Atari paddle controller

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi, I'm trying to recreate the 'old school' feel of a pair of Atari 2600 controllers that I want to attach to RPi running Stella. My process for creating a sketch is taking an example, playing and adapting it for my needs as my coding skills are probably best described as 'rubbish'. I have the Atari paddles connected to an Arduino Micro, A0 and A1 are the pots and I'm using IDE 1.6.6
Approaches I have tried are as follows:

  • Gamepad emulation using joystick library by Matthew Heironimus
  • Various mouse controlling examples from the Arduino library using mouse.move()
  • Absolute mouse from the Nico Hood HID Project

The last doesn't have much in the way of documentation, the first 2 allow me to create a sketch that controls the paddle which is too difficult to control as the code examples are based on central tendency where the input is from a self-centring device such as a joystick. As the paddle controller is not self-centring I find that control is virtually impossible.

I did find the following on https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/MouseContinuousDrawing which looks more like what I am hoping to achieve but sadly there is no code available. I've messaged admin to ask if they could find it for me but no response sadly so I was hoping if anyone had the knowledge or time to help point me in the right direction for my project?

Thanking in advance

J.

2

Instead of using an Arduino as the middleman, you can just get yourself a ADC "Analog to Digital Converter". The MCP3008 chip is rather common for these types of project and can be found on eBay and Adafruit, for a decent price.

3

Interesting, I wasn't aware of this as an option. Might go down that route but just trying to use what I have to-hand as I want to get the family together to play some classic games over Christmas.

Just seems to me that if I could figure out how to write a simple sketch where a potentiometer has an absolute reference but the cursor movement is always relative. So every time the analog input is read, the cursor's position is updated relative to it's current position.

4

Hi,

Take a look at my project, AtariJoysticksPlus,

It supports Atari joysticks, paddles, and driving controllers.

Enjoy!