Giving the Jakks Atari Paddle a Spin

FYI, the system was programmed by Jeff Vavasour’s team at Digital Eclipse Vancouver, using what was described as “partial emulation.” The underlying hardware seems to have been a Winbond W55x-family microcontroller, which is 65C816-compatible. Years later, after the closure of Digital Eclipse Vancouver, Vavasour’s current Code Mystics studio would develop the first Jakks Pacific plug-n-play game system running entirely via software emulation, their 2011 Taito (“Retro Arcade featuring Space Invaders”) system.

Some things I like to talk about on this blog are “paddle” games that use a potentiometer to control the player position, and plug-and-play consoles. Oh, and the Atari 2600. Well, it just so happens that Jakks Pacific in 2004 released something that combines both of them: the Atari Paddle. It’s like they had this blog in mind.

Hardware

The Atari 2600 had a few different types of controllers used with it. The four-way joystick is the most famous, but second to that are probably the paddles. After all, this was an era where Pong could still be a selling point for your game; well, if you dressed it up and called it Video Olympics, anyway.

You might notice a big difference