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Sony Develops a Universal Game Console Controller

Posted by Soulskill on from the floats-like-a-dreamcast-stings-like-a-wii dept.

Go Rumors has discovered that Sony recently applied for a patent on a "universal game console controller." According to the patent filing, the controller "includes a hand-holdable housing and a touch sensitive liquid crystal display (LCD) on the housing. The LCD is caused to present, depending on what type of game console a user has selected, a controller key layout for a first type of game console or a controller key layout for a second type of game console. A key layout includes plural keys selectable by a user to input commands to a game console."

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Until you get to 2 players by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    Until you get to 2 players. Numerous arcade games have two joysticks and two sets of buttons on the control panel, allowing two to four players per machine. Most PC keyboards can't handle the number of simultaneous keypresses that sharing a keyboard would require.

    1. Re:Until you get to 2 players by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

      Couldn't you solve this by plugging in a second keyboard?

      When you plug in multiple keyboards, you have the expectation of being able to assign WASD on each keyboard to control each player's character. But DirectX combines keypress events from all keyboards into one virtual device before passing them to the application. It does the same thing with mouse movements. Some versions of Windows have a "Raw Input API" that distinguishes among multiple keyboards, but Microsoft doesn't promote it to the extent it does DirectInput and XInput. I have a couple conspiracy theories about why: Microsoft wants to sell more Xbox 360 gamepads for use with PC games, or Microsoft wants to sell more copies of Windows on which to play games that need a separate PC per player. Besides, it's a lot harder to fit multiple full-size PC keyboards around one monitor than two arcade-style joysticks around one monitor.

  2. Re:Awful by walshy007 · · Score: 3, Informative

    As someone else mentioned, Sony should have no say in controllers because their controller is a piece of junk. It was a terrible design in 1994, it is still terrible.

    Well, the original ps1 controller was essentially a snes pad with l2 and r2 buttons also. the shapes instead of letters is probably to avoid lawsuits from nintendo.

    Same with the xbox360 controller, it has x/y a/b but the colours and positions of the letters are different in order to be lawsuit friendly

    But I must say that even the best gamepads are not good enough. No console comes with a truly good controller; in fact, only one console ever did: SNK's almighty, eternal, venerable, insanely expensive NEO FUCKIN' GEO!

    neo geo controller was a lovely piece of kit, finest you could straight up buy, but I highly recommend fabricating your own with arcade parts, all of the non usb/bluetooth controllers work basically identically, a parallel to serial converter (exceptions: mega drive, master system, c64, neogeo) which you can implement with any microcontroller easily these days, attach a few different connector endings and have switches attached to the micro for selection of what controller standard to use.

    I made a jamma to snes connector because I was tired of wiring 14+ wires all the way just for a single controller, serial cuts that to five. (and I can now use custom arcade controller on snes)