Overview

Introduction

Classic Commodore computers support up to two controllers for multi-player games. This is not much, if you want to enjoy retro-fun with a couple of friends. In our youth, we were more patient, sometimes waiting for our loading of a game or our turn in a single-player game for minutes, but today we are older (at least I am) and don't have all the time in the world, plus having more people having fun simultaneously is really great.

So, this is all about adding more controllers (hardware) and writing new games or adopting old ones to the hardware.

Details

Inspired by playing Tron on a C-64 with the Protovision 4-player adapter (that just adds two ports, so on a VIC-20 it would actually be a 3-player adapter), I decided to build an adapter for the User-Port that supports 8 additional controllers. There is already hardware available supporting 8 or 16 Joysticks for computers that have two Joystick ports (search for ATARI MultiJoy interface), but that would not work for the VIC-20 and does interfere with normal operation of the internal ports.

AND i want LEDs (blinkenlights!). Hence the EightPlayer adapter.