration. Now all I need to do is make a couple of custom config files for dual analog games, like Robotron, Smash TV, and Karate Champ. Good times ahead, yo.

I finally got the front end tweaked the way I like it and paid to register it ($25). I've got MAME up and running 100% for 2 players, and just finished configuring my SNES emulator.

The only "hurdle" left is that the television's resolution is nothing like the resolution of old video games. 1080p is 1920×1080 on my television.

The Super Nintendo, for example, is 256x224 in low res mode and 512x448 in high res (either progressive scan or interlaced). A 256x224 box is a tiny box in the middle of a 1920x1080 screen. Even scaled up 4x, it still doesn't quite fill the entire screen from top to bottom, but it's close. So really at this point it's a matter of going through every single emulator and setting resolutions that look good on my setup.