I had one of these with my Amiga, favourite joystick ever.
What’s megadrive about them? Is the pinout different?
The one on the right is the MegaDrive one, three buttons + a start button. The C button is by your left thumb. The other only has the one button despite the label showing A + B buttons. Dunno about the pinout but they used the Atari style plug and will have worked fine on Amiga just like the MegaDrive pads did back in the day.
Ah didn’t spot the start button. Yeah I remember the label saying A and B despite only having one button.
Cool.
My friend had one as well for the Amiga back in the day, but being left-handed I was never a fan.
I had a C16 variant. There were few joysticks with the C16’s DIN plug on them.
Those joysticks were very popular in the late 80’s for the Amiga (Atari standard plug). Very high quality switches and good accurate control.
I had one of those for my Atari ST. Surprisingly comfortable and very strong too. That was a great joystick.
I had one back in the day for my Speccy and despite it being advertised as indestructible I managed to break the red plastic off the stick during a particularly furious swim in Hyper Sports. Had a lovely wound in the centre of my palm for my trouble too. Still my favourite joystick even with just the metal shaft left for the stick and served me well into my Amiga days. Never saw the MegaDrive one in the wild but saw a few Master System ones with 2 buttons. Couldn’t believe it when it came up on eBay.
Oh my god Hyper Sports. Those kinds of games were joystick killers. Combat School killed my Quickshot 2!
That’s when I took it apart and learned about leaf springs and why microswitched joysticks were better.
Impressive. If I recall correctly those things had like a 5mm metal shaft molded into the stick. I don’t think mine ever broke, despite some fairly heavy use. I recall the auto fire switch being pretty flimsy though.
I had a very similar one for my MSX :)