Retrogaming DIY!

[Dash Rendar]

I made a 9-pin-to-USB adapter yesterday out of a cheap gamepad. So now I can use my old digital Amiga joystick on my PC, for that authentic retro feel when playing emulated Amiga games!!

 

I bought the gamepad off Ebay, and soldered a 9-pin D-Sub (from Maplin) to the circuit board in the gamepad. Et voilá! So, now I plug my old Amiga joystick into the new 'gamepad-shaped' Adapter, and it works a treat!

 

Yep, I know this all sounds a bit tragic. But, I've never soldered anything in my life, so I was quite pleased when the project actually worked!

 

(The last time I actually held a soldering iron was a few years back... It was Homer's, and I managed to, er, melt the power cable to the iron. I reckon I still owe him a replacement!)

[The-Plethora]

Good work. That's not a quickshot python on the left is it? I remember having one on my Amiga 600 but most of the time I used a megadrive 2 pad.

It's so annoying playing some older games on a pad though when UP is for jump instead of a button.

 

I sold my Amiga ages back but I bought a CD32 a year or so ago and it's awesome, probably see's a lot more play than my XBox 360. You can 'obtain' compilation disks from a few places on the net plus as it's CD32 you can play the full talkie version of Simon the Sorcerer among other things.

 

Unfortunately I am stuck with either a CD32 controller that came with the system which are simply terrible or this...

 

http://accel10.mettre-put-idata.over-blog.com/464x304/1/27/40/16/Joypads-divers/Joypads-Divers-Amiga-CD-32-Competition-Pro.jpg

 

I got a video capture card recently to mess about with on the PC and used it with the CD32, I will take on the geek challenge! Took an age to put together but looks quite cool though.

 

z65le6d40PM

 

And yes I know I missed hunter

 

I found that the best controllers for most older retro stuff through a PC are the USB sega saturn controllers you can get off ebay.

[Dash Rendar]

It sure is a Python.

 

I'm currently using WinUAE to emulate the Amiga on my PC. You can download something called "WHDLoad" and its supporting game packs under the "Abandonware" licensing. Basically, the packs give you just about EVERY game ever released on the Amiga. If you download all the packs, they occupy a few GB. And the WHDLoad application allows you to install them onto an Amiga HD (or emulated HD) EVEN if the games were never designed to be HD installable. (Which most of them weren't.)

 

So basically, my emulator is now setup to run any Amiga games I want, with no floppy load time! It's very cool.

 

And I can even use the emulator to load a real physical HD for an Amiga. Bung it in the Amiga, and you're good to go, with all the games pre-installed!

[The-Plethora]

I would quite like to get hold of another Amiga but all the 1200's now seem to be in nasty yellowing cases. I thought about getting a 1200 motherboard and mounting it inside a nice Lian Li ATX case or something. You can get aftermarket Amiga towers but they still seem to be stuck in the late 80s with the beige design.

 

I used to use the fellow emulator quite a bit and used UAE but I always found getting the resolution set correctly was a pain as well as configuring the hardware side of things so kinda gave up and used the CD32, nice to be able to sit in front of the telly.

I just want to complete hired guns but the copy protection is so crap even my original floppy version came up as a copy and trashed my save games. PC version sucks due to the lousy sound.

What old treasures have you been playing?

[Dash Rendar]

If you look hard enough, you can pick up some nice non-yellowed 1200s on Ebay. Also, it's possible to chemically treat them... I've read that leaving the keys in peroxide + Oxy Action for a couple of days does wonders!

 

I've been playing IK+, Xenon 2, Elite and Shockwave.