On a somewhat related, I saw a PS3 version of the PDP versus pad at gamestop the other day. Felt pretty good to me, but I have yet to really play with one.
SLS did make a batch in 2009 but good luck trying to weed those out from the fakes on ebay. the new fakes even have the SLS sticker. before you could tell them apart because they didn’t say sega on the usb plug, not sure if they’ve copied that now or not. i have one made in 04 and it’s almost 100% identical to the ones i bought in 09 and function exactly the same. the play-sega ones are absolute garbage. i don’t even know why i still have mine.
Your friends’ pads are probably broken. The D-pads shoouldn’t be lose and move around like they are on a broken neck. Never had a problem doing the super moves with the Japanese Saturn pads. I always used my index finger to do the moves as opposed to some people who use their thumb. The American Saturn pads weren’t that bad, either, but most prefer the Japanese build. Never had an official Saturn pad break on me but I have seen plenty of dumb things done to them in-store by hyperactive kids and vandals.
Quality joysticks are in the long run better for fighting games but nothing beats a digital pad cross-genre (unless we’re talking 3-D platformers and FPS). The Saturn pad was still one of the best made in that regard, period. Way, way better than any MS pad or Sony pad prior to the Dual Shock 2. Even then, the only thing the DS2 does better is analog which the Saturn pads (except the purpose-built 3D pad) lack. I’d rate the DS2 over the Dreamcast pad, too. It’s nicer to have functionality built into the controller instead of having to buy plug-ins for basic things like rumble!
Took the words out of my mouth! Huge fan of Sega’s 1990s AM2 output and original Saturn and Dreamcast games but boy have they blown it since 2000! Sega’s become synonymous with “latest Sonic retread or recompiling of the old 16-bit code for newer systems” instead of actually making anything new that people want to buy…
We may be seeing the decline of Nintendo, too…
Software companies are temporarily revived with new developer acquisitions and IP’s but it seems like very few of these companies stay cutting edge for very long. Console manufacturers and first-parties have a worse track record in general. Atari was the industry leader in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Never fully recovered from the industry crash in late '82/early '83, and they kept the under-powered Atari 2600 VCS on the market for TOO LONG without doing a proper follow-up system that handled better ports of arcade games as well as original titles. (Oddly enough, the Atari computers had EXCELLENT ports of many of the top arcade games of their time in addition to very good home originals like Star Raiders. Too bad they cost over $800 at the time!) Atari died a horribly overdrawn death for over a decade and most videogame fans are not aware of the important role this company played in the videogame industry’s early arcade and home console days. Atari became a joke because of ill-planned revivals and sequels to its iconic game titles as well as poorly engineered and badly-marketed console sequels like the 5200 and Jaguar systems.
Nintendo has had a longer winning streak with its handheld portables but I suspect their day in the sun with home consoles is long over… The intransigence of Nintendo and arrogance of its management has probably caught up to it. This and the reputation as the “kiddy machine company” has made it unpopular for the hardcore segment of fandom. Nintendo’s finally proven that you can sell the most consoles for a generation BUT if you don’t have the third-party developers AND hardcore buying game fandom on board, what you have is a single-purpose, limited market game machine that’s not going to last… and how many people still own home Pong machines? (IE, I’m saying both the Wii and Pong are party machines… Party machines do NOT guarantee mainstream success anymore than pointing a machine solely at fighting game fans, either.) The current generation of consoles won’'t be truly dead for at least two more years BUT the Wii has been effectively dead for over a year!
Wii 2 won’t make it next year IF once again there aren’t quality third party developers fully on-board making games people want to buy… I think we’re all tired of tech demos and whistles and bells (3-D TV being the latest example) that don’t improve the game experience measurably.
Sad thing with Nintendo is they started as a playing card company in 1889* (formerly Nintendo Koppai)*
After 1966 Nintendo started to make Toys, YES TOYS.
it was not till the 70s that the went into Electronics. it was the aim of Nintendo for the US and other markets outside of Japan to market the Nintendo Entertainment System as a Home Entertainment system and not a Video Game system, they were in the “business of entertainment not toys”. Sadly that what was the NES was looked at a electronic children’s toy. It seems Nintendo still has that Play Card/ Toy maker Attitude. Nintendo manage to open up to markets untouched by the rest of the game industry only to lose their hard core fan base, as the bulk of current Nintendo games are viewed as children games of shovel-ware. Also making the Seal of Nintendo Quality useless.
Did we just have two threads that turned into “grumpy old men grumbling about Sega?”
Guessing the average age of a SRK member is late Teens to Mid Twenties. I guess I am considered a grump Old man.
I think the saying goes “remember when ____ was good?” " ____ was Never good"!
I was wondering if nostalgia blinded us or we accepted thing more in the days of our youth for what it is.
This thread makes me reconsider going back into making Saturn Adapters.
Speaking about saturn pads. This 3rd party pad is godlike. http://www.shopncsx.com/aimajorissaturnjoypad.aspx If i could get my hand on converters for Playstation and other systems I might stop playing on stick except for a few games.
The pad looks ridiculous but I will say the d-pad itself is the best I’ve played on. It’s little stiff in comparison to others but it flows really nice and I rarely mess up my execution using it.
A FG Widget converter + PCB to the system you want to play on makes a handy Converter device.
PS1 and PS2 would be tricky since they only run on 3.3 volts and the Widget requires 5 volts but its no problem for PS3.
Maybe a battery pack for it or a DC to DC converter.
I bought one of these cheap knock-off pads, and I took the PCB out, threw the rest away, and put it in a real Sega Saturn controller. Guess what, feels just like a real Sega Saturn controller!
I liked George’s post. I wish I had time to put together such thoughtful rants. :wonder:
This is the most hilariously simple answer. Got pictures? How is the alignment of the PCB? How much do the knock off pads sell for?
I can mod original saturn pads for ps3/pc :wgrin:
Umm, well it seemed to fit OK, and it works! The only thing is the trigger switches are different (shorter), so I had to use the triggers from the knock-off because the orignal ones didn’t fit. I bought my pad on ebay quite a while ago, so not sure what they sell for right now.
EDIT: Actually I’ve just been reading up on these, and mine looks like it might have been an early ‘SLS’ version which some claim were ‘genuine’ (although I’m not convinced, pad quailty deffo didn’t match my orginal saturn pad)- so don’t get too excited. It’d still be worth a try though I think?
This sounds fun. I rarely use the shoulder buttons. The appeal Gummo is that anyone could do this without soldering. I don’t see the wanna-be SLS pads on eBay anymore. The two ghetto pads they do have are around $12 with shipping.
Anyone else own both a legit Saturn pad and a bullshit repro? I’m very curious what PCBs can be swapped into a real Saturn pad. I have a couple of empty Saturn model 2 pads that could use a PCB.
Edit: Who is responsible for this? He’d have all of the answers:
The d-pad on the SLS controllers kinda feels like it’s on a semi-flaccid rubber shaft and you can’t be too rough with it otherwise it will break off. However the buttons all feel like you’d expect from a new six button Genesis controller. That is as close to the actual saturn pad as I ever actually played with. I have a pair of real used ones, just no saturn to play with. I can’t believe the price on these things went up so high so quickly. I knew they’d be valuable someday, so just ordered a quartet of them last year for somewhere between $80 and $90 total for all of them but it hasn’t even been a year yet. I kinda feel bad that I snapped the d-pad off one of them now by packing it loose in my laptop bag. If I could find it, I think it’d go right back on, since there’s a little perfectly cut diamond hole on a swivel joint. I think I found a guy who still sells 'em for a reasonable price that I’ll post up if you guys like but I’m waiting on the order for my personal replacement to arrive, since I’m not quite 100% sure. The pics were rather low quality.
Swapping the PCB into a cheaper genuine pad is a pretty bright idea The_Grouch, but what do you do with the original? It’d be a shame just to throw out perfectly functional O.E.M. equipment. With their near legendary status amongst enthusiasts, Saturn controllers are going to be truly valuable and hard to find antiques someday, so being able to reverse engineer the mod might be nice for future generations interested in their anthropological value. I’d probably suggest that others use the knockoff shell to hold it and act as a spare controller for friends when you play on the real saturn. If the P.C.B. of the knockoff lines up well enough with the saturn buttons to be usable, the reverse should hold true too It’d also be a handy way to keep a second controller ready for your real Saturn for use with pals on a contingency basis. I mean, how else are you going to play Bomberman on a multitap?
I think it’s mostly the layout coupled with the fact that it’s a first party product along and a an early market entry advantage. I never played very much on a saturn and what little I did play was with the 3D controller at a demo kiosk for Nights into Dreams.
However I used to play on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo Entertainment system a lot. Both had six button controllers but the approach they took for it was different. Sega’s 6 button genesis controller had them all on the faceplate, lined up sequentially in a way that’s very intuitively conducive to games which use progressively increasing strength logic like Street Fighter II. However I hated playing the SNES version, primarily because the SNES controller took the punch and the kick and put them out of that progressive sequence, giving me bouts of an almost dyslexic confusion. To this day I can’t really remember whether strong punch was mapped to the left or the right shoulder button and possibly never will.
[Sidebar: I don’t play fighters very much to be honest. Yes, yes, my presence here is strange I know. You guys do happen quite informative even for a general purpose video game enthusiast though. :wonder:]
On the other hand, I much, much preferred the SNES pad for general gaming because I rarely ever needed more than four face buttons and the shoulder buttons could be used for special purposes that fall outside of that sequential logic. If you’re playing a run 'n gun, having a good pair of shoulder buttons makes, flicking back and forth between weapons on the run is easy as pie. It was also great for playing Mortal Kombat games, since only used four of the buttons were used for hits and blocking didn’t fall within the logical progression of either the punch or the kick channels, making it so you almost always had a spare finger available to stop and block or in the case of Mortal Kombat 3, even run.
What the Saturn pad did is make it so that you didn’t really have to make a choice between one layout or the other. You had all eight buttons on the same controller to be mapped as necessary, with the luxury comfort of adding two more. Going from either the SNES or Genesis controllers would’ve been a huge step upwards, in this regard.
I do believe there are other controllers on the market that do this job better now. The Hori Fighting Commander 3 comes to mind, save for the confusing decision to map both R1 and R2 to the face. (I’d rather have L2 mapped to the face, as opposed to R1, to keep the eight “saturn” buttons all serving unique functions. Only 7 of the eight can when two shoulder buttons from the same side to the face.) However once you start optimizing your ability to play for any particular controller, you begin to get used to it. This can lead to not only playing very much better with that controller than any other but also mistakes in execution due to unexpected differences. Eventually, with enough practice this can be overcome but the training efforts expended in practice may very well be better serve you in learning the logic to play your games.
To end this overview, I’d like to note that most third party products weren’t exactly known very well known for their quality until the T.E. came along. Usually they were cheaper alternatives to the official product and the very best you could hope to find commonly stocked on shelves, is an product with equivalent quality to a first party product that served some sort of interesting niche function and that’s if you were lucky. MarkMan’s work on the T.E. was a very, very good, very, very welcome change for Madcatz and it was probably invaluable in redeeming what I would’ve once thought to be an irredeemable reputation. The internet also changed things around a bit since the days of the Saturn, in that we can now much more easily learn about an item and buy it without ever even so much as even seeing it in person. Overall product quality overall has seen a huge jump for both first and third parties this generation, albeit I’d say the third party products surged up much more in both proportional and ultimate quality.
The original PCB doesn’t have to be discarded. You could pull it and replace it as needed. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.
George - I’m glad you lurk here. Your posts are great. I can’t say that I regularly play fighters at this point in my life. I did when I was younger. It was a shocker to me to go on Xbox live and be destroyed on HD Remix. I thought I was a street fighting fool.
True, although I how’re you’d store it safely without any housing? I suppose you could put it in some bulky tupperwear or a flimsy antistatic bag, however I’d think the custom shaped replica shell seems to be like the most sensible solution. That was my primary point…
Anyway I got my new controller and the USB plug and the faceplate both have the familiar Sega logo and the back has that glossy white SLS sticker on it like the other thread said to look for. However I remember reading that you couldn’t really tell without taking them apart to look at the PCBs. Those do appear to be different.
Here’s a picture of the front. The one that was shipped to me is the more brightly colored of the two.
The second difference is that they have different initials on the back. Both of my old ones said SH on the back, my new one KH. There seemed to be no consistency in precise placement.
I ended up swapping my old buttons and button membrane from the aforementioned broken controller to the new shell because I couldn’t take out the d-pad from either of the others and thought the newer ones seemed to feel mushier and less textured. Kinda funny since the old one broke so cleanly although I somewhat preferred the new one’s D-pad anyway, possibly because it’s slightly newer, so it doesn’t really matter. I’m probably just crazy as they looked to be identical but just in case. I also swapped the old PCB in just for consistancy’s sake.
Some of the old shoulder buttons also looked like they were machined wrong and look both shorter and choppier but I don’t remember which they were from now. I think it was the old ones, oddly enough, but it could be the new one as it’s one from each side. I’m not certain.
I’m thinking they’re all the same brand, just from a different run but perhaps you guys know better? I’d like to know if you do. I’ll swap the new pcb into a real saturn controller later. Haven’t even tested it yet to see if it works. Should’ve done that first before taking it apart probably.
Do forgive the funniness of the pictures by the way but I don’t really have a camera about me at the moment. I had to take these by dangling the stuff in front of my computer’s webcam by the wire…
Since externally it appears to be virtually the same as my other SLS controllers, I figure you guys might be interested in where I got it as it only cost about 17 bucks and the other importers like Gamebaz would like to charge a fair bit more for what I believe to be the same thing. Though I must warn you of one thing; the product came packaged very poorly. Just a waterproof envelope with no padding between the retail box and the outside world whatsoever. The box got slightly smooshed if you care about that. No tears but a few wrinkles and the glue came undone. It’s a pretty cheap box anyway though.
Later.
Cheers. That is actually exactly what I did with original PCB and the knock-off case. Don’t think it has ever been used though, I have some gaming friends over occaisonally, but they don’t ever want to play Saturn for some reason! 
[LEFT]Here is a video about how to fix the buttons on SEGA USB controllers![/LEFT]
[LEFT][media=youtube]Bia5VX6X3Gw[/media][/LEFT]
[LEFT]Out of the box, the buttons on bootleg controllers are not working properly.[/LEFT]
[LEFT]Many people come to conclusion that they are broken and throw them away -[/LEFT]
[LEFT]while they could be easily fixed and become just as good as the official ones![/LEFT]
Your “solution” is to just take them apart & clean the pads & PCB with water.
Care to explain how that could help?
How it could help?
Well, the factories which are manufacturing the SEGA USB controllers are not so clean.
The thin layer of dirt on contacts and rubber pads often prevents the buttons from being registered.
[LEFT]My solution explains several things:[/LEFT]
[LEFT]1) They are not broken[/LEFT]
[LEFT]2) How to disassemble them[/LEFT]
[LEFT]3) How to clean the contacts properly[/LEFT]
[LIST]
[]don’t touch them
[]use cotton sticks
[]don’t apply anything on the cotton sticks (e.g. alcohol)
[/LIST]
[LEFT]4) How to clean the rubber pads properly[/LEFT]
[LIST]
[] use cold water, not a hot water (or they could melt)
[]don’t forget to remove the remaining water (or PCB would be electrocuted)
[]don’t touch the small black dots (or they would become greasy)
[/LIST]
[LEFT]Note that you should not clean PCB with water, or it would be electrocuted.[/LEFT]
[LEFT]Again, don’t apply anything on the cotton sticks.[/LEFT]