Kempston Micro Electronics

Kempston Micro Electronics was a British electronics company, which specialized in the 1980s in the distribution of joysticks and Perepheriegeräte for home computers; some devices, the firm also manufactures itself. The company had its headquarters in Kempston, Bedfordshire, England.

In order to develop a market for the joystick offered by the company, Kempston produced several joystick interfaces for the most common in the UK home computer, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the factory brought unlike many other home computers no jacks for connecting joysticks. With the Kempston interface that were plugged into the universal expansion port on the back of Spectum, it was possible at that time to be regarded as the de facto standard Atari to use 2600 -compatible joystick with DE -9 connector on this computer. With the sale of these interfaces Kempston joystick also established a standard for reading the joystick position by Spectum software; a bit pattern of the presently closed contacts appears from the perspective of the Z80 processor to the I / O port 31 and can therefore, for example, be read with the BASIC command " LET j = IN 31 ". This control logic was later adopted by other companies. Sinclair himself, however, they did not take over when the company finally own joystick interface for the ZX Spectum offered with the " ZX Interface 2 ". Many later Spectrum games therefore allow the user to select between several different joystick interface or using the keyboard as a replacement if no interface is present.

Joysticks, who were expelled from Kempston and worked with the interface, were among others Competition Pro Competition Pro Plus, scoreboard and Formula 1 and 2

• Hardware Manufacturers (United Kingdom)
• Former company (East of England)
• Home computer
• Borough of Bedford