Well, apart from the initial cleaning of my one working 5200 joystick, the thing has been trouble free, relatively speaking.
That is, until this weekend. Suddenly, moving the joystick to the right did not reliably cause things on screen to move. Sometimes the effect is worse than others. In Pac-Man, the right motion is present, but sometimes requires me to really jam the stick in that direction to get some action. In Defender, rightward motion seems really inhibited by corresponding up/down motions. Interestingly, while playing Super Breakout, right always works, but stops about 90% of the way across the screen.
I thought the problem was the horizontal potentiometer, so I opened the thing up and, using Super Breakout, gave it a twist. Seems to move all the way across the screen freely in both directions when I directly manipulate the pot.
I'm really confused. Any ideas on what this could be about?
