ZX Spectrum Joystick Confusion - Classic Game Autopsy

[@ROMBomb001]

I'm grateful you made this 7 years ago so that I could dive into spectrum emulation today. Cheers!

[@thepenultimateninja5797]

An advantage to the Sinclair (and I guess cursor) joysticks being mapped to keyboard keys was that they could be made to work with games that didn't directly support them, as long as there was an option to redefine the keys.

[@Booruvcheek]

Being a boy from (former) Soviet Union, I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to have gotten a ZX clone. it had two 9-pin joystick ports, plus it came with 2 flimsy joysticks (or one, I can't remember). Needless to say, I had no idea what all those Kempstons and Sinclair joysticks meant back then. I simply had nowhere to get that information in 1991. In fact, until I saw this video I had no idea Spectrum 48k had no standard joystick port at all! So back then, having loaded a game I was presented with these baffling choices. I remember being drawn towards "Sinclair" instinctively, since I knew my machine was a clone of Sinclair's. I can vaguely remember having most luck with "Kempston" though. Anyway, the joystick was bad, so keyboard control was what I used most of the time.

[@JohnnyWednesday]

I'd love to own a Soviet clone - especially given many were greatly improved over the original Speccy - the coding scene in the Soviet Union lived for far longer and achieved absolutely incredible things - they certainly taught the Speccy coders in the UK a lesson or two!

[@MrMortull]

That must have been immensely frustrating... my family had the Amstrad +3 version of the Spectrum at the same time and it was hard enough for *us*, with official hardware and living in the UK, to play these games reliably! The default keyboard controls were usually uncomfortable or inelegant and we just didn't have enough different models of joystick to guarantee that we had the right hardware for every one of our massive box of game tapes. So yeah, I feel your pain.

[@Booruvcheek]

@@JohnnyWednesday Well, that clone is partially responsible for the um.. complicated feelings I have towards ZX Spectrums. On one hand, I love old games and I miss the days when each new title was an event (modern games just kinda blend together into one faceless shooter / battle Royale / whatever is the lastest fad). On the other hand, boy, that clone (and it was a factory-made machine named Sintez) was wonky! And of course it took some time for 13/14-year old me to realize that it wasn't actually me doing something wrong when the machine would just plain freeze displaying black screen with blue vertical stripes, I started calling 'pantaloons' after I saw them a few times. Or the frustration of almost finishing loading a game from tape just to have it go 'load error' on you. Also, ZX Spectrum wasn't particularly impressive in 91, I've seen PC's by then and knew the machine was woefully outdated :(

[@Booruvcheek]

​@@MrMortull Thank you for your kind words, sir! Not knowing which joystick to choose was one of the lesser worries, though. My machine, called "Sintez", a product of "Signal" factory (a ZX Spectrum 48k clone) was very unreliable, prone to freezing randomly and not always willing to start up even after power cycling. Must have been overheating, since in 10 minutes it would normally start up again. Not always though. Also loading games from tapes was a pain. It was a slow and unreliable process as you surely know. I had to wait for the game to load just to get an error message 5 minutes into the process. Then I would have to rewind the tape, looking for the start of the game and start loading again. Of course it could end up in a similar fashion again. Or I could just turn it off and go do something else, if I was not in the mood for another round of waiting. Here I have to add, that all the games were, of course, pirated copies. You just could not buy games in (former) USSR in the eary 90's. There were no shops selling official games, but you could buy pirated cassettes, they were sold freely (and contained about one dozen games each). Or you could just copy games if you had a friend or two who had them. Quality of those cassettes was often, I suspect, not that good, and this was probably a factor adding to wonky loads. If you fancy looking at some of those pirated cassette artwork, check this out - www.spectrum4ever.org/fulltape.php?go=covers Lastly, as I suspected back then and as I can surely tell now, ZX Spectrum 48k was past its prime. It might have been OK as a gaming machine for early 80's, even considering its lack of hardware sprites and proper sound hardware. But by the early 90's it felt like a huge step back. Imagine having seen 286-based PCs, as I have, and then going back to a wonky obsolete machine. It felt like a big disappointment. Having said all this, I still fondly remember several Spectrum games. I fondly remember en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismarck_(video_game) and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nether_Earth . en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_of_the_Wood was bewildering, as I could not understand very well what was I supposed to do in the game (pirated games = no manuals!), but I enjoyed the colors and artwork Oh well, this comment is long enough already :)

[@MajoradeMayhem]

What to cover next- What I enjoy most about your channel, are the technical tricks programmers had to invent to get around tech limitations. This is knowledge that will die out, now we no longer have memory constraints to worry about. May I suggest a video dedicated to the most mind-blowingly inventive bits of programming genius that would be completely redundant now?

[@TheTurnipKing]

Kempston, Sinclair and Cursor were the ones I've always thought were pretty much "defacto". Kempston for pre Plus 2 machines, Sinclair on machines post the Plus 2, and Cursor because it just mapped to keys and thus could be supported via the standard keyboard entry routines.

[@8BitBoyUK]

What a really helpful video. Been scratching my head for the last day how to get a controller working. Who knew?!?

[@UserUser-ef2wt]

Sharopolis is dead here is his autopsy

[@KitUkraine]

I know at least one old ZX-Spectrum game that autodetects the joystick - Flying Shark - and it works fine. It seems to decide how to treat 8, for example, by checking what was pressed more recently, 5 or 9.

[@Inaflap]

@6:06 Comcon interface. That's the one I used. It worked with every game... bringing joystick control to the likes of Halls of the Things.

[@Sharopolis]

That's one I haven't heard of! I could have gone on for another 20 minutes about joysticks, maybe I'll do another video about it one day.

[@jasonrailton7990]

COMCON was elaborate but a good one. It had a huge plugboard where you plug in leads to select which key is pressed when you move the joystick Up/Down/Left/Right/Fire. It also supported joysticks with 2 separate fire buttons. Big drawback with this, and any interface that pressed cursor or Sinclair keys, was that none of them work with the Amstrad-built machines; they can't trigger the keyboard actions any more.

[@TheTurnipKing]

The keyboard matrix is just piggybacked on the Address Bus isn't it? What's missing?

[@michaelplatt1959]

I had this one too. It was great because you never had to worry about the control options, even when it was a keyboard only game.

[@Mark-pr7ug]

Thanks for that. I had always wondered what those different options meant when I played emulated zx games.

[@AcornElectron]

You sound northern, any chance of a collaboration with Techmoan? Yet another brilliant video that’s as informative as it is entertaining.

[@Sharopolis]

Thanks! I'd collaborate with Techmoan if he asked nicely!

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

Well that's a bit racist, just because they're both northern you think they should work together.

[@mattx5499]

Actually mapping joystick to keyboard keys was pretty genius idea at the time.

[@wisteela]

The Spectrum+ was the first to have a delete key.

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

I have 2, and a spare case.

[@honoredshadow1975]

Late reply! You should do a video about game construction kits! Thanks for the video. I remember the confusion I had with my Speccy and all the joysticks that came with it with different interfaces. Confussing!

[@johneygd]

These were still cool controller expansion options😁👍

[@mrljgibson]

Well you might cover the different joystick interfaces and what plugs into them. Like what does the zipstick run as? Something it's hard to find out.

[@SuneSalminen]

All the joysticks that were available at the time and used the 8-pin plug (except for the Amstrad sticks that were mentioned) were wired to Atari 8 pin standard, i.e. "up" is always on pin one. So if you had a zipstick it would work on any computer with an Atari standard joystick port. There is nothing special about the Zipstick, it doesn't "run as" anything. Internally it's wired exactly the same way as say a Quickshot Turbo or a Competition Pro.

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

What would have been good would be to cover joysticks and say what options and interfaces they run with, like the competition pro or the zipstick.

[@SuneSalminen]

The Competition Pro, The Arcade, The Quickshot, the Zipstick, all the Wico sticks, that dumb one that looked like a hand grenade and all the rest were wired in exactly the same way. All the joysticks of the time would work, except for those weird Amstrad joysticks. Apart from the Amstrad sticks, the video does not mention any other joysticks because there is no need to. Think about it this way. If you were a small time joystick and peripherals manufacturer (not a big lump of a company like Amstrad) in the 1980s, you would would want your product to work on as many computers as possible.

[@ayratg5640]

Why they just could do something like "Redefine keys" procedure in menu instead. They could easily go thorugh all of possible input type during this process I guess.

[@Barcrest]

Yeah i never understood why spectrum games didnt just do this as standard. Especially as most interfaces just sent key presses.

[@TheWarmotor]

There are a couple more of us now :)

[@peterwilliams6873]

Can you please help how do you configure gamester arcade stick on original Xbox

[@tomdavies6368]

best solution would have been to prompt the user to press up, down,right left on their joystick before the the game starts, and from that the game would have been able to determine what was being used. No?

[@esathegreat]

They missed the chance to implement more than one fire button?

[@SuneSalminen]

The Atari joystick pinout originates way back in 1977 on the Atari 2600 and became the industry standard. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_joystick_port

[@Andrew-el8xi]

I had the Kempston but it didn't look like that very good never had any problems with it some games I enjoyed more with the old rubber keys I went through some joysticks because some mates were very heavy handed with them i used to feel sick watching them smash the crap out of them so I stopped inviting them and just went round there's luckily most of them got the 128k later a didn't want to come round mine anymore

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

I think that's a pretty rose tinted view of Windows PC machines. lol

[@leeh3568]

Aarrrgghh now some new games dont even support kempston so if using emulator on phone keyboard too small and covers half screen