- Sony got tired of all the bootleg PS3 controllers.
- PS3 controller Support on the PS4 console isn’t happening, it is just bad business.
- PS3 peripherals (with the exception of Sony Six Axis, Dual Shock 3, PS3 Eye Camera) on the PS4 is on the developer with no support from Sony. Hence why Zero Labs developed USB drivers for PS3 sticks, and ask some of us for help.
- Even with a PS360+ fix, a PS4 firmware update can knock out the devices compatibility. Only reason Mad Catz and Hori controllers work on the PS4 was from a firmware update.
- About “They could use the cheapest shittiest parts ever just to keep costs low, but throw in a quality 2” x 1.5" PCB that has everything we need at the ready. Someone to operate under the guise of a controller manufacturer, but designing with us in mind"
Never will happen, no one willing to risk the law suits.
lol why would there be lawsuits? Nobody has sued Toodles, Akishop, Mayflash, or Paewang. Why would they sue a company that’s making controllers to their official specifications and earning them royalties/licensing fees? Because it has a ribbon cable header? It’s not like Hori purposely makes Fighting Commander 4’s annoying to padhack and put in an arcade stick to avoid being sued, they just think people are actually willing to use their shitty controllers as-is.
Well you got a few things wrong here.
For Toodles, he makes a PS3/PC PCB (more like a PC controller PCB that just happens to work on the PS3) and he made PS3/PC PCB that also does retro systems.
Those Retro systems design patents expired, so its a free for all, anyone can make all the SNES and Sega Saturn controllers they want.
PS3 is a special case, we as a community we got GOD DAMN LUCKY on, Sony used generic HID class drivers for any 3rd party wired controller.
Its genetic so anyone, anywhere can make a PC controller that just happens to also work on the PS3.
If you notice carefully, Toodles never made a board that took over the capabilities of a Xbox 360 controller.
All his boards have to piggy back or dual modded with a existing Xbox 360 controller PCB for Xbox 360 support.
Otherwise Toodles a Electronic Engineer in the United States of America would gotten a Cease and Desist and perhaps a lawsuit from Microsoft.
Now about the Akishop, Mayflash, Paewang Qanba and other PCBs.
This is something known as the Asian Grey Market.
Grey as in questionable legality. In the case of the multi-function PCBs they are illegal to manufacturer in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, most of Europe and various other countries.
Now in China, the copyright, trade mark and pattern laws are kinda loosely defined and poorly enforced. China is already the Boot Leg manufacturing capital of the world, any questionable knock-off, every bootleg product most likely originated in China. Also Patent, Trade Mark and Copyrights that are applied in the US does not cover the rest of the world, each country has their own set of laws and require their own application.
Ever heard of a device having numerous international patents. That is because you have to apply in each country for the exact same item you already applied fore a Copyright, patent, or trade mark.
Also unlike a Copyright or Patent where you are automatically protected, for Trade Marks, a company have to actively protect or they loose their Trade Mark (falls into common use).
This is why in formal academic writing you can’y use brand names in place of the items actual name, you can’t say Xerox when you mean Photocopier, or Kleenex when you mean facial tissue, or Band-Aid when you mean self-adhesive bandage. You can only use those brand named in academic writing when you are speaking about that brand. Even for educational fair-use students gotten sued over this misuse before and have there entire academic careers ruined.
Obviously Sony and Microsoft is cracking down on the bootleg controllers this generation.
Most of us get away with what we do with pad-hacks and dual mods, as were not reverse engineering their controllers; we are taking advantage of the first sales doctrine and modifying their existing product to fit out needs.
They could still make a case due to the fact that the Playstation brand is readily being advertised as supported and money is changing hands.
But I mean, regarding someone building officially licensed controllers with a simple ribbon cable header out (on the PCB for stick wiring), what would their lawsuit be for? Such a controller wouldn’t be taking away sales from any of Sony’s first party products or devices, and if they were to shut it down, even though there’s no reason to do so legally, they’d even be killing their own potential revenue stream from the lost licensing fees.
It’s literally a win/win/win for every party involved.
Sony makes their $5 (or whatever they charge) whenever a Hori stick, or a MadCatz stick, or a Hori pad is sold. They don’t lose money if one of those pads is cracked open and rewired for some other purpose.
The main problem is that none of the companies (Sony, MS, etc) would want to officially licence a peripheral where they have no control on the end-use of the device.
You can’t really tell them “Yeah, it’s sorta a controller for the most part, but it’s mainly for external connection for whatever the end-user wants to do with it.” Definitely not gonna fly with the big companies.
You absolutely would never outright tell them that. But there have been all kinds of officially licensed third party controllers over the generations that have been complete and total shit. They really don’t care as long as they’re being paid their share.
Let’s say some random new upstart company, SRK, approaches Sony/MS about making licensed “fightpads” just like Hori and MadCatz do. The deal is made, but instead of designing some ultra shit PCB that takes up 90% of the casing, inside is a cleverly designed tiny little board that the stick modding community can make excellent use of with a ribbon cable header out, nobody is going to be the wiser.
But going back to my point: the official 3rd party licensed controllers might’ve been complete shit, but they were still 100% shit controllers.
So your idea is basically for a 3rd party to use a super-stick-friendly-PCB, disguise it as a super-shit controller, and have MS/Sony license that?..
I doubt that the companies would approve that; somehow I feel that they require internal schematics and stuff as well, so they’d be able to tell…
Yes, that’s essentially my idea. You could even design the controller so those ribbon cable headers are leading to the throw-away daughterboards that control the d-pad and button faces if you guys really think someone at Sony/MS is going to be combing over blueprints with a magnifying glass.
Hori and MadCatz make their shitty fightpads the way they do because they’re naive enough to think we’re buying them as awesome controllers, if they knew what we were really doing with them they’d no doubt design them to be much more mod friendly to increase sales. It’s no different from MadCatz sticks having drop-in Sanwa/Seimitsu compatibility, they saw the business potential of such a move. They just haven’t fully realized the business potential of better boards too.
Never will fly.
I will tell you right now, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo has strict policies that has to be followed for 3rd party accessories.
All 3 companies want the internal schematics and wiring diagrams, and if your designs do not fit 100% into their guidelines, you get no dice no deal.
At best case scenario they just refuse your proposal and ask you to resubmit, making their required changes.
Worst case scenario, you just burnt your only bridge.
Oh Hell yeah they would, with a electron microscope, the Oracle of Delphi and the fricking Pope himself to bless the whole thing.
No, they know they sell the pads they do to keep cost down so their fight pads look more attractive then the official 3rd party controllers.
They cut corners to sell more product plus if it breaks, you have to buy another pad. Indestructible pads = bad business.
You’re right, clearly every Nyko, PDP, Rocketfish, Logitech, and MadCatz controller I’ve bought over the years that carried an official license and failed in some way within a month of use was scrutinized by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo at the utmost standards. What was I thinking?
And I’m not talking about making indestructible pads, I’m talking in terms of the PCB size and shape and its ease of non-solder hackability. Even a first party pad can be an easy hack without Sony realizing it.
You guys are funny.
They care about one thing, money. They only give a shit about security for one reason, to protect themselves from losing money. There’s no danger in them losing money licensing another cheap fightpad, in fact they stand to make money off of it.
You don’t understand Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony very well.
MS uses security screws on their Xbox 360 controllers
Nintendo been using security screws since the Game Cube
Sony since the PS1 makes their pads difficult to pad hack
For 3rd party, there standards don’t equal; build quality. there Standards means licensing and sales agreements and seemingly bizarre arbitrary rules.
Like the stock button colors and layouts on 90% of Xbox 360 sticks uses the same color scheme and odd layout.
Microsoft likes to control the supply of encoder and security chips every 3rd party controller uses, including if the chip can support common ground or not.
So far its only been 1st party MS made Xbox One controllers that common ground and not the usual Mad Catz controllers.
For Sony and Hori, the FPS controller is not common ground but the fight pad is.
No word on the new Hori made Smash bros controllers for the WIi U is like.
The big 3 been very picky as late on next gen consoles who gets to make what for their consoles.
So far it’s been only Mad Catz and Hori making any 3rd party controllers with PDP joining them soon.
ehhh… not necessarily. They want their peripheral makers all on the same page so that one designer doesn’t go “what the hell? why did they get to do that?” and then take their business to the other system. That’s the extreme, but it’s where the mindset is.
Here’s how it would go in the design/cert phase, because you really just have two options:
- Create a peripheral with x layout, and bridge everything out to some header area for easy use. According to use, this should be “easy” because why not?
- Create a peripheral with x layout, and bridge everything through mezzanine style connectors like the xbox one pad to do double duty, both allowing your device to pass easier, but giving users an easy breakout for use.
#2 is the way a company would want to go, Razer has done this and is very open about the connections for users actually. However, those are required because you can’t interface to arcade stick buttons/joystick/etc without that mezzanine access, so a harness or similar. We’ve also gotten lucky with the XB1 first party pad on this, but that happened because of the overall design choices, not a forward thought on modding.
A pad doesn’t follow this, and I’m going to tell you right now that as a designer, they’d be looking at the bottom line of cost per pad. Since connectors are usually some of the most expensive parts on a design, they will avoid that at all costs for a volume build, such as a fightpad or similar. No company wants to go through the hell of a system’s certification and costs to make something for the pretty much sole purpose of ripping it apart (I also forgot to mention CE/FCC/UL certs that may accompany the process, i.e. $$$$). The reason is that the need for that is niche in comparison to the majority of users, and that’s where the money is.
I liked my fightpad, I used it for a very long time, it just had the side benefit of being a wonderfully easy accessible PCB. Some people probably love the Nyko pads, and they generate more money than the minor users who want it for mods.
Let me tell you why #1 won’t fly with the companies.
-They look at your schematics, gerber files for board layout, and your firmware.
-They will see the random OMIT header area, and ask what it’s for. You will tell them “hey, it’s for secondary usage like mods” and they go “no, remove it”
-It’s literally going to end there.
They aren’t dumb, they know a random set of I/O that goes nowhere isn’t “just in case.”
Want to know just how harsh companies are when it comes to guidelines. Just ask markman about why the XB1 TE2 PCB is so horribly inaccessible, it’s because MS forced this with an iron set of guidelines that, as the first release peripheral, was subjected to. Subsequently boards like the razer’s XB1 PCB are clearly subjected to easier/laxed guidelines now that they realize that sales are harsh for the system.
I think Microsoft is a different entity entirely to Sony and Nintendo at the very least, and you don’t have to have random headers that lead to nowhere. They can easily be ribboned to daughterboards in the d-pad/face button area. This is actually done commonly on a lot of third party controllers (albeit older ones) including non-fightpads.
And some of the smaller manufacturers tend to use harnesses quite a bit just so they don’t have to pay skill workers to do as much soldering during assembly.
I’d posit that at least half of the Hori FC4’s sold here in the U.S. are to modders here on SRK. May not be the case in Japan. And that trend will definitely continue with the Evo/PS4 announcement.
I’ll cede that Microsoft are definitely more controlling, but they’re also clearly losing the fighter market this generation, so not nearly as important as Sony support, in my opinion anyways, who appear to be much more open, and rely HEAVILY on financial success in their gaming department, as they’re failing in so many other areas, and don’t have the billions in capital that MS does.
There are a number of members here that pay upwards of $80 for labor alone to have a dual mod done, and that’s simply due to the amount of work required to get a current gen pad hacked. A slightly more expensive fightpad with headers on a lower scale of production volume is still worth a tremendous amount of savings to these members.
Large companies like Razer, MadCatz, and Hori would never do anything that helps the community more than it helps their bottom line. But for a much smaller company like PDP, something like this could be right up their alley, and mutually beneficial to them, us, and Sony.
PDP isn’t a smaller company. PDP seems new as they are formerly name Pelican, they been around the block for a while.
And PDP isn’t known to make mod-friendly devices.
I also want to point out that the Xbox 360 has been a financial failure for Microsoft, with in it’s first year the Xbox 360 cost Microsoft over a billion in losses.
Only reason the Xbox is still around is because Microsoft keeping it afloat. Hell this time last year the MS board of trusties wanted to dissolved the whole gaming division of MS which includes XBox.
Only reason Xbox is still around because it’s new CEO Satya Nadella wants it there. MS wants the market presence, that MS does not want to secede the market to Sony.
Can you prove that? There alot of pad players in the US.
I will quote Phreakazoid from his last post. “I liked my fightpad, I used it for a very long time, it just had the side benefit of being a wonderfully easy accessible PCB. Some people probably love the Nyko pads, and they generate more money than the minor users who want it for mods.” We are the niche market, not everyone else.
That is any for profit company, legally their first priority is to their investors and stock-holders who expects returns on their investments.
Community falls somewhere in their marketing and market share/market presence. With mainstream markets getting more attention than niche communities like the FGC.
So? Even with screw terminals and headers, building/modding sticks is time and labor intensive. Some of us will even ask for no screw terminal version of boards or desolder headers and screw terminals to look more pro.
Don’t want to pay for labor, learn to mod. And trust me, the bulk of SRK Tech Talk is severely undercharging for our services. Beginning fees of a Electronic engineer hourly is approx $23 and hour and that is not factoring any prep work. Some mods takes hours to do. Also not many people charge much for a finders fee for acquiring parts and materials (less than 10%).
Those would be Qanba, Datel, Mayflash and a few others who are all grey market, not just the cut corners on construction, they cut corners on the PCB too.
The kind of stick you were describing, what you want to build was sticks like the Paewang or the MayFlash.
You bring up your examples with Nyko, Rocketfish, etc. And no one’s arguing that the majority of the controllers released by them isn’t a complete piece of crap.
But it’s one thing to have a licensed piece-of-crap controller that is exactly what MS/Sony/Nintendo expects it to be; that is, exactly a piece-of-crap controller. It’s a whole other thing to pretend to release a piece-of-crap controller, and NOT disclose to MS/Sony/Nintendo that there’s an ulterior motive behind it (and like @Phreakazoid said, they’ll see it). No official company will license a product who’s main purpose is NOT what they licensed it for. They just can’t run that kind of risk.