Sometimes I wonder if the 11-year-old is too retro. His current hobby is playing an emulated version of Street Fighter 2 on his PC. And now that a vintage-gaming store has opened in the next town over, he pretty much wants to buy out their stock. (Lucky there’s still one standard-def TV in the house)

But he’s also kinda modern. So when we came across an ancient Atari-style joystick, he looked at it and said, “Hey dad, how about a Teensy in HID mode?”

We opened it up (which required drilling out one of the case screws that was apparently sealed with glue) and I soldered all the old connector clips to the circuit board, then clipped the wires short and soldered them to a spare Teensy 2.0. Anybody need a 9-pin Atari-style cable with only 6 sockets populated?

He mostly took it from there. I told him which pins I’d attached the wires to, and he fired up a copy of the Arduino IDE, found an example program that read a switch and bodged it to what he needed. Didn’t work. A day or two later he came to me and I thought about it,  realized how foolish I’d been, and said “Change all your pinmodes from INPUT to INPUT_PULLUP.” He did, and now the thing works.

Wonder what he’s going to do next.