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Classic Game Console Design Mistakes
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."
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.
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.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
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.
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.
No existe.
the d-pad question sounds more like a patent problem than a real design problem.
good luck doing a good D-pad without running into a sega, sony or nintendo patent.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The guy also seems to be remembering history through rose colored glasses.
Do those glasses produce eye-strain-inducing three dimensional images as well?
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
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.
...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.....
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)
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
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.
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
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 :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
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.
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.
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
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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 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.
Look back on controllers and what do you see? Large-sized (Atari 2600, Colecovision etc controllers). American companies. Switch forward after the crash, what do you have? NES/SNES - kiddie-sized controllers. Hard for adults to use for long. Genesis, a little better but not that great.
N64 controllers - heck, these things are just as big as an original Xbox controller. Set them side by side once. Playstation controllers, back to the small size, but your help came from companies like Pelican and Nyko that released adult-sized controller replacements.
Gamecube controller - smaller again, looked like something drawn by someone's 5-year-old.
Now we're stuck in the same boat. Xbox360 controllers could do to be a bit bigger for adults, smaller for kids. PS3 uses the same damn form factor, and I've wound up buying a couple of 3rd-party replacements once more.
BTW, I don't have "huge hands." According to standard sizing I use a Men's Medium and my girlfriend uses a "Women's Small." I prefer the larger controllers anyways (original Xbox especially) because I can hold my wrist straight in "Handshake position" and don't have to curl my 4th and 5th fingers underneath just to support the damn thing. The crease of my palm can do all the holding work and leave my thumbs and trigger fingers free to manipulate the buttons and triggers.
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.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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 vertically oriented ("handshake position", like these absolutely fucking fantastic mice), rest the controller in the crease of your palm, and allow the fingers to rest. Much less worry about RSI, much easier to actually use the damn buttons without worrying about losing your grip on the controller.
If Gabe/Tycho and the Sony fanwanks would ever have used it, they'd know this. Instead, they just screwed around hating on it because it was from Microsoft, and the rest of us now have to suffer with ergonomically incorrect pads because of it.
Except on a Mac.
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.
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 opened one once and discovered that they basically had the X and Y potentiometers on the same circuit. I never did understand how it worked, but as near as I could tell the magnitude of change of resistance for X was way different than for Y so it could (sort of) tell what you were doing with the joystick. But _only_ sort of. Moving from the extreme corners to other other extreme corners was super obvious and worked okay. Trying to maneuver Pengo from the north side of a cube to the east side, so that you could then shove the cube west was basically impossible.
The fact that the four "trigger" buttons were stacked one above the other, two to a side, on the east and west sides of the controller, in side semi-recessed rectangles was "freaking impossible".
I eventually figured out that they wanted you to hold the controller in your left palm, use your left thumb and fore-finger to operate the triggers, while _gently_ and _unerringly_ operating the joystick with your right index finger. My response to this realization was "ch'yah right".
Then again nobody invented "ergonomics" till like five years later. 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
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