So I was playing Miner 2049er II recently and every time I'd start up it would ask me if I wanted the Apple Joystick or Joyport Atari Joystick. It got me to thinking and doing some reading I found an article that explains how the Sirius Joyport worked:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Joyport

https://www.atarimagazines.com/cva/v1n1/joysticks.php

the original article on archive:

https://archive.org/details/Video_Arcade_Games_Vol_1_No_1_1983-09_Creative_Computing_US/page/n101

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]


so I thought, gee, this looks easy all it does is change the annunciator #1 to on, and then you can read pushbuttons 0, 1 and 2 to get the firebutton, left, right. It sets ann #1 to off, and then you can get the firebutton, up and down.



It's too bad that atari joysticks of this era didn't have two buttons because theoretically there's an ability to have two fire buttons on the PB0 input.


What complicates things is that it does everything backwards from typical Apple conventions. When you press the fire button on an Apple Joystick, it sets PB0 to > 128. When you press the firebutton on the Sirius Joyport Atari Joystick, PB0 is < 128. The same goes for left/right and up/down, low = pressed.

And the biggest complication of all is that the Sirius Gameport is incompatible with the Apple 2e. After hooking it up, the apple2e driver wouldn't boot. It totally freaked me out, but then I figured out that it was holding PB0 high which is also open-apple and that goes into the self-test routine.

So what to do about that? My solution is to not engage PB0 or PB1 high until after a second of machine run time. That seems to work pretty well.

It actually reads it right away, within the first 1/1000 of a second.

from my debugging junk:

C000R READ M_AN1 FALSE pb1 MDJOY_READ VALUE RAW= ff INVERT= ffffff00 RETURN= 80
Machine Time:0.000956
pb0 MDJOY_READ VALUE RAW= ff INVERT= ffffff00 RETURN= 80
Machine Time:0.000962



Okay, so the actual code: It seems to work with Miner II, Miner 2049er, Berzap, Stellar 7. The controls are definitely "tighter" since it's digital and may actually run the game a little bit faster.


One of the things I ran into is that reading/writing c05a/c05b to set/clear the annunciator would get lost, so I added a bunch of printing messages and some extra code that is probably unnecessary. I have no idea what IOUDIS is.

I wanted to be able to switch between the regular joystick and the atari joystick on the fly so I made a configuration option, I didn't think bit 0x80 was being used.


diff against mame205_extract/mame/src/mame/drivers/apple2e.cpp

Code

220,221d219
< m_djoy_0_1(*this, "djoy_0_1"),
< m_djoy_b(*this, "djoy_b"),
265d262
< required_ioport m_djoy_0_1, m_djoy_b;
1387,1388d1383
< 
< 
1445,1451d1439
< 		case 0x5a: // AN1 off
< printf("IOUDIS = 1 GETTING HIT HERE EXECUTING 0X5A DOIO M_AN1 FALSE\n");
< 			m_an1 = false; break;
< 
< 		case 0x5b: // AN1 on
< printf("IOUDIS = 1 GETTING HIT HERE DOIO M_AN1 TRUE\n");
< 			m_an1 = true; break;
1571d1558
< printf("DOIO M_AN1 FALSE");
1575d1561
< printf("DOIO M_AN1 TRUE");
1616,1618d1601
< 
< int joyreturnvalue;
< 
1680,1689d1662
< 		case 0x5a: // AN1 off
< printf("IOUDIS %x\n",m_ioudis);
< printf("C000R READ M_AN1 FALSE");
< 			m_an1 = false; break;
< 
< 		case 0x5b: // AN1 on
< printf("IOUDIS %x\n",m_ioudis);
< printf("C000R READ M_AN1 TRUE");
< 			m_an1 = true; break;
< 
1699,1701c1672
< 		case 0x69:  
< 
< if (!(m_sysconfig->read() & 0x80))
---
> 		case 0x69:
1703,1709c1674
< else {
< //NEWSTUFF (just a text target to search for)
< joyreturnvalue=(~(m_djoy_b->read()) & 0x01) ? 0x0 : 0x80;
< printf("pb0 MDJOY_READ VALUE RAW= %x INVERT= %x  RETURN= %x \n",m_djoy_b->read(),~m_djoy_b->read(),joyreturnvalue);
< if (machine().time().as_double() < 5.0) printf("Machine Time:%lf\n",machine().time().as_double());
< if (machine().time().as_double() < 1.0) return 0; else return joyreturnvalue;
< }
---
> 
1712d1676
< if (!(m_sysconfig->read() & 0x80))
1714,1719d1677
< else {
< joyreturnvalue=((~(m_djoy_0_1->read())) & ((m_an1) ? 0x01 : 0x04)) ? 0x0 : 0x80;
< printf("pb1 MDJOY_READ VALUE RAW= %x INVERT= %x  RETURN= %x \n",m_djoy_0_1->read(),~m_djoy_0_1->read(),joyreturnvalue);
< if (machine().time().as_double() < 5.0) printf("Machine Time:%lf\n",machine().time().as_double());
< if (machine().time().as_double() < 1.0) return 0; else return joyreturnvalue;
< }
1723d1680
< if (!(m_sysconfig->read() & 0x80))
1725,1731d1681
< else {
< joyreturnvalue=((~(m_djoy_0_1->read())) & ((m_an1) ? 0x02 : 0x08)) ? 0x0 : 0x80;
< printf("pb2 MDJOY_READ VALUE RAW= %x INVERT= %x  RETURN= %x \n",m_djoy_0_1->read(),~m_djoy_0_1->read(),joyreturnvalue);
< 
< if (machine().time().as_double() < 5.0) printf("Machine Time:%lf\n",machine().time().as_double());
< if (machine().time().as_double() < 1.0) return 0; else return joyreturnvalue;
< }
1756,1757d1705
< //printf("DEFAULT DO-IO in c000R offset %x\n",offset);
< 
1888d1835
< if (offset==0x5a || offset==0x5b) printf("WRITE8 C000W DEFAULT %X\n",offset);
3145,3168d3091
< 
< static INPUT_PORTS_START( apple2_sirius_joyport )
<         PORT_START("djoy_0_1")
<         PORT_BIT(0x01, 0x01, IPT_JOYSTICK_UP)    PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_8_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_Y_UP_SWITCH)    PORT_PLAYER(1)
<         PORT_BIT(0x02, 0x02, IPT_JOYSTICK_DOWN)  PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_2_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_Y_DOWN_SWITCH)  PORT_PLAYER(1)
<         PORT_BIT(0x04, 0x04, IPT_JOYSTICK_LEFT)  PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_4_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_X_LEFT_SWITCH)  PORT_PLAYER(1)
<         PORT_BIT(0x08, 0x08, IPT_JOYSTICK_RIGHT) PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_6_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_X_RIGHT_SWITCH) PORT_PLAYER(1)
<         PORT_BIT(0x10, 0x10, IPT_JOYSTICK_UP)    PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_8_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_Y_UP_SWITCH)    PORT_PLAYER(2)
<         PORT_BIT(0x20, 0x20, IPT_JOYSTICK_DOWN)  PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_2_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_Y_DOWN_SWITCH)  PORT_PLAYER(2)
<         PORT_BIT(0x40, 0x40, IPT_JOYSTICK_LEFT)  PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_4_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_X_LEFT_SWITCH)  PORT_PLAYER(2)
<         PORT_BIT(0x80, 0x80, IPT_JOYSTICK_RIGHT) PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_6_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_X_RIGHT_SWITCH) PORT_PLAYER(2)
< 
<         PORT_START("djoy_b")
<         PORT_BIT(0x01, 0x01, IPT_BUTTON1) PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_0_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_BUTTON1) PORT_PLAYER(1)
<         PORT_BIT(0x02, 0x02, IPT_BUTTON1) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_BUTTON1) PORT_PLAYER(2)
<         PORT_BIT(0x04, 0x04, IPT_UNUSED)
<         PORT_BIT(0x08, 0x08, IPT_UNUSED)
<         PORT_BIT(0x10, 0x10, IPT_BUTTON2) PORT_CODE(KEYCODE_DEL_PAD) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_BUTTON2) PORT_PLAYER(1)
<         PORT_BIT(0x20, 0x20, IPT_BUTTON2) PORT_CODE(JOYCODE_BUTTON2) PORT_PLAYER(2)
<         PORT_BIT(0x40, 0x40, IPT_UNUSED)
<         PORT_BIT(0x80, 0x80, IPT_UNUSED)
< INPUT_PORTS_END
< 
< 
3171d3093
<         PORT_INCLUDE( apple2_sirius_joyport )
3181,3183d3102
<         PORT_CONFNAME(0x80, 0x00, "Gameport type")
<         PORT_CONFSETTING(0x00, "Normal")
<         PORT_CONFSETTING(0X80, "Sirius Joyport (Atari Digital)")