Tymeg

Hmmm, you may be on to something.  The opener can play all of the great songs that are skipped by the main act.  Brilliant!

I've heard that vinyl is making a comeback...

It is making a comeback, besides buying new releases in MP3 and CD, you can get them in vinyl now too...

When they start offering 8-tracks again is when I'll be really impressed...

Then there was the time that the Cap'n had an 8-track recorder and made copies of some new releases for grins and giggles to show people at parties...

I might have "missed" that party. And by "missed" I mean I don't remember due to consuming mass quantities...

My impression of him is that they both have the same problem when you add alcohol...

I think this has gotten slightly derailed...

I always wanted to get a train crossing for the AFX slot cars that I had...

I picked up some train stuff last year. Now I just need to find some AFX track...

Then time to re-purpose one of these to control the trains *and* cars?

I wonder if I still have the schematic for that somewhere. I'll probably need to retrofit it for the *slut* cars though...

(I'm guessing that my post yesterday failed...)

It's too bad we didn't have a resource back then like we have today.  And all of the cheap micro-controllers.  While you could easily do it with an Arduino (or one of the many others), it's cheaper to just build it with basic components...

(Gaaaah, I can't get the images in the correct order this time.  You'll need to visualize the top one at the bottom and visa versa...)

Since the joystick was an in/out IO port, you got either 0 or +5v I believe. That was connected directly to the 6520 PIA chip. The paddle controllers on the other hand look like they're input only (essential an analog to digital converter) and are controlled through POKEY. What was interesting is that the XL's only had the two joystick ports because they used the other two ports as a memory driver. "Hey guys, how should we handle this extra RAM? Ooo! Ooo! I know. We'll repurpose two of the joystick ports. Dude, that's genius."

Back then, most developers were pretty much geniuses, it takes a lot to shoehorn some of the games into what memory was available...