manette Vectrex

Q. My joystick won't auto-center anymore; can I fix it?
(AKA How do I get inside or open up my joystick?)

You can't make it "good-as-new", but you can repair it so that is is
usable again. You must first get past the sticker on the top of the
joystick to get at the 5 screws that hold it together (4 are about 3/8"
in from the sides and 1/2" from the top/bottom and the last is about
1/2" to the right of the cable). Just feel around and you should be
able to find where the holes are. You can either try to peel off the
sticker (difficult to do without damaging it but possible if you are
careful) or simply punch 5 holes in it so you can remove the screws
(leaving most of the sticker intact). Now that you have the joystick
open, remove the broken spring that used to center the joystick.

You then have 2 choices that work equally well.

(1) Sean Kelly (skelly@flood.xnet.com) came up with another great
method. If you are technically inclined, you can open the potientometer
and replace the spring with a spring out of an Atari 2600 cartridge.
The spring that's used to push down the "protective" cover on 2600 carts
fits nicely. It needs a little bending, but I've replaced several
broken ones with them and they work great...

(2) Use the core from the largest available guitar string to replace the
spring you just removed. If you snip off one end you can remove the
(usually gold) wire wrapped around a core wire by pulling on the gold
wire. Credit goes to Dan Muntz once again for this clever solution and
to Mike Packard (lordgen@kaiwan.com) for details about the screws.