Original Competition Pro Joystick remade!

[J T]

I still have two of those cheetah sticks (along with a load of others in a big box in the loft). I friend bought a Cheetah for his spectrum (as they had the extra Speccy connector built in) and he bought it round for me to try out on my CPC464 and it convinced me to get one to replace the old joystick I had at the time.

Mine didn't have the speccy thing built in, we had like a dongle thing that went into the big long interface (Kempston?) at the back of the speccy and had an Atari type socket on the front.

[Harrison]

You still needed the kempston interface for the speccy, but speccy atari ports were wired differently to the Atari standard pinout (for some odd reason) and the Cheetah stick had a second grey Atari connector running from the main black one for speccy users to be able to use the joystick.

[J T]

Hmmm, I was sure ours didn't have that but we definitely used it for the speccy. Maybe I didn't remember properly. I tried to avoid using that joystick whenever possible.

[TiredOfLife]

Had a Speedking with my 64.
Very comftable but not very robust.
Didn't last long.
The cheetahs must be among the worst joysticks ever.
The word joy should be used anywhere near a discription of those things.
For some mad reason, a lot of speccy owners had them.
Bad choice all round.
Speccy owners deserved cheetahs as far as I am concerned.

Go ead, on a roll now.
Slagged of the hated atari st, ste, dodo or whatever yesterday.
(wonder what ST and STE were abbreviations for)
Ripped into the speccy geeks today.

[Harrison]

For some mad reason, a lot of speccy owners had them.

That is because it was one of the only joysticks that would work with the speccy's Kemston interface!

wonder what ST and STE were abbreviations for

ST stood for a very geeky and crappy abbreviation:

ST = Sixteen/Thirtytwo Named as such due to the 68000 working externally on a 16-bit bus, but internally a 32-bit one.

The E in STE stood for Enhanced. Atari tried to update the ST hardware by bolting on some additions the Amiga had since it's start. The biggest additions were a dedicated blitter, 8-bit stereo sound, simm ram sockets and a few other things.

[AlexJ]

Zipstick was my joystick of choice at the time, although I also had a "Bug" controller like this one (sorry bout the poor pic quality):



Was quite different to use, but suprisingly good.

[TiredOfLife]

For some mad reason, a lot of speccy owners had them.

That is because it was one of the only joysticks that would work with the speccy's Kemston interface!

wonder what ST and STE were abbreviations for

ST stood for a very geeky and crappy abbreviation:

ST = Sixteen/Thirtytwo Named as such due to the 68000 working externally on a 16-bit bus, but internally a 32-bit one.

The E in STE stood for Enhanced. Atari tried to update the ST hardware by bolting on some additions the Amiga had since it's start. The biggest additions were a dedicated blitter, 8-bit stereo sound, simm ram sockets and a few other things.

No mate, I'm sure your wrong.
Think along the lines of something being crap, literally.
I'm sure you get my drift.

[Harrison]

Yeah, yeah, add an h after the S etc... old joke among Amiga fans.

[Demon Cleaner]

ST could also be for Jack Tramiel's son Sam.

[Agram]

The blue version of the Competition Pro looks like a re-make of the original Competition Pro Star.

Speedlink have a new Amiga Classix Bundle blue USB Competition Pro. Think this pdf file lists what games are included.