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A look inside the SNES, PS5, and Xbox controllers with CT scans
- FloatArtifact 3y agoIt's a shame everything used to come with a diagram. Now we resort to CT and x-rays.
- CSMastermind 3y agoBlame intellectual property theft. I'm sure there's a right to repair angle in there as well but my guess would be that it's mainly driven by IP. I had a friend who worked on electronics about 20 years ago. Suddenly they were facing a flood of reverse engineered devices coming out of China. The build quality was lower than their official devices but it was hard for customers to tell the difference and they were undercutting them on price enough to crater the companies revenues. Enforcing patents and other IP was basically a non-starter even when they tracked down the shops in China. Eventually they ended up just partnering with them and selling the lower quality and cheaper versions of their devices because they couldn't compete and all the work they had done to design, test, prototype, etc was written off as a loss.
- autoexec 3y agoAt least controllers usually are pretty easy to open up and teardown. When I read the title my first thought was "why not just use a screw driver to see inside?"
- spondylosaurus 3y agoRemember those translucent DualShock controllers for PS2? There was nothing cooler than watching the little motor spin around when you activated rumble in-game. I'd love if Sony put out a similar style DualSense for PS5.
- Firmwarrior 3y agoYou can get a translucent replacement chassis for pretty much any game peripheral and put it on yourself, just hit up AliExpress with $3 and a lot of patience
- hamedsargolzaee 3y ago[flagged]
- devindotcom 3y agoThis is definitely cool but if you want a more comprehensive teardown of the NES, SNES, N64 and Gamecube controllers, this is the one: https://www.fictiv.com/teardowns/nintendo-controller-teardown-part-1 https://www.fictiv.com/teardowns/nintendo-controller-teardow... I just love how overbuilt the old controllers are. I still have my original SNES and controllers and as far as I can tell they work as well as the day they were made despite decades of abuse. One has bite marks... not sure if that was the dog or me playing The Lion King.
- auxym 3y agoI seem to remember N64 joysticks were somewhat fragile. Many of my friends as a kid had controllers with a joystick that had lost all springiness and barely responded to input. I have not are that on any other controllers, even cheapo xbox360 clone controllers from AliExpress.
- willcipriano 3y agoThe kids call it stick drift today, its a big problem on the switch I heard.
- msk-lywenn 3y agoThe n64 joystick gets a bigger and bigger deadzone. It’s different than drifting, in fact it’s quite the opposite: on the n64 you have to push harder to move your character while with the drifting you struggle to get it not to move
- alanbernstein 3y agoIIUC stick drift essentially means the center dead zone moves away from the physical center. The N64 joystick problem was different and worse: with wear, the center dead zone would expand, to the point that the extreme position values could not actually be achieved. So, instead of walking slowly when you want to stand still, you are unable to run at full speed.
- 3y ago
- TillE 3y agoThe SNES controller is a beautiful thing because it's literally just a bit shift register wired up to the buttons. Super simple to emulate it, make an adapter for it, or be compatible with it.
- jonny_eh 3y agoNot to mention is still very comfortable, especially for its size. And it's basically the pinnacle of 2D controller design when it comes to functionality.
- msk-lywenn 3y agoBest 2D controller is the Japanese saturn one. Better ergonomics, six face buttons and even shoulder buttons.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoYou can still buy USB variants of the Sega Saturn controller on AMazon.
- jonny_eh 3y agoToo big, SNES's d-pad is better. The 6 face buttons on the Saturn is better only for Street Fighter, a single game. If you're that into Street Fighter, get an arcade stick.
- MichaelEstes 3y agoDoes anyone know how accurate these are to the raw data a CT scan produces, it looks really clean, has it been touched up any significant amount or is this actually the quality of the machines?
- guhidalg 3y agoI've seen slightly better scans from the Lumafield machine I have access to at $DAYJOB, but only slightly better. The scans shown here are very high quality. You don't get access to raw data, assuming you mean something like individual X-ray images. The service runs the tomography on some cluster in the cloud and you get access to the reconstruction through a web app.
- endisneigh 3y agoRadiologist?
- guhidalg 3y agoNo, I am a software engineer at a writing instruments company... long story.
- endisneigh 3y agoOh interesting. The writing instrument company needs scans this good?
- guhidalg 3y agoYes, and I wish it was even more accurate :) Doing metrology on production parts normally means disassembling them and putting them under the microscope or X-raying them, but sometimes there are problems that only manifest when the pen is assembled and closed. There's a lot of geometry that isn't visible externally in a pen, more so in certain markers. The writing systems are very sensitive to manufacturing tolerances, and out of spec parts are perceived by users as a bad pen or marker (which we don't want). With a normal X-ray, it is very difficult to resolve internal geometry deep in the assembled pen with any degree of accuracy. CT scans allow us to examine internal geometry non-destructively and they are relatively fast to run. The scans shown in that blog post I would guess took about 6-8 hours of scanning + 1 hour of reconstruction to generate. Once you start the machine, it's completely automated from there, so you don't need a technician or an engineer sitting at the X-ray machine (which BTW is running Windows XP or something worse) takings images of parts.
- amelius 3y agoYou can do this yourself. Just bring a USB drive to the airport and ask the TSA officer for a copy of the images.
- Hamuko 3y agoAre they going to give me copies? Do I need to threaten them with GDPR?
- kube-system 3y agoThe TSA DGAF about GDPR
- ComputerGuru 3y agoI would hope that data can’t be just copied to a USB. I would like to believe it is destroyed automatically except with an override authorization code from a couple of managers but I know better.
- autoexec 3y agoWhen TSA employees were busted for saving pics of women going through their nudie scanners they were saving the images on their cell phones if that makes you feel better.
- hyperific 3y agoThat sounds like a major security liability
- partiallypro 3y agoYou can see what the agents are looking at just going through a security line.
- hyperific 3y agoI meant more from a standpoint of random USBs from the public being plugged into their computers.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoDualShock controllers are the best, tactile, haptic feedback and gyroscope Nintendo's joycons also pretty novel, you just clip them on your console in/out and you unlock new ways to play, OP should have included them too, I'm curious now.. a shame its build quality is one of the worst of this decade Xbox's one is pretty basic and conservative, wich is a shame..
- PretzelPirate 3y agoI don't want controllers to keep changing. I love the Xbox controller. I also have a PS5 and a switch, but those controllers don't feel good in my hand. The PS5 haptics don't add much IMO, but hurt battery life enough that I'd rather just turn them off.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoMost games don't take advantage of haptics, but the ones that do have been pretty cool IME. The physical feedback made web-slinging in the new Spider-Man super fun and engaging, and Returnal used trigger pressure to switch between your weapon's main firing mode and secondary firing mode (and used audio/haptic feedback to let you know when the secondary mode was off cooldown).
- Macha 3y agoLuckily, the Xbox controller fundamentals have changed relatively little since the move from the Duke to the S controller during the life of the original xbox. I say luckily, because I feel they got pretty close to the optimum design around then, and later enhancements have been about mostly shuffling the battery components around.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoWell, I use a controller to game and interact with the game, the most ways to game, the more fun I have Hence why I bought a Nintendo Switch, the premise is: to have fun
- 3y ago
- sdf4j 3y ago> Nintendo established the blueprint for gamepads in 1985 with the iconic rectangular Nintendo Entertainment System I'm pretty sure they did it two years before with the famicom gamepad.
- chrisco255 3y agoRight, but Famicom is just the Japanese name for the NES, which, as you say, debuted in Japan first.
- msk-lywenn 3y agoOp is right, the famicom/nes was released in 1983
- chrisco255 3y agoI concurred with the 1983 release date for the Famicom/NES in Japan. Just pointing out that it's really the same system.
- cubefox 3y agoThe NES actually had a pretty different shell, removable controllers, one audio channel less, and some other hardware differences.
- chrisco255 3y agoYeah a different shell catered for the American market and certainly some minor differences, and despite regional incompatiblity, the NES & Famicom have the same core chips and instruction set.
- asdkfjhsifhsjd 3y agokinda of a let down. CT scan and just focus on the big huge unavoidably obvious stuff. The biggest change in feel and game play from the SNES and the newer controller for example is the lack of plate under the dpad and other things that are awsome to see with a scan like that. Yet they ignore all that.
- sethbannon 3y agoPerfect combination combining the wonders of youth (video games) with the wonders of adult age (understanding and building technology).
- cubefox 3y agoOne thing they didn't make quite clear here is that the Xbox controller is considerably less advanced than the PS5 controller. The PS5 controller has "linear resonant actuators" (previously introduced in the Switch, and in the iPhone before that) which provide a much more fine-grained rumble feature than the older method which is still used in the XBox. The newer feature lets you feel e.g. that the character walks over sand, rubble or grass. The PS5 controller also has actual force-feedback triggers (which simulate e.g. a bow or a gun), while on the XBox there are only simple rumble motors. The XBox controller also still lacks a gyroscope (e.g. used for more precise aiming), which other controllers have for many years now. A really outdated piece of hardware, in contrast to the base console.
- dmbche 3y agoI'm not certain how outdated it is. I'm certainly happy with it, and I imagine it adds workload to the console.
- katbyte 3y agowell it is objectively outdated based on the different tech and capabilities. now as to if these are something you want or need is another question.
- darknavi 3y agoNot to be stuck on my old ways too hard but didn't Sony make it so you can't play PS4 games on your PS5 without an actual PS4 controller? That sort of thing really puts me off the changes, although I accept that it pushes innovation forward. I enjoy being able to play OG Xbox, 360, and current-gen titles with the same controller.
- tyfon 3y agoNo, you can play PS4 (and PS3/2 via emulator or streaming) games just fine with the DS5. There is one exception, you can't play a PSVR (1) game that requires the camera to track the light bar on the controller with a DS5, but that's very few games and for technical reasons (the DS5 does not have the light bar)
- nicetryguy 3y agoI appreciate the in-depth look but i will say that it really isn't necessary and these things are completely openable, cleanable, operatable, and repairiable in most cases. I have opened, cleaned, operated on and repaired many of them. (except for the rubber pads, if they go ...you're kinda fu...deged)
- hyperific 3y agoFinally scanofthemonth makes it to the front page of HN
- bartislartfast 3y agoyou can just open them with screwdrivers I'm sure.
- XCSme 3y agoThe website/presentation is really cool. One thing that's missing is some bookmarks on the right side, to scroll directly to a specific controller/section.
- InitialLastName 3y ago> In 1991, the Super Nintendo (SNES) controller added two more buttons and took on a (slightly) more ergonomic design. Talk about attention to detail: the SNES controller added 4 more buttons (you have to count the shoulders).
- pbj1968 3y agoI’m glad it wasn’t just me. SMH
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- RadixDLT 3y agoany signs of overheating? ps4 is the worsts