Although I tend to use emulation to record my Atari A to Z videos for the sake of convenience, when I actually want to sit down and play something on the Atari 8-bit or Atari ST, I prefer to use the original hardware.

There are myriad reasons for this, probably chief among them being that strange sense of nostalgia for things that used to be inconvenient, like disk loading times (and the noise of disk drives!), playing on a small CRT TV (or TV-monitor in my case, since we had — and I still have — a lovely Trinitron hybrid thing) and all those delightful compatibility issues we used to have to deal with.

There’s one aspect that can prove quite annoying, however, and that’s the tendency of old joysticks to fail. While games for many home computers of the ’80s offered keyboard control as an alternative, on Atari systems it was often joystick or nothing. So clearly the way was open for a company to put out a modern joystick that would work on an old system.

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