Many people from the retro community still have their beloved joysticks and gamepads from the early days. These devices often live their lives somewhere in the dark corners of our basements and we don’t dare to throw them away, because of nostalgic reasons. They remind us so much of our childhoods, where we played our Wing Commanders, X-Wings, Descents and many other games.

These old joysticks were all made to be connected to the game port, usually on a sound card. But by the end of 90’s and beginning of 2000’s game ports vanished from computers and were replaced by USB and old joysticks disappeared into the past.

Today not everybody has a full retro PC and many people are using their modern computer with DOSBox to play the old games, sometimes with a modern USB joystick. But wouldn’t it be great to play the old games with the same joystick which we used back then? And this is where the Necroware’s GamePort Adapter comes into play. It can be used to connect gameport joysticks to a USB port.

The adapter is built around Arduino Pro Micro, which uses an ATmega32U4 microcontroller . This microcontroller has built-in USB HID capabilities and can be used to build HID input devices, like joysticks. The adapter itself is super simple, the main work was invested in the software. It reads the joystick states and sends the data, via USB, to the computer, which thinks that it is communicating with a USB joystick.

See more on GitHub.