Harry writes "Some bad decisions in game console design get made over and over. (How many early systems had nightmarish controllers?) Others are uniquely inexplicable. (Like the Game Boy Advance's lack of a headphone jack.) Some stem from companies being too clever for their own good. (Like the way the RCA Studio II and Atari 5200 drew their power through their RF switches.) Benj Edwards has rounded up a few classic examples, and has attempted to figure out what was going on in the designers' heads — and what we can learn from their mistakes."
The guy also seems to be remembering history through rose colored glasses. And I quote: "It took a long time before one innovator clearly came along (in this case, Nintendo with its NES pads) and provided a truly easy-to-use, accurate, sensitive, and comfortable solution."
He obviously doesn't remember the NES pads, or is confusing them with the SNES pads, because those little square brick NES pads were the definition of cramped hands. The first truly long term comfortable controller I ever held in my hands were the Sega Genesis original 3 button. The curved shape made it easy to tear through some Altered Beast or Super Thunder Blade. Anybody who gamed for hours with the original NES pads knows the lovely hand and finger cramps that would come after hour 2.
I must agree, only for me it wasn't cramped hands, it was "Nintendo thumb". My thumbs would get completely sore playing on the standard NES pads after about an hour. I ended up buying a NES Max, which was much, much better but shouldn't have been required. When the Genesis came along, it had basically a perfect controller out of box.
because those little square brick NES pads were the definition of cramped hands.
I started playing nes when I was 4, I stopped around age 13, those controllers were very comfortable for me. Perhaps now that I'm not a child they wouldn't be, but to children they were fine
Different people, of different ages, will play your game console. Those different people, for the most part, will want (at least if they are going to be comfortable) different-sized controllers.
Yeah. Most of the Japanese population has small hands. They're also shorter. Remember, the reason that Asian societies never had much use for the idea of the straight-blade sword, and never developed the single-handed "lunge" maneuver, is that those don't work very well for people wh
Remember, the reason that Asian societies never had much use for the idea of the straight-blade sword, and never developed the single-handed "lunge" maneuver, is that those don't work very well for people whose arms and legs are proportionally shorter than most of the Western people. If they wanted something to poke at someone at distance, their best bet was a spear.
Yeah, I remember that from training at the Jedi Academy.
Correction: The Gameboy Advance SP had no headphone jack; the original Gameboy Advance did, as did the Gameboy Micro. But who bought a Gameboy Micro, anyhow...
My first video game platform ever was an Advance SP. And I had to go buy a dongle to use headphones.
My suggestion for the series: classic smartphone design mistakes:
on the t-mobile g1, you need a humongous dongle with two mini usb slots (one for power, one for a headset), and two normal headset jacks. And with the battery life of the g1 you need to connect it to a loader as much as you can... Just search for htc yc a300 to see how ugly it is...
I bought two sets of madcatz adapters that allowed me to charge and plug in head phones at the same time. The most disappointing thing about the SP related to the GBA was that when you played four swords you could not charge. The great thing about it (even the first rev SP) was the backlight and small size.
Nice that this article fails to consider that all of these technologies come from companies developing within their comfort zones, unaware another company was pushing the boundaries or under immense budgetary pressures to save every last cent.
In the author's world of retrospect, everything should be fantastic.
On the bright side, the 5200 joysticks included the world's first on-controller pause button.
Er, the Intellivision had a system-wide pause function that would pause any game when you held the "1" and "9" keys (I believe "3" and "7" also worked) on the keypad simultaneously.
If you want to get picky there was not exactly a button marked "PAUSE", but it served the same function.
Loading times for games on CD were very long in the mid-1990s, sometimes trying the patience of the player. [...] In contrast, the access time for ROM chips in cartridges was nearly instantaneous, with nary a loading screen to be found. It made for a better user experience up-front, but ultimately that feature alone wasn't worth the price of admission.
Unfortunate, as long load times is one of the things that really irked me with the PlayStation.
They state that game publishes were reluctant to invest in cartridges, as CDs were less risky and had higher profit margins, but if the focus had been on making good games that people want to play rather than trying to weigh risks and balance game quality with profitability, they really shouldn't have had to worry about that.
Nevertheless, there were a few good N64 games and couple of great ones. Cartridges weren't a complete mistake.
well, if you take account Nintendo 64 had almost twice the ram of playstation console, and probably the devs would want to use it, that would mean in a lot of cases that N64 would have two times more loadtime than the playstation console, unless they used a more expensive 4x drive.
and that without the expansion pack thing of course, with it, we re talking about 8 mb to fill now.
actually thats not a frame buffer, but a texture cache, but you're correct on that being the cause of the crappy blurry textures.
Playstation had a 2k texture cache, but if i'm not mistaken, its hardware automatically did cut the bigger textures in smaller parts to fill the cache with the pixels that only would be used on that triangle, unlike N64 that needed to pull that off manually or not at all, as the cases you pointed.
Optical discs as a storage medium suck. They're fragile, slow to read in non-sequential order and make the machines noisy and more prone to failure. They can't die fast enough.
I always find it a bit sad that game consoles have almost entirely gone from the switch it on and play instantly to the PC's wait-half-an-eternity-to-install-and-patch routine (I'm looking at the PS3 in particular).
Sure load time on the playstation where very annoying, however there is no doubt that the decision to use cartridges hurt the N64. Final Fantasy and it's cinematics where the killer app on the playstation.
In fact, it worked so great that Nintendo lost most of big 3rd party studios/exclusivity, and all but the best N64 games had soap in place of textures.
I agree. The N64 suffered in terms of digital music and cutscenes, but the cartridges were plenty big enough to hold great games. You don't need digital music or cutscenes to make a great game.
...had two (identical) momentary buttons on the top of the console, one for 'pause' and one for 'reset'.
I remember once playing Zillion, where you had to press the pause button to switch character. I had been playing for about 4 hours when I reached for the pause button and.....
Remember having to put your PS1 on its side (or completely upside-down) or else it wouldn't read your games? The optical pickup mechanism of the early models of the PlayStation used a plastic piece as a guide for the sliding laser assembly, repeated motion degraded the plastic piece over time causing optical drift - turning the PS1 on its side forced the laser back to its correct position (yay gravity!).
Sony replaced that piece with a shiny metal guide in their later models, much like every CD-ROM drive has used for the past two decades or so.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday August 11, @05:39AM (#29021267)
How about bonehead decisions on the current consoles?
Like the PS3/X-Box analog stick "button"....who in the hell thought it was a good idea for the analog sticks to double as game buttons as well? It is impossible to NOT press these "buttons" by accident in the heat of a tense moment in any game. I can't tell you the number of times I've suddenly gone into "crouch mode" in Fallout 3 or activated my "search for power sources" mode in inFamous.
Can we get rid of this idiotic controller design, like right now?
In my experience, really bad design decisions aren't always motivated by idiots trying to push their hobby horse, but often because better solutions have been patented to death.
Case in point: electronic television guides. Every format under the sun is patented. Philips refused to submit to extortion for years and implemented one miserable scheme after another, until they finally got an agreement with a patent holder. Even then, the patent holder refused to let Philips implement the whole thing themselves but instead insisted it had to be their own, horribly buggy, implementation. You can still hear the tv-guys at Philips gnashing their teeth.
I fear it's sort of similar with these controllers: the good ideas were being patented, so the designers had to avoid them and come up with something 'original'. That doesn't always work out for the best, as demonstrated in the article:)
Perfect example of death-by-patent: Trackpoint sticks below the spacebar. Your thumb is a MUCH better finger to use for manipulating a pointer stick... it's stronger, and it's a lot easier to execute fine isometric motions with it than with a hyperextended index finger. Unfortunately, Fujitsu included the below-the-spacebar position as part of its patent for a pointer, and nobody besides Sony has ever dared to risk an infringement lawsuit by putting an "IBM" Trackpoint in the "Fujitsu" position (Sony presumably has either a cross-licensing agreement, or feels safe from a lawsuit). The fact that Fujitsu's "stick" utterly sucks ass (slippery concave top, vs rubbery convex top... the exact opposite of the Trackpoint) is the icing on the cake.
Don't believe me that it's a better position? Try it sometime. Find a Thinkpad, then position your hands so your thumb is over the stick and give it a try. You'll be left cursing everyone responsible for putting the stick between "GHB" instead of below the spacebar.
Of all the crappy design decisions Atari made with the Jaguar, they're giving it crap over the controller? The controller was pretty comfortable and worked well for most of the Jaguar games. The crappy cartridge slot that was wearing out before mine hit year 1 of ownership, the incredibly awkward and unreliable CD drive, and hardware complexity that would stump Saturn developers would've all been better knocks to make on the Jaguar.
And as far as missing items, where the HELL is the sidetalker? The origin
I want the nextgen consoles to have a standby or hibernate mode like a Windows box. I would no longer have to issue fatwas against game designers who put save points three hours apart.
I want the nextgen consoles to have a standby or hibernate mode like a Windows box. I would no longer have to issue fatwas against game designers who put save points three hours apart.
Thank you! I've been saying that for years.
As an side: if you're willing to wait a generation or so, emulators provide universal save points as well as many other convenient features.
First of all, let's understand something here. The Studio II was the second programmable console released, ever. I saw it in a list of "10 worst consoles ever" the other day... a list which I consider invalid for never mentioning the horrible Arcadia 2001. Basically, the Studio II had nothing other than Pong machines to use as a reference, since the Channel F hadn't been around long enough. (FYI, both systems were designed by chip companies trying to hype their own chipsets, and the Intellivision was a 3rd-party use of a pre-existing chip manufacturer's chipset.)
So you see, it's got the controllers built into the main console unit, and one wire for both the RF and power. But in actuality this design meant that the console was the controller! And the RF-powered idea was a clever idea to reduce cord clutter. If you're picking up the whole console and using it as a controller, you don't want a second wire getting wrapped around things.
As for the 5200, Atari was trying to cram as many patents as they could into that thing, and most of them were crap ideas that went into the controller. But this time, Atari wasn't just trying to reduce cord clutter, it was also the first system with an automatic RF switch. It's just that unlike Nintendo, they tried to do the switching with clunky relays. Atari were thinking in the right direction, but got it backwards. You give power to the RF switch, not the other way around.
However, both the Studio II and Atari proved that you could put DC and RF on the same wire, which is what made automatic RF switches a standard in every console since the NES.
It's a nice controller for sure. I've go the X-Box 360 version for my PC just so I could play Burnout Paradise (The Ultimate Box). It was well worth it IMHO. But if your into console emulators such as the SNES, Genesis, and PS1, nothing beats the Gravis GamePad Pro (USB). It's basically a Playstation controller for the PC. I'm surprised they didn't get sued by Sony unless a deal was already cut between them.
Or you can simply buy a 5$ adapter to plug your PS1/2 on your computer (USB) and use the actual PS controller. (linux even supports PS3's wireless controller)
But if your into console emulators such as the SNES, Genesis, and PS1, nothing beats the Gravis GamePad Pro (USB).
I have one. Its D-pad makes it too easy to press diagonally, which screws up my Tetris big time. So instead, I bought an Adaptoid for my N64 controllers and an EMS USB2 adapter for my PlayStation controllers.
Actually, I miss the older, larger controllers; Everything switched to the smaller controllers (which apparently many folks preferred, but which I found uncomfortably small), then to the 360 controller (which corrected some of the small controller's other flows, but is still physically smaller than I like). It's not even like I have gian hands - I just like holding something larger than the smaller controllers, and find the button positions more natural.
What made the original Xbox controller nice (for anyone who actually used it, as opposed to Sony fanwanks and Tycho/Gabe who don't ever even fucking play the games or consoles they talk shit about) is basic ergonomics.
The original Xbox controller is not designed to be held in the "traditional" controller position (wrists curled, hands tucked under, 3rd/4th/5th fingers curled in to support the console). That position is why people get carpal tunnel and "nintendo thumb".
good luck doing a good D-pad without running into a sega, sony or nintendo patent.
Exactly copying the design of the Famicom (NES) D-pad from 1983 shouldn't be illegal, given that patents run out after 20 years. Yes, unlike trademarks and lately copyrights, patents actually expire,
That's not a resistor, it's actually a mini-fuse in packaging that looks like a resistor. Those things can really be a pain in the ass if they're set up where they are easy to blow.
Yeah, the author didn't put any research into this.
For example, about the 5200 controllers he says "Atari engineers likely wanted to try something new".
However it's already well documented on the web that the engineers thought the controllers sucked. It was marketing that demanded the controller design just so they could claim a greater feature set than the Intellevision controllers.
My cousin had an Atari 5200. I recall him at some point noting his Atari being "better." But seemed every other time I saw him, the 5200 was away being repaired or some such.
The 5200 was internally based on the 400/800 computer system (in fact, the insides were near identical, albeit with some minor memory map and OS changes that killed direct compatibility). The 400/800 was miles better than the 2600- unsurprising when you consider that it was originally meant as a next-generation successor to the 2600.
I've never used one, but from what I know, the 5200's problems primarily stemmed from the horrible external hardware design (particularly the controllers) and lack of 2600 compatibility.
The former wouldn't have been a problem with the 400/800, which used the same style controls as the 2600, and the latter wouldn't have been such an issue, since they had plenty of pre-existing software.
Atari later released the XEGS (XE Games System) that- unlike the 5200- retained compatibility with the 400/800/XL/XE series it was virtually identical to. However, that was the late-1980s, and another era.
I loved the box as technology. The thing where the power came down the line from the RF diverter was outstanding, and never a problem. I think I owned all eight games made for it as well. And the track ball. And the plastic thingy that let you mount both controllers together so you could play space dungeon. Hell, I still might. The thing survived, fully functional, for numerous moves over like 20 years, and every now and again I would plug it back in only to remember...
If you're charging your iphone daily, you're doin it wrong. Just turn down the screen brightness and the auto-lighting-adjust feature, and it'll run for three-five days on one charge (depending on your usage levels of course).
TurboDuo (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How have you not had to replace some bulging caps?
Looks liek this guy learned... (Score:2)
He's cut it down to four. Much more reasonable. (Though still unnecessary.)
Re:Looks liek this guy learned... (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy also seems to be remembering history through rose colored glasses. And I quote: "It took a long time before one innovator clearly came along (in this case, Nintendo with its NES pads) and provided a truly easy-to-use, accurate, sensitive, and comfortable solution."
He obviously doesn't remember the NES pads, or is confusing them with the SNES pads, because those little square brick NES pads were the definition of cramped hands. The first truly long term comfortable controller I ever held in my hands were the Sega Genesis original 3 button. The curved shape made it easy to tear through some Altered Beast or Super Thunder Blade. Anybody who gamed for hours with the original NES pads knows the lovely hand and finger cramps that would come after hour 2.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The guy also seems to be remembering history through rose colored glasses.
Do those glasses produce eye-strain-inducing three dimensional images as well?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
because those little square brick NES pads were the definition of cramped hands.
I started playing nes when I was 4, I stopped around age 13, those controllers were very comfortable for me. Perhaps now that I'm not a child they wouldn't be, but to children they were fine
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Therein is the underlying problem.
Different people, of different ages, will play your game console. Those different people, for the most part, will want (at least if they are going to be comfortable) different-sized controllers.
Yeah. Most of the Japanese population has small hands. They're also shorter. Remember, the reason that Asian societies never had much use for the idea of the straight-blade sword, and never developed the single-handed "lunge" maneuver, is that those don't work very well for people wh
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Remember, the reason that Asian societies never had much use for the idea of the straight-blade sword, and never developed the single-handed "lunge" maneuver, is that those don't work very well for people whose arms and legs are proportionally shorter than most of the Western people. If they wanted something to poke at someone at distance, their best bet was a spear.
Yeah, I remember that from training at the Jedi Academy.
Correction (Score:5, Informative)
2009, and still we need a bloody dongle (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Did they actually ever release this in the US? I had to import mine, fortunately I still managed to get one for only $5.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes but I only ever saw it on their online store. They still have them in fact:
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/gameboyadvance/accessories.jsp [nintendo.com]
I bought two sets of madcatz adapters that allowed me to charge and plug in head phones at the same time. The most disappointing thing about the SP related to the GBA was that when you played four swords you could not charge. The great thing about it (even the first rev SP) was the backlight and small size.
comfort zones (Score:3, Insightful)
In the author's world of retrospect, everything should be fantastic.
World's first pause button? (Score:5, Informative)
On the bright side, the 5200 joysticks included the world's first on-controller pause button.
Er, the Intellivision had a system-wide pause function that would pause any game when you held the "1" and "9" keys (I believe "3" and "7" also worked) on the keypad simultaneously.
If you want to get picky there was not exactly a button marked "PAUSE", but it served the same function.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Did you never play Major League Baseball on the Intellivision? Selecting your outfielders with the numeric pad was awesome.
Except... (Score:3, Insightful)
Except on a Mac.
N64 cartridges (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunate, as long load times is one of the things that really irked me with the PlayStation.
They state that game publishes were reluctant to invest in cartridges, as CDs were less risky and had higher profit margins, but if the focus had been on making good games that people want to play rather than trying to weigh risks and balance game quality with profitability, they really shouldn't have had to worry about that.
Nevertheless, there were a few good N64 games and couple of great ones. Cartridges weren't a complete mistake.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
and that without the expansion pack thing of course, with it, we re talking about 8 mb to fill now.
Re: (Score:2)
It worked out okay though. Games like Blast Corps and Donkey Kong 64 looked decent for what they had to work with.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Playstation had a 2k texture cache, but if i'm not mistaken, its hardware automatically did cut the bigger textures in smaller parts to fill the cache with the pixels that only would be used on that triangle, unlike N64 that needed to pull that off manually or not at all, as the cases you pointed.
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad it only had a 4kb framebuffer
hate to be pedantic, but it had 4kb texture cache, if it had a 4kb framebuffer it wouldn't even pull of snes style graphics.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I always find it a bit sad that game consoles have almost entirely gone from the switch it on and play instantly to the PC's wait-half-an-eternity-to-install-and-patch routine (I'm looking at the PS3 in particular).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, it worked so great that Nintendo lost most of big 3rd party studios/exclusivity, and all but the best N64 games had soap in place of textures.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. The N64 suffered in terms of digital music and cutscenes, but the cartridges were plenty big enough to hold great games. You don't need digital music or cutscenes to make a great game.
The Sega Master System (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember once playing Zillion, where you had to press the pause button to switch character. I had been playing for about 4 hours when I reached for the pause button and.....
Re: (Score:2)
Pause may trigger an interrupt, but that doesn't imply anything about how a game would handle that interrupt.
Early PS1 Optical Pickup Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony replaced that piece with a shiny metal guide in their later models, much like every CD-ROM drive has used for the past two decades or so.
Classic consoles? (Score:4, Informative)
How about bonehead decisions on the current consoles?
Like the PS3/X-Box analog stick "button"....who in the hell thought it was a good idea for the analog sticks to double as game buttons as well? It is impossible to NOT press these "buttons" by accident in the heat of a tense moment in any game. I can't tell you the number of times I've suddenly gone into "crouch mode" in Fallout 3 or activated my "search for power sources" mode in inFamous.
Can we get rid of this idiotic controller design, like right now?
Looks like a case of patent problems (Score:3, Insightful)
In my experience, really bad design decisions aren't always motivated by idiots trying to push their hobby horse, but often because better solutions have been patented to death.
Case in point: electronic television guides. Every format under the sun is patented. Philips refused to submit to extortion for years and implemented one miserable scheme after another, until they finally got an agreement with a patent holder. Even then, the patent holder refused to let Philips implement the whole thing themselves but instead insisted it had to be their own, horribly buggy, implementation. You can still hear the tv-guys at Philips gnashing their teeth.
I fear it's sort of similar with these controllers: the good ideas were being patented, so the designers had to avoid them and come up with something 'original'. That doesn't always work out for the best, as demonstrated in the article :)
Re:Looks like a case of patent problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Perfect example of death-by-patent: Trackpoint sticks below the spacebar. Your thumb is a MUCH better finger to use for manipulating a pointer stick... it's stronger, and it's a lot easier to execute fine isometric motions with it than with a hyperextended index finger. Unfortunately, Fujitsu included the below-the-spacebar position as part of its patent for a pointer, and nobody besides Sony has ever dared to risk an infringement lawsuit by putting an "IBM" Trackpoint in the "Fujitsu" position (Sony presumably has either a cross-licensing agreement, or feels safe from a lawsuit). The fact that Fujitsu's "stick" utterly sucks ass (slippery concave top, vs rubbery convex top... the exact opposite of the Trackpoint) is the icing on the cake.
Don't believe me that it's a better position? Try it sometime. Find a Thinkpad, then position your hands so your thumb is over the stick and give it a try. You'll be left cursing everyone responsible for putting the stick between "GHB" instead of below the spacebar.
Parent
The Jaguar CONTROLLER?! (Score:2)
Of all the crappy design decisions Atari made with the Jaguar, they're giving it crap over the controller? The controller was pretty comfortable and worked well for most of the Jaguar games. The crappy cartridge slot that was wearing out before mine hit year 1 of ownership, the incredibly awkward and unreliable CD drive, and hardware complexity that would stump Saturn developers would've all been better knocks to make on the Jaguar.
And as far as missing items, where the HELL is the sidetalker? The origin
Standby/Hibernate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I want the nextgen consoles to have a standby or hibernate mode like a Windows box. I would no longer have to issue fatwas against game designers who put save points three hours apart.
Thank you! I've been saying that for years.
As an side: if you're willing to wait a generation or so, emulators provide universal save points as well as many other convenient features.
Studio II (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, let's understand something here. The Studio II was the second programmable console released, ever. I saw it in a list of "10 worst consoles ever" the other day... a list which I consider invalid for never mentioning the horrible Arcadia 2001. Basically, the Studio II had nothing other than Pong machines to use as a reference, since the Channel F hadn't been around long enough. (FYI, both systems were designed by chip companies trying to hype their own chipsets, and the Intellivision was a 3rd-party use of a pre-existing chip manufacturer's chipset.)
So you see, it's got the controllers built into the main console unit, and one wire for both the RF and power. But in actuality this design meant that the console was the controller! And the RF-powered idea was a clever idea to reduce cord clutter. If you're picking up the whole console and using it as a controller, you don't want a second wire getting wrapped around things.
As for the 5200, Atari was trying to cram as many patents as they could into that thing, and most of them were crap ideas that went into the controller. But this time, Atari wasn't just trying to reduce cord clutter, it was also the first system with an automatic RF switch. It's just that unlike Nintendo, they tried to do the switching with clunky relays. Atari were thinking in the right direction, but got it backwards. You give power to the RF switch, not the other way around.
However, both the Studio II and Atari proved that you could put DC and RF on the same wire, which is what made automatic RF switches a standard in every console since the NES.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a nice controller for sure. I've go the X-Box 360 version for my PC just so I could play Burnout Paradise (The Ultimate Box). It was well worth it IMHO. But if your into console emulators such as the SNES, Genesis, and PS1, nothing beats the Gravis GamePad Pro (USB). It's basically a Playstation controller for the PC. I'm surprised they didn't get sued by Sony unless a deal was already cut between them.
Re:X-Box controller (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But if your into console emulators such as the SNES, Genesis, and PS1, nothing beats the Gravis GamePad Pro (USB).
I have one. Its D-pad makes it too easy to press diagonally, which screws up my Tetris big time. So instead, I bought an Adaptoid for my N64 controllers and an EMS USB2 adapter for my PlayStation controllers.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I miss the older, larger controllers; Everything switched to the smaller controllers (which apparently many folks preferred, but which I found uncomfortably small), then to the 360 controller (which corrected some of the small controller's other flows, but is still physically smaller than I like). It's not even like I have gian hands - I just like holding something larger than the smaller controllers, and find the button positions more natural.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What made the original Xbox controller nice (for anyone who actually used it, as opposed to Sony fanwanks and Tycho/Gabe who don't ever even fucking play the games or consoles they talk shit about) is basic ergonomics.
The original Xbox controller is not designed to be held in the "traditional" controller position (wrists curled, hands tucked under, 3rd/4th/5th fingers curled in to support the console). That position is why people get carpal tunnel and "nintendo thumb".
Instead, you can keep your hands vertic
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
good luck doing a good D-pad without running into a sega, sony or nintendo patent.
Re: (Score:2)
good luck doing a good D-pad without running into a sega, sony or nintendo patent.
Exactly copying the design of the Famicom (NES) D-pad from 1983 shouldn't be illegal, given that patents run out after 20 years. Yes, unlike trademarks and lately copyrights, patents actually expire,
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think Star Wars Galaxies is a console. The subscription may cost as much as one, mind you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's not a resistor, it's actually a mini-fuse in packaging that looks like a resistor. Those things can really be a pain in the ass if they're set up where they are easy to blow.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, the author didn't put any research into this.
For example, about the 5200 controllers he says "Atari engineers likely wanted to try something new".
However it's already well documented on the web that the engineers thought the controllers sucked. It was marketing that demanded the controller design just so they could claim a greater feature set than the Intellevision controllers.
Re:I had an Atari 2600 (Score:4, Informative)
My cousin had an Atari 5200. I recall him at some point noting his Atari being "better." But seemed every other time I saw him, the 5200 was away being repaired or some such.
The 5200 was internally based on the 400/800 computer system (in fact, the insides were near identical, albeit with some minor memory map and OS changes that killed direct compatibility). The 400/800 was miles better than the 2600- unsurprising when you consider that it was originally meant as a next-generation successor to the 2600.
I've never used one, but from what I know, the 5200's problems primarily stemmed from the horrible external hardware design (particularly the controllers) and lack of 2600 compatibility.
The former wouldn't have been a problem with the 400/800, which used the same style controls as the 2600, and the latter wouldn't have been such an issue, since they had plenty of pre-existing software.
Atari later released the XEGS (XE Games System) that- unlike the 5200- retained compatibility with the 400/800/XL/XE series it was virtually identical to. However, that was the late-1980s, and another era.
Parent
I owned a 5200 (Score:3, Informative)
I loved the box as technology. The thing where the power came down the line from the RF diverter was outstanding, and never a problem. I think I owned all eight games made for it as well. And the track ball. And the plastic thingy that let you mount both controllers together so you could play space dungeon. Hell, I still might. The thing survived, fully functional, for numerous moves over like 20 years, and every now and again I would plug it back in only to remember...
Its death was the controller. I opene
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If you're charging your iphone daily, you're doin it wrong. Just turn down the screen brightness and the auto-lighting-adjust feature, and it'll run for three-five days on one charge (depending on your usage levels of course).