We talk a lot about standards over this way, including what came before the standards were put into place and what came before that. Our last issue was about standards, even. But sometimes, de facto standards simply come into place, where a large number of people and organizations agree to do something a certain way, despite no formalized agreement or strategy. And one of the greatest examples of a de facto standard in computing history may be a controller port that remained in constant use on mainstream consoles and computers for two whole decades. I’m, of course, talking about the Atari joystick port, a port with a surprising amount of history behind it.
My experience with this venerable port came through the MSX, which was weirdly popular in The Netherlands thanks to Phillips being a Dutch company. It wasn’t until much later that I realised it was in use all over the place.
This reminds me of the Game Port on old IBM PCs! I was wondering if this was the same port, but the Wikipedia says it isn’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
Anyway, good memories. 🙂
DA-15 def not the same port but very much similar design to those mentioned in the article all the way back to the 50s. DA-15 was a MIDI and Joy/Game port. I still have a joystick that had a fair amount of use playing Tie Fighter in the 90s. Those games claimed many a ball mouse ha.
There’s a little more nuance to the Megadrive / Genesis bit though – Sega opted to fundamentally change the pinout of the port, swapping power and signal pins around. This meant that, while the Megadrive pads might have worked on some systems using the Atari standard, it wouldn’t work on others. And on some, e.g. the C64, it runs a high risk of damaging the machine’s CIA port due to causing contention with the keyboard.
Also, while the article says the Amiga CD32 deviated from the standard in a similar way to the Megadrive, in implementation the CD32’s port is no different from the port on any other Amiga – the reading of the CD32 pad is entirely a software difference, so any Amiga can read a CD32 pad and the extra functions have no bearing on the compatibility with the standard. Outside the original Atari 8-bit machines, the Amiga and C64 (possibly the VIC-20 too) have the closest implementations to the original. Even the Atari ST isn’t as compatible with the original.