Nice informative video. 😃

Congratulations Glen, nicely done. You've opened the hardware development floodgates now :) I loved (and still love) flight sims, and played a lot of them and F1GP back in the day with an analogue stick, probably using the same schematic. I think I can offer some further insight into how these games read the controller and so on. Many games back in the day (including the flight sims you tried) didn't offer any sort of calibration options, and essentially made assumptions on the centre and the limit values of the stick. It meant that you needed to use the trim controls (those small screw adjustments) to adjust the stick to suit a game instead, and if your stick gave significantly wider ranges of values, it would be basically impossible to control. They assumed the values would be quite low because PC-type sticks were far more common than Amiga-type. This means that although they are analogue readings, the resolution is still quite low considering the maximum reading possible was 255, with only maybe 20 steps in each direction available. Sticks made for the PC typically used 100K pots, which gave quite low values compared to sticks designed specifically for the Amiga (which were based on Atari paddle controllers and thus had higher resistance pots, typically 470K), meaning values were 4-5 times lower with a PC stick than an Amiga one. The optional capacitors in that circuit are intended to compensate for that, however, because games made the assumption for PC sticks, they were redundant in many cases as you saw. A few games do allow calibration, like Tornado and F1GP, and these games should make full use of the smoother input using the capacitors or larger value pots, and will still work with lower value setups. It's just a shame that so many games didn't include a calibration routine.

diy stuff is super

Congrats Glen. The first of many to come !!

👍

Haven't played F1GP since the early nineties but immediately after you started that lap, I remembered every corner like some kind of sleeper agent, activated from deep slumber.

Yeah making PCBs is pretty amazing... something that was impossible 30 years ago now costs just a few dollars. I'm at the other end of the scale... After my Commodore 128D 1571 disk controller repro PCB I decapped the read/write hybrids in all Commodore floppy drives and fully reversed them all (there are 3 different versions with minor changes) using Eagle PCB. After a few weeks of work they were done. It's basically all common smd parts (caps/resistors/transistors) so should only cost a few dollars to build.

The caps should be there but do not connect them together at the other end, just use a double-pole switch to disconnect them or 2 separate jumpers. With the caps not connected to gnd (with switch/jumper open) the caps should be completely open at the end. You could try it on your older design, add the parts and cut the trace on the caps so they are not joined. As the readme says, some games require the caps and some don't.... that's why in your testing some games worked and other didn't. Back to the old drawing board for version 3 ;-)

Great Project! Your Videos are Awesome👍🏻

Nice work! How about for v3 you consider a USB version for more modern devices, like XBox/Playstation controllers? Perhaps even a wheel? :p

"It maybe is a shame that not more games on the Amiga support this sort of stick" Support for just a two button stick (let alone three) is up there with Unicorns being ridden by Bigfoot over the rainbow, even though the Amigas port was ready to go. If you read posts about some Amiga games on YT there are still people that believe the Amiga was a one button joystick computer.

Well done learning a new skill.

Glen, you've done 2 things in this video that bug me You apologized for your circuit diagram, yeah it could be neatened up but it was functional, and you apologized for working with Kicad as a beginner, we all start somewhere and you made an amazing product A good bit of advice for Kicad is to download the digikey libraries, lots of useful components with premade footprints that are pretty good Practice altering footprints, I use Kicad for work for making student board products, but some of the premade footprints are a bit tight, for beginners especially, but sometimes solves issues just moving the centre leg of a transistor forward to avoid bridging Great work again mate

KiCad is a big win! I learned a bit on PCB design with Eagle and hadn't touched in years. Then I found KiCad and ran into a project that almost mandated a custom board (really weird shape, nasty to hand wire, etc). Other than a bit of fighting to get foot prints correct for some of the more esoteric components I've needed, it's been a very capable tool for me. I highly recommend it if you need a board design tool for anything DIY.

I wonder if you were getting such different values because it looked like the calibration program was reading a byte (0-255) for each axis, whereas F1 appeared to be displaying a short (0-65535) based on the number of 0's

I've had a 'PcJoy2AMIGA V1.2' (+ a Tornado Logic 3 stick) for a few years --- but never had much luck 😥

Good job Sir .

Nice work Glen. F1 I used to play full races back in the 90s. Happy days man.

Haha, this takes me back to learning AutoCAD in school :) I only made one single-sided PCB though, and we etched it on site! (Well... gave to the teacher and watched him dunk 'em. The school's insurance didnae cover us working with the acid oursels!) I absolutely second the suggestion to get a breadboard - and make sure it's a good one! Cheap ones will do you no favours, with extra capacitance and dodgy connections. In fact, given the issues the capacitors gave you here, this circuit might never have worked quite right on a cheap'yun. But... aye. In the aforementioned AutoCAD adventure, the teacher made us all test our circuit on a breadboard first. Before we wasted any precious, UV-activated-whatever, blank PCB material on a useless circuit! Those transparencies for the printer didnae come cheap either ;) I suppose with how cheap professional PCBs are nowadays, that's all a wee bit less of a concern.

Good job with your first foray into PCB design! The first project is always a challenge but super exciting when it actually works. My first ever was designing a memory module for a Compaq SLT/286. Definitely bit off more than I could chew but got it to work in the end. Starting smaller and working your way up is definitely the (less frustrating) way to go :)

Good work. Exercise those geek muscles!

Great job Glenn =D

Great work Glen. And i learned a few things watching this. Nice editing at 23:17 btw, slick👍. Just wanted to mention, I bought f15 strike eagle 2 for my Amiga back in the day. It's a cracking game and a natural successor to fa18 interceptor in my opinion. Looking forward to your next vid.

Nicely done!

Excellent little project there Glenn :)

great work mate! the magic of having your own PCBs made never gets old :)

Fantastic video Glenn. I fear a reality where I "inspire" anyone to do anything, never mind a PCB and related video lol. One small correction. I wasn't using the yoke for Flight sims, although back in the day, I did one session with it in F18 before realizing that you don't fly a jet fighter with a yoke lol. Love your work mate. Awesome.

01:40 😂

I've never dabbled in PCB creation/design, but it does seem prudent to start out with a breadboard for testing the schematic first. That way you're not waiting 3 weeks only to find out the capacitors were unnecessary.

Very cool. I have a few ideas myself for different projects. How did you find KiCAD to use?

Amiga? Dead garbage! Bury it, it stinks.

Resident Evil supports Mystique too, it says so on the packaging!

New subscriber here - I enjoy your content and dry sense of humour. However, You really are making life hard for yourself with QFN and QFP packages. Just tin the pads, pre-heat the board with your hot air set to 150c, then turn it up to 300-350c, drop the chip on and use the hot air to solder it on. You’ll see the chip get slightly sucked down onto the pads, and you are done. Make sure you use a large square tip on your hot air station, not the thin round tip you use for caps and resistors. A large square tip bigger than the chip will give you even heating and reduce the chance of damaging the PCB or chip.

It's strange why the PCB designer didn't just take the german design open-source 68EC020 accelerator made for the A500\500+ and re-work it to use the square CPU. That's a really amazing accelerator for the A500 with 16MB true fast RAM and a very fast IDE controller built in.

Another way to make the socket shorter is to rub it on a sheet of fine sandpaper. This will ensure the ssurface is nice and flat and you can make very fine adjustments more easily.

You should consider getting better quality sockets rather than the cheap chinese crap. On the Individual Computers ACA620 or ACA630, once it is pushed onto the CPU it is *extremely* difficult to remove.

20:54 One thing that is curious is the RAM should be fast RAM. Slow RAM is connected to the chipset and fast RAM is connected to the CPU. That accelerator should have the RAM connected to the CPU so why is it configured as slow RAM????? I think the board designer needs to go back and do a bit more thinking lol

6:00 That's a design fault. The board designer should have made the pads longer. My guess is he either used a footprint for some other chip that is not the correct one because he was too lazy to make a custom footprint (there definitely won't be a 68000 QFP footprint for that chip in Kicad) or didn't actually check it properly, or he may have used solder paste and a reflow oven which would work fine with short pads. Edit: Another possibility is the space available is very tight and he made the footprint as small as possible. The correct way to solve that issue is to make the footprint larger and then use alternative routing (not run the trace near the edge of the board that forces the pads to be short) or make the board 1-2mm larger. The board can easily be made larger there is no reason to make it that small and a couple of millimeters larger won't hurt but will allow for more space to make the footprint larger. This is your typical amateur PCB designer mistake, seen it hundreds of times before. I'm usually taking these types of projects and improving them and re-releasing it and have been doing that for many years. Maybe I'll get hold of a PCB, reverse and fix it ;-)

4:20 Use magnification and simply hold the part with the point of some tweezers and the chip won't move. With the same hand that is holding the tweezers also hold some solder. Touch the iron to the solder to pick up some of it on the tip and solder the corner of the chip. The added flux on the chip will make the solder flow. Check the position and adjust if necessary then solder the opposite corner. It isn't that difficult with the correct technique ;-)

Good job, but the easy way to solder a QFP chip on such a tight footprint is to tin all the pads, and then use hot air to solder it. It’ll even self align for you.

I might be wrong on this one, but I thought that ranger/slow ram, although only accesible to the CPU only ran at the same speed as the amiga's chipset as it still has to be accessed via agnus, hence only "real" fast memory (accessed directly by the CPU) accessed at the CPUs native clock speed. That might explain why you're not seeing the speed up you'd expect from things like frontier.

Thanks for the video. It’s a really interesting project. Hopefully these will be available to buy in kits.

Can someone help me find the cpld and ram - I have looked on Ali and lcsc but can’t find them

Not to be a knob or anything, but why did you not pretin the IC pads a bit instead of wiping them with the braid? The way I do IC's like this is to pretin the pads so they have a slight layer of tin on them, place the chip, tack in the corner legs to the tin already there, then tin up the iron tip and "bead roll" the legs. By bead roll I mean use the tip of the iron "wet" and add tin as you slowly go from leg to leg to leg. You can do it with a bead of tin if you feel lucky, the name comes from that but it's a PITA to roll an actual bead the whole time, you get the same effect if you keep the tip "wet" so it has tin on it all the time. It's also fairly quick to do it this way, you're done in 5min tops if you roll on through it. If you get a short/bridge disregard it and roll on down the side of the chip, then clean the bridges up with a wick afterwards. I used to do a lot of assembly and rework, also with hot air, and had time to mess around and try different methods, this is what was the easiest and cleanest for me. What you get is the legs, or the "foot" of it is coated with tin and so is the pad and it seems to be the best "bond" like that. Also liberal application of flux is recommended hehe. - just to be clear, cleaning the pads isn't a bad idea, but I think leaving them "dry" is, in particular if you have to take a break and so on, you can get oxidation or weird stuff make the pad not want to wet with tin later. Not sure exactly what does it but it's happened to me several times if I cleaned a board and left it "dry" for some time.

Did u get a solder hair on the cpu etc?

Great work Glen! Respect!

20 minutes into a 40 minute video and Glen says let's power it on and see if it works.... 😢 I'm quite enjoying the whodunnit aspect of this though

You mentioned that you changed the socket several times. Is it possible that you may have damaged the pcb (especially the inner layer connections of the socket) of the 4 layer PCB? The only way to find out for sure is to buzz all the socket connections per the schematic. A tedious task.

Oh dear, I've only just noticed how loud and annoying the game music is during Frontier and Monkey Island. Apologies for that. I've been looking at the original board again and have made some progress, fairly sure I know the cause of the problem now and I hope to have a 2nd channel video done for it in the next couple of days.

Patience of an absolute saint with that soldering!