Classic Game Console Design Mistakes 185
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."
Or the old one where... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Hello, Star Wars: Galaxies combat system for probably the BEST example of being pig headed and pushing through a joke of a combat system even when EVERYONE playing the game says it sucks ass.
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I don't think Star Wars Galaxies is a console. The subscription may cost as much as one, mind you.
Those Who Forget The Past... (Score:1)
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.)
Anyone fancy some DRM? Or a bullshit non-standardized mobile adapter? I know imitation is flattery but...
TurboDuo (Score:2)
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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.)
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The guy also seems to be remembering history through rose colored glasses.
Do those glasses produce eye-strain-inducing three dimensional images as well?
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
Nope, I still play mine regularly, and the pads are fine. Don't hold yours so tight. The difference in comfort between the NES and SNES or Genesis is much smaller than that between the NES and the 2600/intellivision/colecovision pads.
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I dunno, the Genesis controller was just too big for me when I was a kid.
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"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."
And you obviously don't remember the NES Advantage pad, which had that shape before the Genesis EVER existed.
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Oh, I'm sorry, please forgive me for having owned so many fucking peripherals that I can't keep track of the names of them all.
Fucking nitpicking cocksucking cowardly bastard.
Correction (Score:5, Informative)
2009, and still we need a bloody dongle (Score:2)
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Did they actually ever release this in the US? I had to import mine, fortunately I still managed to get one for only $5.
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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.
yes. (Score:2)
Many stores sold headphones that had the funny plug built in. And Fry's carried the adapter jack.
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.
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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.
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and that without the expansion pack thing of course, with it, we re talking about 8 mb to fill now.
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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.
"more expensive" 4x drive is relative. Through the 1990s, CD-ROM read performance improved from 1x to about 40x without significantly increasing the price of the drive. And as faster drives were released, slower drives could be
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It worked out okay though. Games like Blast Corps and Donkey Kong 64 looked decent for what they had to work with.
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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.
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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.
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Ha! yes texture mapping like that would be fun.
One thing though, the VCS only had half a scan line of raster data. All the playfield graphics in the register was reversed for a mirror image by default. Many games had to update the register just as the scanline was in the middle of the screen to not have a pong-like play field. In fact some games would change colors or sprite, missile, ball coords during the scanline for effects like having more colors and more objects on screen. The game could more easily d
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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).
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I think it's more about the development costs and time associated with programming the console's internal code and games in assembly.
In the Atari 2600 all of the code was in the cartridge, there was no BIOS in the console let alone an OS. I have no doubt that being able to access system hardware at a low level would make instant play more feasible, but it would significantly slow down game development and cost a fortune.
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It's not that expensive to manufacture a cartridge with a gigs or two rom; that's surely still quite a bit less than a DVD or Bluray, but that extra space is almost always just pre-rendered video and high-fidelity multi-channel music. Nice, but not really ess
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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.
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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.
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Nevertheless, there were a few good N64 games and couple of great ones. Cartridges weren't a complete mistake.
That doesn't follow at all. Nobody ever claimed that because the N64 used carts, it was literally impossible to ever make a good game for it. Hell, Xbox has good games that could fit on N64 carts (like Geometry Wars.)
Cartridges were a mistake because Nintendo lost much of its support from publishers. Imagine where Nintendo would be right now if Final Fantasy 7 or Tomb Raider had come out on N64. It
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Cartridges of course absolutely can't be called an outright mistake.
But at that point in time, when CD-equipped systems were on the market for half a decade, and rest of the hardware has just become powerfull enough to truly use that space, they were a mistake (or, spinning it to fit /. more: Nintento put their wishes (better DRM and ability to put more pressure on devs) too much ahead of consumers & game studios wishes)
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On the other hand, noone had been entirely successfull with an optical-based console yet, either. The TurboDuo suffered greatly because of poor hardware and marketing, and even though the SegaCD did alright, things were already looking a little bit dubious for Sega because of bad business practices (hardware tack-on requirements). Add to that the disgracefull 3DO, and you have a string of bad console designs with optical media. Granted, none of these failours had much to do with the adoption of optical medi
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Well, you don't create hugely successful products by fallowing the pack (OK, OK, "in ideal world", but you get the idea). You notice new possibilities, new opportunities, and exploit them.
Early CD-systems that you mention also didn't do that, in large part, mostly relying on CD as a gimmick - games were more or less identical to cartridge ones (and/or plagued with other issues, like quick obsoleteness in favor of Saturn or non-console pricing in 3DO). Sony did the right choice, shown what CD-based can truly
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.....
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Pause may trigger an interrupt, but that doesn't imply anything about how a game would handle that interrupt.
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I don't think that's the case, at least with the SMS-II. Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the built-in game, used the Pause button to access the inventory screen.
The SMS-II has a much better design though, IMO. Big pause button, and no reset button. Still would be nice to see it on the hand control though, like the other consoles.
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.
The words 'remember' and 'PS1'... (Score:2)
... make me feel old.
I remember the VIC-20, darnit.
22 columns of fuzzy text! AND WE LOVED IT.
Actually, no, we hated it.
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?
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utter lack of left-handed controllers, and how about that right analog stick being one of the primary controls for most modern games and it still being in the obnoxious dual-shock position rather than swapping it with the buttons or rearranging things a bit so BOTH your thumbs can sit in a normal position.
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.
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
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And as far as missing items, where the HELL is the sidetalker? The original N-Gage belongs on this list more than half the items listed.
Some people liked sidetalkin', you know... [sidetalkin.com]
Standby/Hibernate (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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As everyone has mentioned, current-gen portable systems have had this feature for awhile now.
BUt I would really wish my Xbox360 or PS3 had it. Po
DS already dunnit (Score:2)
I want the nextgen consoles to have a standby or hibernate mode like a Windows box.
This is on the DS and PSP, as well as in select Game Boy Advance games. Or are you asking for a separate hibernation file per title and per user? That could get real big real fast.
I would no longer have to issue fatwas against game designers who put save points three hours apart.
Yet people still bitch about New SMB's save points because they can't squeeze in a round of Nintendogs or Animal Crossing 2 while New SMB is sleeping.
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Well, the DS has it too, you just close the clamshell.
I totally agree with the article about the lack of backlight on the GBA. It was invisible unless you were in very bright light - if there was no sunshine, you had to somehow angle yourself directly under a lamp, merely being in a lit room was not enough. And then the irony of the DS Phat screen, where they made the exact opposite mistake - you can hardly see it in anything but pitch darkness! You just sit there squinting at the reflection of your sad lit
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Nope. I guess the combination of touch screen and dual screens makes that one a tough nut to crack!
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.
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Eliminating the standard hard drive from the 360 (Score:2)
AVGN (Score:2)
Wow
It looks like this guy just discovered the angry video game nerd [cinemassacre.com] video files, spent the weekend watching them all, and rehashing every complaint made in those videos for hardware on his own site in text format with the humor stripped out.
I would say it is a good list, if it wasn't for the fact I've seen all of these problems complained about in one place before
Wrong (Score:2)
Like every Game Boy model before it, the original Game Boy Advance model did not include a built-in light for its LCD screen.
While it was Japan only, the Game Boy Light did have a backlight. http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Game_Boy_Light [wikia.com]
Multipage AARRGGHH!!! (Score:2)
Splitting an article over four pages.
What were they thinking?
Missing mistake.... (Score:2)
One mistake they missed that plagued the 3DO and others was having to daisy chain controllers. In theory it sounds like a genius solution. In practice it usually ended up with Player 1 ripping the controller out of Player 2's hand if they happen to move.
That thing about the 5200 RF box is horseshit (Score:2)
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Actually, Atari changed the design because the thing occassionally caught fire -- which really causes people to complain! (in court)
I've seen some big sparks popping of that RF modulator, so I can believe it was fundementally defective.
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One PSX one he missed (Score:2)
Crap, I forgot the most blatant bad design (Score:2)
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Re:X-Box controller (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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Incredibly comfortable though...
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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.
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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
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good luck doing a good D-pad without running into a sega, sony or nintendo patent.
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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,
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I think that the xbox360 d-pad is a bit mushy but other than that not bad. What is bad about it is its location. My thumb is at a nearly 45 degree angle, and so I tend to press NE when I want N or E unusually often. Also it is harder than it should for me to press W, SW, and S because of the location. My thumb needs to rock for those.
The most natural controller that mixed a d-pad and analog stick was for the N64. It was a good idea to split the controller like that so that if you held it one way it was an i
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And yet the 360 controller still has a d-pad that bad.
Two things:
1) Good D-pad designs are all patented; the reason Microsoft's sucks is because they were late to the market. Any other latecomer would have the same problem.
2) Xbox games generally don't bother using the D-pad anyway. Normally when it's used, it's just used as 4 additional buttons, and not as a joystick.
Given those, I think Microsoft's doing about the best they can with their controller.
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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.
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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.
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My complaint with the article (at least after reading the 1st half) is that lots of these "mistakes" are really just laments that the technology of the 80's was not as good as today's.
Poor sound? Well how much would a 'better' chip cost, and would the very best sound chip of its time really measure up to the author's expectations?
If you read the article, you'll find that the Atari 7800 (the machine mentioned as having poor sound) had virtually identical sound to the original 1977 Atari 2600- one music and one sound channel- despite being released seven years later.
This was significantly inferior to the NES, and even to its predecessor, the 1982 Atari 5200. And the 5200 internal hardware was identical to the older 400/800 computers first released in 1979.
So the 7800 was supposed to be a "next generation" console, but it had "last
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.
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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I bought a 5200 a while back. It came with 6 controllers, not one of them worked. Other than that, the 5200 was far superior to the 2600, being based on Atari's 8 bit computers. Compare Star Raiders on the two systems, there's just no contest.
Funny, I remember buying new joystick centers (Score:2)
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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).
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SNES - previously mentioned on /. Early production runs of the SNES shell used a cheap plastic that over time turned a ghastly yellow.
Over *what* length of time? Because I'm pretty sure that whether or not Nintendo knew about the problem at the time, it's unlikely that they would have given a toss about the consoles starting to go yellow 15 years later.
:-( )
If they went yellow after a year for want of a few cents worth of additive or better plastic, that might count, but otherwise no- regardless of how much it sucks for collectors. (And yes, my Atari 800XL has gone yellow too...
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The Wii controler is not that bad.
I'll assume the standard wiimote+numchuck setup.
The nunchuck has 2 buttons (trigger style) and 1 analog stick. As far as non motion-based controls that is it.
In the remote position, the wiimote has 2 readily accessible buttons, and a d-pad. (the dpad is positioned to awkwardly for regular directional use, but for item switching, etc it is fine) Two buttons that could logically be used as start or select are reachable with some strain.
So: 4 main buttons (3 in trigger positio