Amstrad JY-1/JY-2 joysticks

Amstrad JY-2 Joystick

The original joysticks for the Amstrad CPC computers.

In order to push sales of Amstrad's own joysticks, Amstrad designed the CPC with one joystick port only which had two different ground levels. The idea was to sell one joystick which forwarded the second ground signal to a built-in joystick port, to which the second joystick could be connected.

This plan didn't fully work out for Amstrad for multiple reasons:

• The original joysticks were plain unusable crap, so that most users bought a JY-2 at most and a different one as second joystick.
• There were 3rd party Joystick Y-cables available, which allowed the use of any joystick on the market, rather than Amstrad's lousy ones
• Many games didn't even support two joysticks (Though for many of them you could just redefine keys to match the keypresses produced by the second joystick)

Besides the port for the second joystick, the JY-1 and JY-2 joysticks were identical.

Peculiarities

• Connector for second joystick (JY-2 only)