For a long time, I thought about designing a Joystick (IBM 15-pin) to Parallel adapter with a parallel pass-through for connecting peripheral devices, like a sound card, for example, to the system so both can be used simultaneously.

For this design, it'll consist of a 25-pin male connector for the parallel port, a 25-pin female connector for connecting peripherals, and a 15-pin male GamePort for connecting IBM and compatible joysticks that have any number of buttons on it and throttle controls. For making the design to work, ADC chips will be utilized (analog to digital) along with a TSR to awaken the adapter and allow the joystick to operate for games that use it.

Pretty much like the LPT Joystick design that someone wrote for Atari/Commodore joysticks (http://web.archive.org/web/20010405143853/htt … ra/lpt_joy.html), except it'll use the 15-pin GamePort instead of the 9-pin connector.

All I need to figure out is how to connect the X and Y axes, buttons, and throttle to the parallel port (the X and Y axes ones will be tied to an analog to digital chip first) so the joysticks can work without issues.

The reason I came up with this is 1) laptops from the early 1990s and earlier lack PCMCIA slots (didn't come with those for some systems, like the Zenith Data Systems Z-Note 32X series), 2) for systems that don't have adequate amount of ISA/XT slots open for a GamePort card or a sound card, and 3) with possible additions, like Sound Blaster Pro capabilities with MPU-401 to it along with network capabilities (DOS and Windows compatible), it'll make things interesting. Also, for this particular design, it'll work with systems from the 8088 to Pentium 4. And for designing a TSR program, I haven't done any coding, but anyone is open to create the TSR program for the adapter.

You may present your ideas for this as well and schematics for converting from analog to digital, where the wiring goes, and so on.