Since starting this project I’ve acquired a selection of Playstation kit at local car boots sales. No cheap Playstation 2 consoles - but a few of the Playstation 1 ones though.

However the real prizes are the controllers. Whilst it would be possible to build a new controller from scratch - its much easy to modify an existing one. This is  because unlike PC gameport joysticks - the Playstation ones have their own logic and use a propriety high speed serial interface to connect to the console. Modifying an existing controller avoids me having to implement this serial interface.

The serial interface may be standard - but the contents of the controllers are not and some are more suitable than others for modification. Playstation controllers do come in 2 main flavours though - digital and analogue. The digital ones only have buttons whereas the analogue ones also have a pair of small thumb joysticks. These analogue controllers are more interesting as my main goal is to replace one of the thumb joysticks with a PC style analogue one.

I’ve aquired a few different Playstation controllers so far and hopefully will open them all up for comparison. I’ve concentrated on non Sony analogue ones as these are apparently more easy to modify than genuine Sony ones.

Here are a couple of Joytech ones I’ve acquired. The blue one is unmarked - but the black one is a model: JS-109A. Click on the pictures for futher details:

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