Old Video Games

Does anyone recognize this?

Whenever someone asks me if I play video games, I like to say that I stopped playing video games when they started taking up more than 2 floppy disks.  I think I was only a very casual gamer, and as games got bigger, one had to put more time and effort in to them to get more enjoyment out of them.

In any case, there are many emulators out there that allow one to play video games from all of the early game systems.  I had been using a Logitech game pad to play them, which, of course works great.  But when I saw this Wico Boss for sale at a thrift store a number of years ago, I just had to pick it up.  This particular joystick has an Atari style interface/connector, and will not plug into a modern PC.  One can build custom interfaces - there are many designs published on the Internet.  I built a parallel port adapter some time ago, and it worked great in Windows using the PPJoy driver.

I decided I wanted a USB interface such that the Boss would just appear like a regular joystick to a PC.  My initial plan was to gut a USB game pad, and use it to put together my own interface.  In the end, I decided to just pick up a pre-made Atari to USB adapter from raphnet.net.

I’ve been playing with it for a few days now - it’s a great way to re-visit games like Dig Dug.  While digging around for background on this and other joysticks, I came across the history of Wico.