Tutorial written by : bek

If you have installed the fabulous UAEX on your XBOX and love the feel of your old Amiga games playing on your console, please read on. This tutorial describes how to add an Amiga joystick port to you XBOX gamepad, so that the Amiga gaming experience can come even close to the good ol'e days!

Pictures
Notice: The pictures have been scaled to fit the style of this site. For larger images please go to http://www.termestrup.dk/zipstick/ Take a look here to get an idea of what we are trying to accomplish!

* Before modding

* Soldering (first attempt, wires are placed wrong, don't use this image as reference!)

* Soldering done

* Ready for assembly

* Back view

* Rick D. - the way it was meant to be played!

* The finished product

What you need

* A male 9-pin joystick connector (the opposite of the one on your joystick)
* A soldering iron and a bit of tin solder
* 6 thin wires of approx. 15 cm. (about 6 inches)
* An XBOX gamepad (I used the MS one that came with the box - others might have a different layout)
* A camera so that you can post pictures of the modding on the web :-)

Notice: I placed the port in the bottom slot on the back of the controller. If you don't wish to do this, read everything through and make modifications as you see fit.

How to proceed

* Unscrew the seven screws on the controller, turn it upside down (so all the buttons won't fall out) and open.
* Unscrew the four small screws and the wires for the shock-thingies and take out the print
* We want to use the joystick for the 4-way digital buttons (do they have a name) on the left and the joystick button for button "A"
* Solder the 6 wires onto the 9-pin connector on pins 1 (up), 2 (down), 3 (left), 4 (right), 6 (fire) and 8 (ground). For those who do not have numbers on the connector, 1 is the top left when looking from the side on which you solder the wires
* Mark the wires with their respective numbers so that you can recognise them
* Take off the plastic casing for the two slots on the back of the controller - insert the connector in the bottom slot, letting the wires from pins 1-4 go out of the hole to the left and put the ones from 6 and 8 through the hole in the right
* Put the plastic casing back on place with all the wires now being on the bottom side of the controller, 4 wires on the left and 2 on the right (if you are using longer wires the right/left side probably doesn't matter that much)
* What we want to do is basically to short circuit each of the 4 directions with ground. On the top there is really no good place to solder, so we follow the wires and see that they are connected to the chip on the bottom side.
* Turn the pad upside down with the wire pointing towards you. The wires should be soldered onto the chip as shown on this illustration, that is the wire from pin 4 (right) onto the bottom leg of the left row and 3 (left), 2 (down) and 1 (up) connected to the first, second and third legs from the left on the bottom row.

* The fire button wire (from pin 6) should be soldered on right below where it says TP78 (refer to the illustration again) and ground should be soldered onto something that looks like it connects to ground.. :-)
* Try to fasten the connector in the slot - e.g. by heating the metal until the plastic melts a bit..
* Close everything back up, load UAEX and rejoice!

Post scriptum

The old Amiga games just got much more fun to play! Now I only need to do this again for some nice 2-player action in IK+, Dynablaster, Turbo-raketti, Golden Axe, Jupiter Masterdrive, etc., etc... ;-)

Thanks to Mads for doing the quite delicate soldering! And of course to everybody behind UAEX, EvolutionX, xbox-linux and the rest of the community!