My collection of joysticks and joypads Also known as controllers Did you waggle or button-bash any of these back in the day, and how many did you break while furiously waggling them playing Daley Thompson's Decathalon? I broke a few of the C16 Plus/4 joysticks with their silly Mini DIN style connectors Or do you remember the hassle of connecting them to the Spectrum, did you have the Kempston, Cursor, or Sinclair interface? Or did you have one of the later Amstrad Speccys that didn't use the Atari standard despite using the same plug? Did the cable cause the interface to move slightly and disconnect itself causing a crash? Nightmare! In this room is my joystick collection, yes kids, this is what we used before control pads were invented. Most joysticks are all based on the Atari standard and can be used on most machines of the era, for reasons I don't know they were known as "Kempston" on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum The Sega Master System control pad used the same wiring as the Atari standard, but had two buttons, which would later be adopted by the Commodore Amiga etc There was six wires as a minimum, a common wire, then a wire for each direction, and one for fire. Depending on which direction the stick was pushed, a switch would connect that direction wire with the common wire to make the connection and the host computer or console would register the movement Later controllers with more buttons than available pins which used the same style of plug may have used a shift register to read all the button inputs There was a Sinclair standard which used the same socket and plug combination, but with different wiring, some joysticks had two plugs for this reason, the black plug was the Atari standard, and the grey plug was the Sinclair standard. There are examples of these joysticks with the two plugs in this room. While Sinclair was under Amstrad's reign of terror they made joysticks that used the Sinclair standard called the SJS1 and SJS2. Also there are the TED series of Commodore computers which introduced the mini-din style socket for it's controller ports (and other accessories), although you could get adaptors to use the normal Atari style joysticks as what joysticks you could get for these machines was rather limited. Holding one of these brings back maximum nostalgia for me Lastly we have official and third party controllers for the consoles of the era There are 46 controllers in the museum
Google Stadia Premiere Edition
Free local pickup from FB Marketplace, can work as a Bluetooth controller if the device supports BT Low Energy. Which my Retropie PC doesn't!
Sega Mega Drive Arcade Power Stick
Bought from a Retro Gaming store in Wrexham for £15. Some haggling was involved
Joy Tech Jordan Grand Prix Wheel
Cheap wheel for a PS2, and despite looking like the gear lever has a lot of travel, it doesn't
Quickshot QS-135 for Sega Megadrive
Found in a box, can't remember where I got it from, it's for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis
Spectravideo 318-102 (Quickshot II) (X4)
This feels familiar, I may have had this with an adaptor for my Plus 4
The dark area
I hope you all find this as interesting and as nostalgic as I do.
And if you do, why not check out the next page in my retro museum... Desktops
Or to quicky jump to another room of the museum, click or tap on Rooms at the bottom of this screen
Special thanks to my long-suffering partner Denise for putting up with all this "nonsense".
No cats were unnecessarily annoyed during the creation of this site
Well, maybe Rose was slightly irritated because breakfast was a few minutes late because the human was up late working on this site and overslept... CATS!
?FILE NOT OPEN ERROR
ianwilliamhill.co.uk
Legal and privacy policies
© 2025 IWH Software (Ian Hill)