I interpreted it as meaning they removed the parallel-to-serial shift register in the controller (or at least stopped simulating it): http://www.gamesx.com/con

I interpreted it as meaning they removed the parallel-to-serial shift register in the controller (or at least stopped simulating it): http://www.gamesx.com/controldata/nessnes.htm http://www.gamesx.com/controldata/nessnes.htm The SNES has hardware to generate the P/S signal once per frame, but as the SNES CPU was originally intended to be backwards compatible with the NES it still has the old NES-style bit-banging mode ("old-style joypad registers"). If you remove the shift registers and drive the data line directly you can get higher bit rate. The SNES itself stays unmodified.