A controller with a scroll wheel, you say?
Well this is a little funny. Yesterday I posted the first part of a series of post on the fine details of how computers work, mentioning how I've been looking into this as part of a personal project I've been working on, and today I wake up to see Masahiro Sakurai posting a youtube video lamenting the lack of... this exact thing I'm working on.
Apologies for how much cat hair is in this photo, that's a bit of an occupational hazard, but this here is a photo I took back in September when most of the parts I had to order were in for the prototyping of this thing:
That's a really bad MS Paint mockup, but yeah. I'm designing my own game console, and one of the key features is a big ol' scroll wheel right in the center of the controller. Another is that I'm planning to just put all the designs of the circuit boards and 3D printer files for the casing/buttons up online for free, making it this totally open DIY thing where anyone who's a big enough nerd can just make a couple downloads, order some dirt cheap components, and build their own copy of the system (or people with better setups than me can build and sell them, whatever). So I'm not super worried about anyone stealing my ideas or whatever, but I WOULD like to establish a standard and all that, and figured it was worth noting that this is something I've been slowly working towards for like a year or two now, and didn't just get the idea from this video:
But yeah, now that the idea's out in the public consciousness, here's the plan for the controller (that I was planning to keep under my hat until I had a working prototype and some demo software sometime next year).
First off, the plan is that this is to be the standard controller for a whole console I'm also plucking away at designing, which is a bit more ambitious of a project, so I figure I might as well make it compatible with something that's already out there. So specifically, I'm designing this so that you can take one, plug it right into an SNES (or with a different connector at the end, an NES, because turns out they use the exact same input handling standard and it's just the shape of the plastic on the end that differs), and have it just work. Or mostly work anyway. I'm hoping I can process a signal out of the scroll wheel in a way that it either just needs the 3 extra bits of the input signal I don't have buttons for in my design (more on that later) or failing that, I can get it to output the same sort of signal as one wheel in the SNES mouse, which just rides along the second data line very few things use. I think that plan might break multitap compatibility and require an extra chip on the controller PCB, but it would leave this slightly more compatible with existing games on the same hardware. I might also do something weird with the button mapping to be sure NES select is on a shoulder and it works right out of the box with that whole library.
Working out exactly how to handle signals from the scroll wheel happens to be the point I'm currently stuck on by the way. I got this baggie full of rotary encoders for just a few cents which... almost fit in my first draft 3D printed wheel housing, but I have NO documentation on them, not even a part number/manufacturer besides "H-9," the pins don't fit a breadboard, and I've kinda been scrambling for rent so I can't afford a nice multimeter or oscilloscope to poke around with. Plus again I need to redesign this wheel print to even get it to spin right, and... this was a gift from a friend with a printer who is Not Local. Solvable problem, just needs more time and/or outside expertise.
But yeah, once I have those kinks worked out, it should be easy enough to get a custom board design made, replicas of end-cap of the controller cord are another problem easily solved by ordering a 1 dollar part or 3D printing something. The actual cord might be tricky since I don't know where you actually order something like that from, but it should be easy enough for anyone who doesn't mind a little assembly work to put one of these together and have it good to go for any software made with it in mind, or retrogames where you don't mind a weird button count. So... what's the pitch on this scroll wheel anyway?
Well for starters, there's the stuff Sakurai got into this morning. Any sort of RPG or text heavy game can use it to quickly scroll through menu options, or stuff in a text-heavy game. You could also pan the screen with it, something a lot of early 16-bit games assigned to the shoulder buttons or holding up and down while getting used to the new options the hardware was giving them.
Past that, you'll notice in my design it's at a 45 degree angle. I might have to tweak it a little, but my thinking is for a game that uses it heavily, one thumb or the other can slide over easily enough (I'm going for a pretty compact overall design) so we can have some games where you take your thumb off the D-pad, and have this nice analogue steering wheel. Nice for fine control in a racing game, or if you want some little radio-tuning/safe-cracking sorta deal.
Alternatively, move your right thumb over, use the D-pad to steer, shoot and dodge or whatever with shoulder buttons, and use the wheel to rotate a turret for a twin-stick sort of game maybe.
Or just use it for the sort of stuff mouse based games stick on the scrollwheel. Changing weapons, changing powerups... I'm planning to officially label the directions "hot" and "cold" to encourage weird gimmicky things like... I dunno, a platformer where you have a thermostat in your controller you can always mess with, freeze water coming out of pipes, crank up flame jets? Have a shot charging mechanic where you just really crank it to get to max strength? Weird minigame stuff. There's some fun space to explore with it.
Then we have the rest of the design here... which basically comes down to me being just plain sick of how every controller made by anyone in the past... 20 years give or take has kind of the exact same layout? 4 good face buttons, a D-pad, 4 shoulder buttons, 2 sticks, and 1-4 annoying to reach tiny awkward middle buttons, and we're just kind of overdue for a change-up?
Like first of all, hey, this is just too many buttons. There's a ton of games that really only need a D-pad, and maybe 3 buttons (attack jump pause) and the two things that aren't fully standardized is how awkwardly placed the D-pad is and how awful and awkwardly placed the pause button is. Shoulder buttons can be nice, but I've never really felt like 4 of them awkwardly crammed on the rim has been really useful or ergonomic, and that's coming from someone who's been playing a ton of FF14, which gets more use out of them than anything else I could name. And really, aside from games doing fake twin-stick stuff and using the whole grid like a second D-pad, I'm having a really hard time thinking of any game I've ever played that really makes good use of 4 good face buttons? Like people will use them if they've got'em sure, but unless you do that keyboard style thing where you lay the controller on a table and use all your fingers, you can really only comfortably hit 2 face buttons without sliding your thumb away from them, maybe comfortably make a quick pivot to a third.
Also, really, a lot of designers just sort of feel compelled to map SOMETHING to every button, even if it's clear the design didn't really need them. So basically I figure I'll try kinda just taking a "less is more" approach here. Here's the buttons that it's comfortable to rest your thumbs and fingers on, here's a dedicated pause/menu button where people often stick a kind of redundant menu button, here's my gimmicky scrollwheel. That's it, work around that.
I'm also going a little Gamecube inspired (literally using replacement membranes for one in my prototype design, even). Gonna make a great big primary button and use different shapes for the other two. Trying to label these in a less arbitrary fashion than most. If shooting a gun is a thing you do in this game, and there isn't a real good reason not to, default it to this nice right trigger you can hold down all the time. If we're advancing through menus or jumping or holding down gas in a car, here's the big GO button. Need brakes, need to break stuff with a melee attack? Go back in a menu system? There's your other face button. Have a quick dash move or a run you hold down, let's just use the other shoulder.
So yeah. That's my controller. Need to work out the kinks on the scroll wheel, source a cord, and hopefully I can slap things together and this will be something you can just order bits for piecemeal and put together for like, $5-10 after shipping? Maybe less? The parts are shockingly cheap so far.
But yeah if anyone has any insight to the scroll wheel or cord issues, let me know. Also the whole thing is presently a tad back-burnered because I am in a serious financial crisis and I don't want to have electronics spread all over my table if I have to abruptly find a new place to live if I can't scrape next month's rent together. So as usual, donations are incredibly welcome.
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