I see the analogue stick is missing the hole in the center. Interesting. They’re definitely using a new plastic mold for that part.
Can’t wait to see a teardown of this thing once someone gets around to it.
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I just realized - now that the N64 controller has been released for Switch, we have authentic controllers for NES, SNES, N64, and GCN all officially supported on the hardware in some form.
If I’m not mistaken, having official controllers for each system was the initial vision for Wii’s Virtual Console back in the day, but they abandoned it quickly and just released the Classic Controller (Pro) instead.
It’s been a very long time coming. If only the Switch could output proper 240p like the Wii. Sigh…
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Would love to see system level support for the Wii remote too.
It’s a surprisingly great one hang controller for games like Visual Novels that don"t need constant action
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Having read opinions of the new service. I’m out.
I might get the controllers at some point, but I’m in no rush.
Pretty much the same for me. The price was already a major turn-off, but what you get for that price is a deal breaker.
I was never in for the service upgrade. Even if it worked perfectly, the value proposition just isn’t there for someone who owns most of the games already. Still excited to receive the controllers though.
Regarding the services - I don’t think retro gamers with expansive collections are the target audience. It’s more the type of thing that is a deal sweetener for parents of kids who are getting into games who haven’t been in the process of collecting over the years. Someone who didn’t own a Wii U and who’s Wii isn’t hooked up anymore with these games downloaded to it and who doesn’t have original hardware lying around (which I estimate is the vast majority of Switch’s audience).
It’s like the NES mini and SNES mini - cool ways to show kids a snapshot of Nintendo’s legacy without breaking the bank (or even being that authentic). Or just a quick and fast way for people to revisit the games who have no other means to do so and won’t fiddle with emulation on PC.
Sure, I just find it hard to believe that Nintendo are happy to release this stuff as representation of their golden era history.
It’s like Springsteen releasing a drunk karaoke version of Born to Run because which kid is going to know the difference?
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That’s an astute observation - can’t believe I hadn’t noticed that!
How are folk getting on with the modern N64 controller?
I finally got round to getting it working with a computer - turns out it only works via Bluetooth. USB-C provides power delivery only and no input is detected by the controller at all.
Having painstakingly mapped buttons in RetroArch, then mapped those buttons to the buttons in the Mupen64 core, I got mine working and it’s pretty good with slower games that don’t necessarily require painstakingly fine accuracy. Goemon 2 for instance, controls far, far better than the HoriPad Mini on real hardware, which is a good sign.
But then when I tried F Zero X +64DD Expansion and then Winback it was clear third party emulators still aren’t up to par, even after changing the deadzone settings to get a controller profile as similar as possible to a real controller.
I think the problem is the acceleration is still too fast, which makes ships more slippery in F Zero X (even the tuning screen is quite slippery) and aiming less satisfying in Winback.
So I have two big questions from this:
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Does anyone have any recommended settings of their own to try which make it behave as authentically to a real N64 controller?
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How is the calibration on Switch Online? F Zero X isn’t out yet, but that should be a true test of how well Nintendo has calibrated their own official controller.
Saw this yesterday:
I don’t know what’s up with emulators but it seems like it works really well with real hardware. The adapter in the video is an open hardware project based on a development board so you have to make it yourself.
That’s really cool.
Presumably it just works fine on real hardware, I think the issue with using it on Windows might be the calibration step you have to do to make the analogue stick work. After doing that you have to mess with the deadzone values in Mupen64 so there’s two layers where something could be lost in translation.
In the video I’m surprised he mentioned Star Fox doesn’t rely on subtle movements, that’s one game where it makes a huge difference. I thought Wii U VC Star Fox 64 was unplayable due to the poorly calibrated analogue sticks.
Just ran the analogue stick benchmark on my controller via the Parallel N64/Mupen64 core:
Calibrated using the crusty old Windows controller screen and with deadzone values set to 5 and 110.
These results are actually better than the bluetooth adapter to real hardware…and doesn’t look like a significant deviation off what a new original N64 stick would turn in, but it behaves so differently in certain games that I wonder what the problem is. Maybe bluetooth latency is to blame for my F Zero X woes.
As well as the extremes there’s also the ramp it takes to get from 0 to max. Could be linear or could be curved.