Vectrex Asteroids Controllers (maker blog)

First thoughts-

After playing the rather excellent Rocks & Saucers and Rocks Deluxe on the Vecfever and THEN the Vecfever being updated with ACTUAL Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe emulated games, I wanted to make a proper controller, with buttons. Just like the original arcade machine.

After making up a prototype with an off lthe shelf manufactured ABS plastic box, I had a good idea of what I wanted, but sadly not quite how I wanted it to *look*

 

 

 

You can’t see 2 smaller buttons on the back left hand side of the box, which are mapped to the Vectrex’s joystick UP & DOWN. These are used to navigate the menu on the Vecfever cartridge. The 4 buttons across the top are mapped to the Vectrex’s 4 fire buttons, the 5th (Hyperspace / Shield) button at the front is mapped to the Vectrex’s joystick DOWN position.

So, I put this idea to the Vectrex community over on Vectrex Fans Unite!

They liked the idea and of course they asked me to –

‘make me one!’
‘make me one!’
‘make me one!’
‘make me one!’
‘make me one!’
‘make me one!’

So, I had a thought that I’d do a batch of ten and see how it goes (actually 11, as I bought a single box first as a ‘try out’)

One of the members from the US informed me of a more suitable black ABS box and I managed to find the same box at a supplier here in the UK. I bought one to test it out for purpose. The biggest problem would it be being too shallow to accept a button at the front (hyperspace / shield) Fortunately, it fitted just fine, although I did have to bend out the pins on the button for it to fit.

The next bit was to design an overlay for the controller, just like an arcade machine. I am no good at Photoshop, so I got onto my mate Olly over at Arcade Art Shop, who is excellent at that sort of thing and he made my VERY poor idea in a shoddy Paint jpeg into a fully functioning vectored image. Also, to be more in line with the Vectrex’s asthetics, member Darryl Hirschler on Vectrex Fans Unite! had already made a black and white image of his own. He kindly allowed me to modify this slightly and use it for the 2nd overlay design. In the image below you can see both designs side by side in a finished black ABS box.

 

 

 


Build list of parts-

Black ABS box
5x Sanwa OBSF24 buttons (White)
2x Momentary buttons (Black)
9 Pin ‘Atari’ style extension cable (male end cut off)
11 x 16 Copper stripboard for analog to digital joystick conversion.
4x 10k ohm 1/4w resistors
4x 3.3k ohm 1/4w resistors
Wire
Overlay


Method-

Use CNC made aluminium fixture (I made at work) to accurately drill 3mm pilot holes in ABS box.
Follow 3mm holes with a step drill to drill them out to 24mm
Drill menu up & down buttons in back face of box
Drill 9 pin cord hole in back face of box

Clean & vaccuum all plastic chips & swarf from box

Fit overlay to box top face
Fit buttons thru holes

Cut off male end of 9 pin extension cable.
Remove 140mm of the black pvc covering to expose the 9 wires
Insert wires thru cable entry hole in the back face of the box
Tie a knot in the wire from the inside (only on the first batch – I have ordered some cable strain relief glands for future controllers)
Trim and solder the wires to the top 4 buttons with Vectrex pins 1,2,3,4 and daisy chain pin 8 to the button grounds.
Trim and solder the remaining wires to the relevant points on the strip board circuit with +5v, -5v, X position and Y position wires.
Wire in the up and down menu buttons on the back face of the box to the relevant points on the strip board circuit.
Secure strip board to box with some hot glue (a maker’s best friend!)

Continuity (beep) test all the copper strips to make sure no solder has bridged where it shouldn’t.
Use the Vectrex test cart / rom image to test all buttons (including up & down navigation buttons – DOWN and the hyperspace button share the same pin)

Here is the simple circuit I found on the internet to convert the Vectrex’s analog joystick to digital –

Note – I didn’t need half of the circuit (left & right), but it didn’t take much to solder it up and someone may want to mod the controller in the future?

 


Tools used-

Aluminium pilot drill fixture
3mm drill bit (pilot drill)
4.5mm drill (cable hole)
7.6mm drill bit (menu button holes)
Cordless drill
Step drill bit
Pillar drill
Scalpel
Noga deburring tool
Wire snips
Wire strippers
Soldering Iron
Mutlimeter


As I normally want to do a few cheeky ‘exclusives’, I had Olly make up 2 overlays with a RED theme. I have already ordered the differently coloured back menu buttons for the next surprise ‘odd coloured’ controller…

 


Conclusion and Future Batches-

Problem 1. This initial batch of 11 was VERY labour intensive.

Problem 2. I had to be super careful to be as accurate as I could with fairly basic hand and machine tools, as wrong button placements would show up badly on the overlays.

Solution 1 – Work at a much larger table, so I can do all the seperate operations on ALL of the controllers in sequence.

Solution 2 – I am going to make a drilling fixture for the future releases and do the main drilliing operations on a 5 axis CNC mill at my work. This will make accuracy pin point perfect and will take much less time. It will be able to do ALL the holes in one operation!

 

 

 


Some people have already asked if the controller could be used on other consoles, particularly the standard 9 pin ‘Atari’ style – Vic20, C64, Spectrum (with interface), Atari consoles and computers and various others. I had thought of making an adapter, but I can’t seem to get the digital DOWN position to work. I’m presuming because of the odd way the Vectrex uses positive and negative 5v and the circuit alters this to digital with resistors, it doesn’t seem to register properly? However, it would actually be a ton EASIER to wire these straight to a 9 pin ‘Atari’ cable. No circuit required! Only 6 wires to solder!

I’ll advertise my thoughts on Atari age and see what the zillions of console & computer users think?

2 comments

  1. I’m interested in your Vectrex button controller (the red/blue/white). Are you making a batch any time soon? It’s really cool looking and I bet the gameplay on my Vectrex would be fun.

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