Last night I fired up the one-twenty-eight to play something from the Thunder Mountain Action Pack. So I held down the Commodore key and powered up the computer, then proceeded to type the regular L-shift-O (for “LOAD”), but rather than get the PETSCII character for shift-O, I saw the one for shift-Q. What happened? I rebooted and tried again and got the same results. I then just tried typing the letter O and got Qs instead. Uh-oh…

I then tried powering up into 128 mode and typing the O and got GRAPHIC (the F1 key). What has happened to my computer?! Oh no!

After the initial wash of dread that something within my beloved 128 had blown a circuit, I started to think. What could it be? It was working fine the night before. I was playing Apache Strike just fine. Then it occurred to me, I had to use the joystick in port one at some point and when I shut down for the night, I must have put it back on the shelf under the computer in such a way that the stick is leaning up against something or the fire button is depressed.

Sure enough, the stick wasn't standing upright and must be sending a signal to the computer. As soon as I righted joystick 1, all was back to normal. Man, I hate those little gut wrenching moments like that. However, I was very relieved to see that this was just a simple misplacement of equipment on my part and not some kind of computer fault. Thank you, Lord!

It's been such a long time since I had to deal with this situation; for a while there I completely forgot that this can occur with port 1. It did take a minute or two for my aging brain to “search the archive” and recall this troubleshooting data. But, thankfully, I did eventually remember this simple fix.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share my experience here in the event you reading this might find yourself with a similar problem with your Commodore computer. Keyboard not working as it should? Check the joystick plugged in to port 1!

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