Amstrad JY-1/JY-2 joysticks

Amstrad JY-2 Joystick

The JY-1, JY-2 and JY3 are the original Digital Joysticks from Amstrad for the Amstrad CPC computers.

In order to push sales of Amstrad's own joysticks, Amstrad designed the CPC with only one joystick port 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 of bad quality, 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)

Peculiarities

Connector for second joystick (JY-2 only)
JY-1 has only one single fire button (at the top), plus connector for second joystick, the JY-1 doesn't use microswitches
JY-2 has two fire buttons (one at top and one for the trigger), plus connector for second joystick
JY3 had a different design, the "trigger" button was moved to the bottom, unknown if it featured a connector for 2nd joystick (?)