A patent filed by Nintendo suggests that they’re working on Hall Effect style joysticks for the Switch 2 that would eliminate stick drift almost entirely.
Fucking finally. Still have to see if they actually go through with it.
Seriously…idk why they are so…obtuse to fixing shiz sometimes. Granted we are talking about the same company that won’t embrace fan work the same as Sega so they’re kinda backwards imo. Esp since that stuff usually isn’t making money or is free promo for the real shiz Ala streaming and reviews. They’re not very smart imo on a lot of things and seem to punish fans for having fun with shiz too much…
Nintendo is absolutely one of those companies that has been breathing its own farts for too long.
A part of me is worried that they will patent this, and then just sit on the tech forever, and kill hall-effect joysticks for good.
I mean I doubt it. Hall effects have been on the market for ages(notably the dreamcast as a few other comments reminded me). They can’t possibly stop hall effects and mods that allow them at this point XD
The title of this post and article literally say they patented it.
You can patent a specific implementation of a technology, but not usually the principles behind that tech. Nintendo had patented this, too, but that likely has little to no effect on other hall effect joystick manufacturers.
Buying a new car fixes your old car
Laughs in Dreamcast
I still wonder what was so special about my N64 joysticks that I never experienced drifting. They’d recalibrate every time you turned the console on (or held some key combination) and after that were golden.
Yeah, except they were also so horribly designed that normal use literally grinds away the plastic at the base of the stick until it starts flopping around like a wet noodle.
The rare comment praising the N64 controller joystick.
The N64 used optical sensors in its joysticks. If you take apart the N64 joystick you’ll see the joystick is attached to some disks with slits in them. The N64 had an optical sensor that would count how many slits passed by.
Well I would hope so…
Gulikit already beat them to the punch! 10 quid for a pair of new joysticks on Amazon.
Repair don’t replace!
It would be 100% possible for game devs to include an option to mitigate drift (require the stick to be pushed at least ~x% to move at all, adjustable anywhere from 10 for slight drift to 50 for extreme cases). Haven’t seen the slightest effort nor heard a peep on that.
Bunch of people in the replies seemingly never tried to play puzzle games with drift and have no idea how much trouble it can cause. Do the puzzles in The Last Campfire with joycon drift and let me know how it goes.
That’s not a valid option. 50% is terrible for joystick dead zone and is considered poor quality.
As a Steam Deck user, even the thought of a 50% dead zone makes me nauseous.
It wouldn’t be the default, obviously… did you read the first part of my post?
It makes way more sense for that to be an OS level option, not per game. It also makes even more sense to have hall effect joysticks and avoid the problem entirely.
Or use Hall Effect sticks and have no deadzone at all
Wouldn’t solve it, drift can affect regular joystick operation as well, where pushing it all the way to the side could show up as it being stuck in the middle.
You might as well be using a d-pad at that point
