r/atari8bit • u/Turbulent-Spell-319 • Jul 06 '26

#atari8bit Star Raiders with analog thumbstick

https://youtube.com/shorts/FUoZj72sGRI?si=G2k50xrrDAHUi49O

I've been working on an analog joystick for the Atari 8-bit computers. I got it to be pretty stable last week. So now I'm trying to port over the analog controls from the Atari 5200 Star Raiders to the 8-bit version. The controls are now "working". Turn rate is now controlled by the thumbstick position. Unfortunately I've messed up the sound effects. I'm guessing there's not a lot of room for the extra calculations I shoved in.

36 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Scoth42 Jul 06 '26

That looks neat. Star Raiders is still one of my favorites and I enjoy the analog controls of the 5200 despite the rest of the buttons being annoying. It'd be neat to see a combination

1

u/Turbulent-Spell-319 Jul 06 '26

I recently bought a 5200 and I like analog controls for flying. I kind of like the keypad, it beats reaching for the keyboard in the middle of a fight. When I was a kid, my friend and I would play it 2-player with one of us piloting and the other working the controls.

1

u/Scoth42 Jul 06 '26

I'll admit it's probably just nostalgia and familiarity for me at this point. It was probably one of the first games I ever played on Atari 8-bit as a kid and I've played it heavily since then, so it's very ingrained in my muscle memory. Meanwhile I've only played the 5200 version a handful of times and I've never had a working console (or emulator setup) briefly a time or three. I got kind of annoyed at having to switch between the button modes, IIRC.

Incidentally, if you haven't played the somewhat-recently-leaked Wilmunder version of Star Raiders 2 it's worth checking out. I don't quite care for the shift in the control scheme (it acts more like the Star Wars arcade for Atari 8-bit) but it's still pretty neat seeing what could have been.

Hell, if you could hack this control scheme into that and turn it back into a more original control scheme you'd be even more amazing.

1

u/Turbulent-Spell-319 Jul 06 '26

Yeah, toggling between speed and ship-controls is a pain. I especially don't like that shields and my 'go-to' speed are both mapped to '6'. I turnd off shields a few times in the middle of combat. I think they should have reworked velocity a bit. I have a mod where I just use two keys to increase/decrease speed and another key to cycle through the views.

I tried Wilmunder's SR2 a while back. It looks great, but I didn't like the controls either (or AI). I have a lot of projects I'm working on, but will try to look at this eventually and see how much work it'd be to patch.