CX52b

Introduction

The Atari 5200 has a dreadful controller. The are many reasons for this, including:

• Analog controls. These are awkward for arcade games meant to have digital controls, and don't have any self centering, which is awkward for many analog games as well.
• Uncomfortable. This is somewhat subjective, but I don't expect many people to disagree on this.
• Extremely unreliable. The original controllers are somewhat expensive today because they so frequently malfunction.

I bought an Atari 5200 from a friend in 2018, and decided that it to be able to enjoy it, I ought to make my own controller that works better than the original stock controllers. hence this project was born.

Current State

This project is not done, but I did build a working prototype (Fig. 1). in the future, I want to modularize the design to reduce wiring effort, make a much nicer wooden case, improve project documentation, upgrade the joystick to be switchable between 4-way and 8-way digital input (maybe even analog!), and make a version as a handheld controller instead of an arcade stick.

Figure 1

Figure 1 above shows my prototype arcade stick Atari 5200 controller. Click to enlarge.

Design

This project so far consists mostly of PCB designs done in Altium's Circuitmaker. Links to the projects on Circuitmaker are below: