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Why did many commodore 64 games require the joystick to be in port #2, despite being single-player games?

I remember being annoyed by having to unplug and plug the joystick between games.

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ha, I didn't remember this. I had a very big problem because when the joystick was plugged to that port it didn't work to move down, so there were games I could not play. +1! – jmfsg♦ Jul 14 '10 at 13:58
I agree with the selected answer, but I heard a rumour once that there was a tendency for American games tended to use one port and UK games the other. I never did an exhaustive study. – Oddthinking Jul 15 '10 at 13:44
But why would that be? I always assumed that the 2# port was intended for plugging a second joystick for a two player game. It's also possible that for some reason it was easier, faster or in some other way more effective to read port #2 than port #1 for games. – Petruza Jul 18 '10 at 12:21

2 Answers

up vote 23 down vote accepted

I never really thought about that much as a kid, when I had my C-64 (we just left a joystick plugged into #2 all the time).

However, after some digging, according to Ode to Joysticks:

Port 2 eventually emerged as the default, mainly because joysticks plugged into Port 1 could interfere with the command line interface.

Which is a good point, now that I read that, I do remember that having a joystick plugged into port #1 would send bizarre key codes to the primary BASIC interpreter/command line.

Ahhhh, memories!

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Yes! I remember that too! I had though it was on purpose!! – jmfsg♦ Jul 14 '10 at 14:28
Oh Yes!!!! one direction printed the number 2, I recall. Maybe Joystick port #1 used the same OS interrupts that those keys. Totally off-topic: when writing on the command-line, if you opened double quotes, special keys as the cursor, home, etc. would print a reversed char instead of performing their main function, until you closed the double quotes. This was for allowing printing special chars from basic code. I didn't realise this as a kid and sent my C64 to the technical service to get it fixed assuming the keyboard was malfunctioning :P – Petruza Jul 14 '10 at 19:19
Hm, port 2 is read from $DC00 and port 1 from $DC01. I wonder if it might not also be because $DC00 is simply more logical to use. Port 2 will type characters as well. :) – bzlm Sep 24 '10 at 14:29
up vote 2 down vote

My impression was that keys were given by port1 so you could read a joystick with the GET(A$) command just by checking for keypresses.

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