Video game history is littered with cool peripherals that were only supported by less than a handful of games. NES R.O.B., SuperScope, etc.

How I longed for that Power Glove, though in retrospect it's an incredibly stupid interface.

"Its so bad..." Oh how right he was.

I have a bin of plastic instruments lying around somewhere

Logitech Cyberman is my favourite.

The "paddle" and "driving" controllers looked the same, but they did not have the same function.

A paddle controller for the Atari 2600 had a hard stop, so that it could only make one revolution (or a bit less) in each direction. Therefore, you could use it with Tennis or Pong or whatever else just had you going back-and-forth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_(game_controller)

A driving controller spun freely in both directions without stopping its motion. This was not analogous to the steering wheel of a car, but it did permit driving games to be relatively free-wheeling, and you could spin the car's wheels endlessly in either direction.

In my experience, paddle controllers were more compatible with more games, but if you had a diverse library, it behooved you to keep driving controllers on-hand for that eventuality. Other unique controllers included the BASIC Programming pads, and one of those space games which had some really intricate controls on the dash.

The "driving" controller class was the type that was supported by Tempest. Analogous to the arcade controller, you could spin indefinitely in either direction without having the physical tab to stop the motion. This definitely contributed to the fun and suspense of the gameplay!

Mine had no stop so it must have been the driving controller (though now I may be mixing up my 2600 with my 7200). Time flies.

Driving controller makes way more sense for tempest, and the lack of use. My family had a pretty extensive collection of 2600 games, and two sets of paddles (needed for four player paddle games, we had one, but it wasn't very good and the 2nd set of paddles was wonky anyway), but no driving controller or any games that used it.

I had several driving games, too. But they used a joystick or the paddles.

I'm not sure about the specific Atari 2600 controllers but my hazy memory has at least three types of what appear to be rotary.

One is basically a self centring sprung up/off/down switch. That would be similar to a car indicator stalk and simple left/right arrow keys.

Another would be rotary with a stop but it sent a physical position, presumably it was something like a variable resistor or very fine resolution rotary switch. With these you could instantly position your character by the position on the ring/slider. This could be interpreted as position 1, 2, 3 etc etc.

The third was a free spinning which moved the character faster the faster you spun it. This would be how I remember Tempest playing, you could slowly nudge it or just do a fast spin & stop to quickly move around. This would produce a signal such as clockwise+very slow or anti-clockwise+very fast.

On the Apple 2 at least the paddles registered a number between 0-255. The joysticks were just “2 paddles” with an x and y between 0-255.

I remember a little adjustment slider to help the joystick center near 0,0

Wait. Did you never play Kaboom? Kaboom was awesome!

I had a very limited library. I think it was Pitfall, Combat, Tempest, and Berzerk. Kaboom looks fun though.

Kaboom! and Tempest...a perfect combination!

Did you actually play Tempest on the Atari 2600? As far as I know, Atari did a prototype, but never shipped it.

https://www.atariage.com/software_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=8...