3 ms·
A traditional videogame controller is not much more than a few switches and perhaps a few potentiometers, see for instance the pinout for the Master System: htt
by cesarb 4y ago
A traditional videogame controller is not much more than a few switches and perhaps a few potentiometers, see for instance the pinout for the Master System: https://www.smspower.org/Development/ControllerPort https://www.smspower.org/Development/ControllerPort
That is, someone who started playing videogames in the SMS/NES days might have formed a mental model of the controller being mostly a passive device, with at most a few active chips to multiplex the pins in the interface, to allow for more buttons than there are pins.
- unwind 4y agoSure (I was there) but the same can kind of be said about mice and keyboards, too. Ever since USB took off ~30 years ago and basically killed off raw I/O pins on the front of computers, human interface devices have required microcontrollers on board. Edit: added timeline.
- cesarb 4y ago> but the same can kind of be said about mice and keyboards, too. AFAIK, even old keyboards (AT and PS/2 connectors) already had a microcontroller, and the same was true of mice. The communication between the keyboard or mouse and the computer was through a serial protocol, instead of the computer directly reading the keyboard matrix or the mouse buttons and wheels. The exception might have been computers with built-in keyboards. But the joystick port (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port) directly exposed the buttons and potentiometers from the joystick, instead of talking to a microcontroller on it.
- unwind 4y agoYeah, that was what the "kind of" was meant to shadily cover. Thanks for clarifying.