Joystick port problem

Ghislain · Post by **Ghislain** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:46 am

A problem has recently surfaced wtih my VIC-20... it appears that in some games, the player will start moving right by itself, with or without pushing the joystick to the right, and it even happens if there is no joystick plugged in! I understand that the VIC-20 is almost 25 years old now and that such problems were eventually bound to happen, but I was wondering if anyone else had a similar problem and how they fixed it?

The games that this problem occurs on are:

Avenger
Colorbot (type-in game from COMPUTE!'s Gazette)
Pitfall (my version of the Atari 2600 game for the VIC-20)

The problem does not occur on the following games:

Gorf
Serpentine

It's funny that the problem does not occur if the screen border is not black. I'll have to keep testing. Maybe I'll have to buy another VIC?

Post by **Jeff-20** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 9:44 pm

O.k. I DEMAND to see this pitfall! Even a screenshot. Just the thought is amazing to me. I love cross-platform stuff! I am excited to hear someone has tried this.

Ghislain · Post by **Ghislain** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 3:13 pm

Jeff-20 wrote:O.k. I DEMAND to see this pitfall! Even a screenshot. Just the thought is amazing to me. I love cross-platform stuff! I am excited to hear someone has tried this.

I'll have to upload it to a PC with my StarCommander cable. But it will take some time to do this, as I need a computer that has Windows 98 to do this. I used to have a geocities page with some of my vic-20 games but I lost it. I actually had 2 versions of pitfall that I made: "Pitfall!" and "Vicfall!".

If I let you see Pitfall!, would you be able to show us your version of Vic Windows 95 and/or Mortal Vikbat?

As for my joystick port problem, I decided to learn to live with it. It appears that most people have problems with their VIC-20s in some form or another. Maybe it will eventually go away?

Mayhem · Post by **Mayhem** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:03 pm

If you make a copy of the media, no problem to sling it over to me (although I am in the UK) to transfer across (fully cabled to the MAX here for transfer of anything... all hail the powerful 486 of doom!).

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 8:31 pm

Here is a digicam picture of my version of Pitfall! (made in 1993--I was a retrogamer back then before it was cool to be a retrogamer)

Post by **Jeff-20** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 11:14 pm

fuggin awesome... (tear to the eye) I... must... play...

I love the activision parody logo at the bottom of the screen.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 3:30 am

So, will Ghislain port The Last Ninja to VIC-20 too? (System 3 rather than System 4).

Post by **Jeff-20** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 10:47 am

I wanna see Tomb Raider!