Picture a gamepad. You know, kind of wide, two handles, two thumb sticks,
some face buttons, a D-pad, and you know, some shoulder buttons, too. That's
basically every controller ever at this point, right? But what if I told you
that not only did some foresee this future over 20 years ago, we hit a lot
of wacky potholes on the road to modern perfection. There's no shortage of
fodder for a video like this. So, for today, we'll be ignoring intentionally
weird controllers like chainsaws, katanas, and hip-hop logos. And instead,
we're going to be sticking with some more technically and historically interesting specimens. Starting with the
most historically interesting of the bunch.
This absolute unit is called the XE-1AP,
developed by Dempa Micom Soft in 1989 for the Sega Mega Drive and MSX
compatible home computers. They're still around, by the way. One of
their most famous products was actually the Framemeister, which has sadly been
discontinued. The XE-1AP notably served as the
inspiration for Sega's 3D control pad for Saturn, which [music] in turn was
made into the Dreamcast controller, which inspired the original Xbox
controller. Don't believe me? Check out these concept sketches from Xbox
co-creator Seamus Blackley. That's right. You can trace the modern Xbox
controller all the way back to this thing.
But, uh, it's substantially bigger than
even the Duke. So, how the heck do you
do you even hold this thing? What works best for me is index and
middle fingers on the shoulder buttons, thumbs on the sticks, and ring and pinky
fingers holding the grips. It's not the most ergonomic setup in the
world, but considering this had never been done before, it's not bad. That's
right. Not only was this the first use of an analog thumb stick as we know them
today on a controller, it was the first use of shoulder buttons and grips, too.
Predating the Super Nintendo by a year, the N64 by 6 years, and the DualShock by
8 years. Now, true 3D games weren't a thing on
the MSX or Mega Drive in 1989, but Sega's 3D-like arcade games use analog
controls. And home consoles didn't have
analog controls, so Dempa made their own.
The way the stick functions is shockingly simple. On the inside, the
stem slips into two split half rings that overlap each other and connect the
two potentiometers representing each axis. All that moving the joystick
actually does is turn those potentiometers. The right stick only has
one axis that serves as a throttle in most cases. And if you want to use it in
a different orientation or even invert it, you can do that by simply
twisting it. Neat. The controller itself has six face
buttons, four switches, and four shoulder buttons.
If you're keeping track at home, Sega pads at the time had four buttons, and
later seven buttons was the best you got. The two face buttons on the right
share the A and B buttons with the shoulder buttons on the same side, and
the buttons on the left shoulder handle C and D. Now, D isn't a normal button on
the Sega Genesis controller, and while it shows up in the options menu, it
doesn't actually do anything that I can tell. The rest, I think, are for the MSX. A
handful of Mega Drive games did support it, but because it didn't get released
outside of Japan, and the Mega Drive was well behind both Nintendo and NEC there,
it didn't gain widespread support. Unlike orders from lttstore.com, we got
your back. Well, Dempa stuck to Japan. Advanced Gravis Computer Technology,
founded right here in British Columbia, was far more prolific in the west,
specifically in the PC peripheral space, with [music] the Gravis gamepad being
the quintessential PC controller of its time. So much so that it was available
for the Philips CDI, for better or worse. But, this test-like gamepad, while
historically significant and interesting with its flippable controls, isn't as
interesting as the PlayStation-like gamepad pro. While it was available in
USB, the white game port version was special in what it did with a far more
limited interface. I mean, look at it. 10 buttons. That alone is weird. Because
the old PC game port can only support up to four axes and four buttons at best,
half that at worst. How does it do it?
Using what they called GRIP, or G R I P,
which, as French blogger PolkoMandy discovered, is a 5-bit I squared C style
interface using the first and second buttons for clock and data transfer.
This means that not only does it only need up to 11 of the 15 pins on the
port, it can theoretically support up to 11 buttons, 15 if you include the D-pad,
and it can support multiple gamepads at once. Yeah, this was a big deal back in
the day. Because of the way game ports worked, two controllers via a Y splitter
would be limited to two buttons each. But, with GRIP, the second controller
uses the buttons that would normally be used for the second controller for an additional serial connection.
Gravis even made a four-controller hub using this technique, with each
controller having eight buttons. Get subscribed, by the way, because we're
going to look at a keyboard that has this kind of plug-in approach to
peripherals for it that you're not going to want to miss.
If you're wondering why I care about all this game port nonsense, it's because
that USB just didn't catch on for game controllers in the early days, because
well, you didn't have all that many ports. I mean, maybe you had two for your whole
PC. Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro,
probably the best joystick of its time, only supported the game port, and also
had a special mechanism created by Creative Labs to use the MIDI
capabilities of the game port for bidirectional communication, rather than
the traditional joystick protocol. It's that bidirectional communication
that made force feedback possible, something Microsoft was pushing pretty
hard at the time. Unlike Nintendo's contemporary Rumble
Pak, which had a vibrating motor like we're all familiar with in modern controllers, the Force Feedback Pro had
directionality and texture to its impulses, actually shaking the stick in
response to in-game action. While the game port was seriously old by
the time Microsoft finally retired it with Windows Vista, the effort that went
into extending and improving it with features like this isn't talked about
too often nowadays. But, they were vital in cultivating PC gaming around this
time, and led to big features we'd see come back later.
Speaking of which, a friend of mine from junior high actually owned a Freestyle
Pro, a boomerang-shaped monstrosity that had terrible D-pad, but an extremely
interesting analog control. Motion.
Wikipedia describes it as similar to the six-axis controls found on PS3 and later
Sony controllers, and I'd say that's about accurate. It was difficult to get
used to back in the day, but it gave the controller a lot more utility than it
had without it. And likely planted some seeds in future Sony engineers' minds.
It straddled the line between USB and game port, and was one of the many controllers of its time that hedged its
bets by including a game port to USB adapter in the box.
Microsoft had a lot of other wacky ideas in the pre-Xbox years, but few others
truly caught on. Let's come back to the Sega days for our
final controller. You ever get fatigued when playing games? You know, cramps,
blisters, numb thumb? Well, the Turbo Touch 360 from Triax is
here to save the day. This was available on the NES, Genesis, and Super NES, and
did away with Gunpei Yokoi's historic invention entirely, replacing it with
this thing. "No need to push," they say. "This
technology breakthrough NVIDIA game control uses a capacitive touch sensor
instead." Otherwise, it's pretty much a standard Genesis controller with nuclear yellow
90s styling and turbo switches. Clearly, Triax was confident in this
technology, though, with their higher scores or your money back guarantee as
seen on TV style marketing. So, hey, maybe it's better than I let on.
So, compared to a regular controller, this gives you way finer control. Like,
I can adjust the throttle any way I want. I can go pretty much wherever I
want immediately on the screen. Whereas before, with a controller, doing that
kind of stuff, like holding right here, would actually be kind of difficult. The
thumb stick is really tall, actually. So, that makes it a little bit awkward,
aside from all the other things that make it awkward. But, can't argue with
the results. It works. Like, that's pretty good first three stages, I think.
But, yeah, holding it for extended periods of time like this, or at least
holding it up like this, probably not the best idea. It's not ergonomically
sound, and it is, uh, pretty pretty heavy. But, yeah, I kind of feel like
I'm just you moving a mouse and clicking on stuff. This is ridiculously easy
compared to, uh, using a gamepad with a regular D-pad. All right, let's switch
to the other controller, then. Let's, uh, let's start with the Turbo
Touch. See how this compares to the, um, XE-1AP.
Uh, okay. Oh. Oh, no. Uh,
[laughter] I, yeah, th- this this doesn't feel like
I have any control at all, actually. I I touch it, and it's
I mean, the controller works. I think my thumb is just too fat. It's like
triggering multiple directions. But, uh, hey, at least I didn't die for the first
three stages. Uh, significantly worse score. Uh,
that's that's a thing. Yeah, like I basically never get an
opportunity to lock on and fire anything, because I'm not actually able
to point at anything. Yeah, I think there is something where I'm going to
probably have to open this up and tweak those potentiometers.
Uh, and if you rest your thumb on it, it's like, okay, kind of kind of works,
but like now I'm constantly actuating something, so
I can't I can't sweep my thumb in the
kind of directions they say you can, like circular motions are easier now.
That doesn't feel like it's a thing. I I don't know.
It was not better than I let on. But, hey, that's not to say that the
technology is bad necessarily. We're seeing its descendants make its way into
controllers like the DualSense and Steam's upcoming Steam Deck. So, the
idea was sound, it just it's not good for this purpose. If you
open it up, you can see the metal capacitive plates that you're actually interacting with under the D-pad, as
well as potentiometers you can tweak to adjust their sensitivity if need be.
It's a pretty complicated PCB compared to most controllers of the time, but
unfortunately, that didn't save it from bombing. It's conceivable you could get faster
input if you got used to it, but at $15 more than a first-party
controller, it was a steep ask to give up tactile feedback in the name of
faster actuation. Come to think of it, gaming keyboards
have been doing that for a while now, too. I maybe they were just too ahead of
their time. There's far more controllers like these than we have time to talk about in one
video. Like this Jet Fighter controller. And not all weird controllers are from
the '90s. I just happen to own a few of them. Let us know what you think are the
weirdest controllers, and maybe I can convince Linus to do another video like
this one. But I don't need to convince him to let me do a sponsor segway to iFixit.
Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring today's video. iFixit makes it affordable to fix
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description to buy your kit today. Thanks for watching, guys. This was a
different kind of video, so I don't really have a related video for you to
look at. You know what? All of these should work
in Linux with adapters. So, go check out my how to install Linux video because
it's getting way more relevant as the Steam Deck gets closer to release.