Tendo City

This better not be true.

Wait, now Nintendo not only invented the D-pad but the entire joypad too?

I swear to God, the Intellivision must be a figment of my imagination.

And a "Giant main button" is an innovation now?

I mean, Nintendo is without a doubt the innovator of the industry, but there are times when credit is given where credit is not due.

And apparently the "joypad" was invented AFTER the D-pad at that. Something doesn't add up... What made the SNES more of a joypad than the NES controller? The shoulder buttons? Nope, that's considered a seperate innovation.

That cant be true, Nintendo's site claims the wiimote has rumble, Miyamoto spoke of the uses of rumble and its importance in using a 3-D controller. There is no interview with Miyamoto anywhere where he says that rumble has been removed and countless third parties have discussed how they are using the rumble in conjunction with the speaker to create more immersive effects.

It's a misunderstanding on the magazine's part. if you look at everything else they talk about, it's all stuff we already knew. The 6kb of memory in the mote was presumed to store personal settings and options since it was revealed months ago.

We only have to wait 6 days to find out for sure though.

Ryan Wrote:Wait, now Nintendo not only invented the D-pad but the entire joypad too?

I swear to God, the Intellivision must be a figment of my imagination.

Intelliwhat? ;)

Dark Jaguar Wrote:And apparently the "joypad" was invented AFTER the D-pad at that. Something doesn't add up... What made the SNES more of a joypad than the NES controller? The shoulder buttons? Nope, that's considered a seperate innovation.

Donkey Kong 1982

the Intellivision had a disk used to control the game, the disk had multiple inputs, such as a specific diagonal input. A D-pad was more cost effective and easier to mass produce with it having only 4 inputs that could be used in multiple instances, such as holding left and down to move diagonally. This cost effective design also made controlling games much easier as the directions were clearly laid out, making it more accessible for the player. The Intellivision disk was not marked in any way, had no clear orientation and was a bad design that was essentially an atari control stick without the stick.

The d-pad is vastly superior and an innovation over Intellivisions failed design. There's a reason why no one went back to the Intellivision design.

Smoke/ You beat me to it. :D

Oh, on the subject of controllers. I can confirm that the GC pad does indeed have seperate inputs for the shoulder buttons. When you open it you'll see that the shoulder buttons are connected to a sliding mechanism that offers no degree of seperation or resistance. The springy feeling of the shoulders are created by an actual spring under the buttons. At the bottom most point of the shoulder push you'll find a standard internal digital button mechanism, a small rubber nub that offers a tactile click when the shoulder button goes beyond the limit of the analog sliders. It's a completely seperate set of buttons, making the GC have a total of 16 inputs plus the analog increments of the control stick, camera stick and shoulders.

This is how the GC controller allowed you to play games like Metroid Prime where you could hold the shoulder button slightly pushed in to aim your gun independently and allow for a full lock-on when the digital button is depressed. In programing terms you cant add a seperate function to a analog button, you can only subtract. Ie; Mario's full tilt run is 0 (and tip-toe is minus 10), you cant go above that, so as you push less and less, it goes from 0 to to minus 1, to minus 2, etc. If a controller with shoulder buttons that has no seperate digital input on full depression, say the PS2 controller is used, if you made 0 (full) the lock-on, then as you minus away as you depress the button less it cant remove the lock-on, as this would be a constant and cannot be removed from 0 to minus 10. It can only do the function 'less', not change its function.

With the GC controller, you could in theory be playing a FPS that has guns with multiple functions - Let's say a machine gun with a grenade launcher - You press L lightly to fire the machine gun, or fully depress to the click to fire a grenade. To even response time out so that you can effectively fire a grenade without firing bullets, you would create a small delay so that by quickly depressing the shoulder and releasing it the grenade is fired without wasting bullets. Then use the Z switch to enter or exit a sniping mode, with the camera stick allowing for analog zoom. Alternatively, if the gun's secondary function was a mode switch, ie; first mode is rapid fire with second mode being homing functionality, you could fire the rapid fire, depress fully to homing, depress lighter back to rapid fire. Or, quickly depress and release the shoulder to activate the secondary mode without spending bullets.

Why the shoulder buttons weren't used to their potentiol is dumbfounding. If third parties would have spent some time with it, we would have seen some amazing stuff with those shoulders.

lazy, we already knew how the shoulder buttons worked. I have a transparent one, so I can see for myself.

But in practical usage, that's irrelevent. You can't press that button without pressing the button all the way in. In effect, in actual USAGE, it is basically just the bottom floor of the shoulder buttons. Metroid prime CAN be done on other game systems. Just program it so instead of pressing the digital click, you just press teh analog stick all the way in and have that trigger the lock on. The main advantage with the GC controller though is that you can "feel" the point where you reach the bottom floor, making the game easier to play as a result.

Some of those "innovations" are legitimate ones, while others are only innovations in the console industry, but some are just...odd.

And by the way, technically lazy we are both right. In the technical side of things, those triggers are in fact two buttons, but on the functional end, on the user end, that's mostly transparent. There's no way to only trigger the button part and not depress through the whole analog trigger part, so on the functional end, as intended, it's basically just like a normal trigger but with player feedback telling them when they are about to "bottom out".

I tend to prefer the functional description simply because, well think of it this way. A movie, moving picture, is actually a lot of pictures being displayed rapidly. Ask someone what they saw though, and even though most people realize that's the case, they'll say they saw a single scene and not a million pictures of the same scene. Functionally, it's a big moving image, as it was meant to be. There's no point adding that each individual one also functions as an independant photo as a feature because people aren't going to be able to see that aspect in practice.

Quote:With the GC controller, you could in theory be playing a FPS that has guns with multiple functions - Let's say a machine gun with a grenade launcher - You press L lightly to fire the machine gun, or fully depress to the click to fire a grenade. To even response time out so that you can effectively fire a grenade without firing bullets, you would create a small delay so that by quickly depressing the shoulder and releasing it the grenade is fired without wasting bullets. Then use the Z switch to enter or exit a sniping mode, with the camera stick allowing for analog zoom. Alternatively, if the gun's secondary function was a mode switch, ie; first mode is rapid fire with second mode being homing functionality, you could fire the rapid fire, depress fully to homing, depress lighter back to rapid fire. Or, quickly depress and release the shoulder to activate the secondary mode without spending bullets.

Your example using the digital click of the control stick(s) on the PS2 controller makes absolutely no sense. Not only would that be a handicap to overcome while playing (probably a reason why those digital clicks were never used for anything) but you're also using two seperate inputs on different locations of the controller when the GC pad can do it in one location across two inputs without moving your orientation.

The thing is, that same functionality with fully depressing a trigger to toss a grenade and pressing up until that point fires a gun can easily be programmed into anything with standard analog triggers as well. The only drawback is even though it CAN be done, it would lack the feedback making it too easy to accidently toss a grenade.

On the other hand, in the case of clickable sticks, you need not move through the range of the stick at all to use the button feature, making it a distinct button, if not a rather hard to use one.

Quote:People keep asking me about this so I checked it out. There's no rumble in the nunchuck attachment.

By the way, the final Wii-motes do have rumble in them.

Hope this clears everything up.

Matt

http://boards.ign.com/nintendo_wii_g...6557109/p1/?73

Smoke Wrote:Intelliwhat? ;)


Donkey Kong 1982

I still have mine, and mine still works....Ahhhhhh...memories. :D

The Intellivision controller was vertically oriented, like all controllers before the NES -- what they call a 'joypad' is horizontially designed, the key difference.

Quote:The d-pad is vastly superior and an innovation over Intellivisions failed design. There's a reason why no one went back to the Intellivision design.

If you want to mention predecessors, almost all of those "inventions" built on older ideas.

-D-Pad: enhanced (MUCH enhanaced) version of the Intellivision disc, which was a flat version of a 2600-style small joystick.
-Joypad: horizontal vs. vertical orientation switch, simply.
-R.O.B. - um I don't know if this has any comparable products, before or after...
-Shoulder buttons - didn't the Intellivision have side buttons? Or rather, two side buttons that both function as "button 1"...
-three-pronged joypad - that was new, as far as I know.
-analog stick - these were the first kind of game controller invented, predating all console joypads to the best of my knowledge... Nintendo didn't even come close to inventing the analog stick. They weren't even first with an analog stick on a console controller -- the Atari 5200 had one too. It just popularized the idea (creating the modern mini analog stick design).
-Rumble - invented for and first used in PC joysticks and steering wheels as force feedback. Nintendo simplified and copied the idea for consoles, getting rid of the tactile feedback and making it simply a controller that shakes. The N64 was the first game console to use force feedback, though.
-Giant main button - like how early controllers (2600, etc) had only one button? :)
-analog click - unsure if this was a new idea or not... maybe? Shoulder buttons that function as analog controls weren't new, though; this is just two-level instead of a gradual control (two buttons instead of analog axis, simpler form of a similar idea).
-Touchscreen - PDAs, anyone?

Of course everyone here probably knows all of those things by now, but I wanted to say them anyway. :)

Quote:People keep asking me about this so I checked it out. There's no rumble in the nunchuck attachment.

By the way, the final Wii-motes do have rumble in them.

Hope this clears everything up.

Matt

Good. There never was going to be rumble in the nunchuck, as far as I know, so that's no loss...

Having accepted the fact that Nintendo isn't going to opt for gyro force feedback and going with the "bzzzzz!" cellphone-like feedback I had actually never thought the control stick attachment had a rumble of any kind. While it could open plenty of gameplay possibilities, with the battery already at 30 hours I think it's smart to leave rumble out of the attachment. Though since its modular I imagine a company can release whatever they want later.

DJ/ It wouldn't work because an analog switch can do only the mapped function less, an analog switch cannot perform a completely different function while maintaining the data needed for the original function through it's increments. The 'bottom' of an analog switch is 0. So let's say you're playing a game that allows you to control your character with either the analog or digital function; the digital will be always be 0 (full run). If you looked at an analog switch you would see that it's litteraly connecting less and less as you let go of the switch and then offering the most connetion at full press (the the GC shoulder buttons use an actual slider to tell the data what increment its at), but it's still ONE switch with one or two inputs (the control stick has two inputs, one for horizontal, one for vertical). When you program a game to use an analog switch your base data is the full press (run) and then as you let go the character moves slower. The modeler and animators then adds animations that make sense for the character, ie: if you're barely moving the controller, the character tip-toes. But even in that tip-toe animation, you can control the speed of the animation to a fast tip toe to a slow tip toe. This all depends on how senstive the analog switch is. But no matter what animation is used, the character will move from a full sprint to a slow crawl.

What you're talking about is for the input to recieve a new map of action. An analog switch cant do this, it's still ONE button with ONE input. If you look at Zelda you can move in analog, the go in to a first person mode and look in analog. None of the parameters have changed, you're still controlling the horizontal and vertical data but now from a fixed point so instead of moving your character you move his point of view. What you want to do is say that you can look or move, but by pressing all the way right on the analog switch Link will take out his sword. This is impossible for the controller to do is since full tilt right is 0 of the mapped action (horizontal movement), replace the horizontal action with take out sword, and now the full tilt right and every incremental step away from 0 will be take out sword which means you have lost the ability to move horizontally.

This is exactly why the CG controller has seperate inputs below the analog inputs, making the digital click a completely seperate button for mapped data while still retaining any analog data for the seperate switch the developer might be using.

Let me give you an example I saw in school; Imagine you're playing a first person Zelda and you have the bow and arrow. You're using a PS2 controller to play it. You press and hold R to load the arrow, then press harder to pull the arrow back. At full analog depression the arrow is pulled back at its maximum but cannot fire until a new input is recieved, since the analog button can only control least tension of the bow to max tension of the bow. If a programer is faced with this, he can add something simple like a delay or scenario where you have to completely remove your finger from the button in order for it to know it should fire. But this is sloppy, delayed and not very accurate at all - defeating the purpose of an analog aiming system. So it's best to use a digital button with timed data (ie: hold button for X amount of time for a full charge) which gives the player the option to use more or less tension on the bow while retaining the accuracy. But if you really want to have analog control for the tension, you have to give the player a fire button somewhere else on the controller, otherwise all they can do is control the tension of the bow.

Hopefully you'll understand now, I dunno how else to explain it.

Yes, it CAN.

Here's how

"If trigger axis = 255 then lock mode
else zoom = triggeraxis"

It's not hard. It's actually very simple programming.

I can program mouse input so that if you roll it under a certain speed it's normal mouse pointer controlls but above a certain speed opens a program. I can program a computer joystick so that if you press it all the way to the left it exist a program. These aren't tough tricks. If it's assigned a variable number, and an analog axis is assigned such a number (it gets converted to digital eventually), then you can do whatever you want with that number.

You actually have to think of an analog switch as a massive series of potential switches. Rather than just "one button", think of it as (in the case of a typical joystick on a PC) 255 different buttons for either direction. As far as the programming is concerned, that's what we are dealing with.

You can program it being tilted to register as "234" to do something totally different from tilting it to "255".

Look at the touch screen. In the end that's basically a combination of two axis itself, but that can be converted to all manner of different functions. Click and drag here and you have a rainbow bridge, but click here and you have a menu option.

This stuff is done all the time, though usually not for games. After the input, it's all the programming.

Intellivision predates the Game & Watch by two years.

Quote:This cost effective design also made controlling games much easier as the directions were clearly laid out, making it more accessible for the player. The Intellivision disk was not marked in any way, had no clear orientation and was a bad design that was essentially an atari control stick without the stick.

I guess that's true if you're a retard. I, on the other hand, was handing the Intellivision controller like a master before I could even read. So much for that argument.

Quote:The d-pad is vastly superior and an innovation over Intellivisions failed design. There's a reason why no one went back to the Intellivision design.

The cross-designed D-Pad is certainly a design improvement, but it is neither an innovation, nor does it make the Intellivision a failure. The machine never beat the world, but it lasted eleven years, longer than the SNES, N64, and GameCube.

This is an argument I already won months ago, so it doesn't matter.

Quote:The cross-designed D-Pad is certainly a design improvement, but it is neither an innovation, nor does it make the Intellivision a failure. The machine never beat the world, but it lasted eleven years, longer than the SNES, N64, and GameCube.

Eleven years only if you count the years after 1983 or 1984, which are debatable... there should be a line drawn between when a console was actually competitive and when support for it ended -- like how the Super Famicom had releases until 1999 in Japan, but wasn't exactly one of the top systems after 1996 or so...

As for the disc, the d-pad was an innovation compared to it, but it also was clearly another version of the same idea -- trying to come up with a good flat replacement for the Atari 2600-style joystick, and Intellivision was first, which is why I said that and not Donkey Kong Game & Watch.

Quote:I guess that's true if you're a retard. I, on the other hand, was handing the Intellivision controller like a master before I could even read. So much for that argument.

I've never used an Intellivision, and do know someone who loved the system, but its controller must have its bad reputation for a reason...

I think we've had this arguement before.

A Black Falcon Wrote:Eleven years only if you count the years after 1983 or 1984, which are debatable... there should be a line drawn between when a console was actually competitive and when support for it ended -- like how the Super Famicom had releases until 1999 in Japan, but wasn't exactly one of the top systems after 1996 or so...

Well, even by those standards, the Intellivision was a main entry for five years (79-84), which is a decent run by any standard. Consider also that there was a lot more competition in its era.

Quote:I've never used an Intellivision, and do know someone who loved the system, but its controller must have its bad reputation for a reason...

I don't think it deserves its bad reputation. Certainly, the contoller is more complicated and less aesthetic than controllers that came later, but in 1979, it was a marvel compared to its competition.

Probably, but that doesn't make it not worth having again... :)

Neither a mouse wheel nor a touch screen is an analog switch. A mouse ball is an analog switch with two inputs. A mouse wheel is simply a digital switch, a touch screen has no switches, in terms of functionality it's guided by pressure on a series of pressure sensitive points usually in the corners and center.

If you tell an analog switch that has values from 0 to 255 that at 254 it should do something completely different then it has assigned the values of 0 to 255 of the new function. It's one input, it cant do two inputs, each increment comes from base data for the one input and cannot be changed unless the mapped function is removed and replaced.

Show me one game on Dreamcast, PS2 etc that allows you to use a shoulder button that changes its function at full depression.

Ryan/ It sucked. And then it died. Cope.

No, you don't assign 255, you just assign 254 to the first function and then when you hit 255, yes, you ALL THE SUDDEN have it do something totally different.

Most games never bother with this sort of thing, but it can easily be done. And, I was talking about a mouse, not a mouse wheel.

You can program anything you want from not just an input, but any input RANGE. The fact is, an analog button is not just a single button style input, it's an input RANGE. You can assign any function you want to any point on that range.

How much experience with programming do you have?

Quote:Well, even by those standards, the Intellivision was a main entry for five years (79-84), which is a decent run by any standard. Consider also that there was a lot more competition in its era.

Agree here, five years is decent. (That 'continuing support' thing would let you do things like extend the 2600 to ... now? If you count homebrew cart releases... same for the Jaguar, Genesis, and some others... and while noting that support is probably important, like saying that the last US SNES game was in 1998 (Frogger. Yay.), the most important part is the main successful lifespan of the console...

As for which console had the longest lifespan on top... hmm. Game Boy is a good contender, with 9 years as Nintendo's sole handheld and the handheld industry lead (Pocket was just a redesign, not a new system) plus two or three more years of games released which supported it (the black carts)... Neo-Geo too, in its limited market, for 13 years of support... (plus a homebrew release this year that would make it 16 if it counts)... the Famicom wasn't replaced in Japan for eight years... hmm, what else... Playstation? Eight years or so in the US I think... maybe a bit more in Japan...

Quote:I don't think it deserves its bad reputation. Certainly, the contoller is more complicated and less aesthetic than controllers that came later, but in 1979, it was a marvel compared to its competition.

I'd have to try one to say for sure, of course.

I do know that Intellivisions break easily, though... especially the controllers...

Just to go even further from there, yes, if you are able to assign a single bit of that to a specific different function, yes you can assign any value or value range in that range to any function you can otherwise accomplish, and you can have some overlap so that when you hit that part of the range both functions happen. This can result in some very crazy controls, as I've experimented with before just for fun. A single button is just 1 or 0, on or off. You really can only assign ONE function to that, any more and you have to create methods of sensing "holding" the button or rapid button presses (street fighter for example), so yeah even with that limited input there are some options. A mouse is different than an analog switch actually. It's just a detector of motion, not really range of motion. You'd have to get a method to calculate "speed" first before you can assign multiple functions to that. A joystick or analog trigger are, essentially, the same thing as far as a program is concerned. It's an input range, an axis. Not a "single thing", because quite obviously multiple things are assigned to it. In the case of most games, those functions are all done with a very simple string that just converts whatever range the thing is in to a certain in game "speed" of cursor or character movement. It's usually stupid to convolute it any further than that. But, since it IS a range, you don't have to add much of anything to get multiple functions out of it. It's ready for those to be assigned "as is". As I explained above, any analog trigger or stick MUST be converted to digital to be used by (today's) computers, since they too are digital. An analog machine as in 1940 or so could be designed to not require any digital conversion, but don't even bother worrying about that. Early PCs (and upwards) were digital affairs and thus a conversion to a digital range was needed. That accomplished, it's a simple matter from a programming perspective to assign whatever part of that range you want to whatever function you could want. It's not impossible, it's not even hard.

A Black Falcon Wrote:I'd have to try one to say for sure, of course.

I do know that Intellivisions break easily, though... especially the controllers...

Pfft. I have two working machines, and one of them is older than I am by a year.

Which, for the mathematically-inclined, means my Intellivision's lifespan has been more than six times that of my NES (which lasted only four years).

DJ, I tried explaining it to you. Never mind that I went to a school that dealt with learning the ins and outs of programing and hardware design, mechanics and engineering, etc. Never mind that there isn't a single game in existence that has an analog switch that is capable of using two seperate functions except for the GC. You just dont get it and there's no point in explaining it to you. All the programing mastery in the world wont change the fact that an analog switch is one input, unless there's 2, then you can have two functions. This logic seems beyond your grasp for whatever reason. The input needs 100% of the range, otherwise it doesn't work.

I also heard that intellivisions break easy but the 2600 and the Commodore seem to break less more better. But i've only seen a commodore in pictures. Anyone still have one?

Well I'm not sure what they taught you wherever you went, but the fact is that analog switch needs to be converted into something digital, and that happens to be a range. Maybe their dev kits are extremely limiting, but on a PC once you get access to mapping joystick axises, you can do whatever you want with any point in the range. You don't NEED to assign 100% of it to any specific feature. It's an open thing. If whatever kit you were being taught on didn't allow that, the people who made the kit screwed up, but it is clearly possible.

Sheesh, what exactly prevents you from taking the input from the joystick and assigning different values to different functions? Did you only go to the school or did you actually take a few programming classes?

Sorry DJ, you died on the second disk.