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Penny Arcade - Comic - American Ninja Warrior
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - American Ninja Warrior
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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They were expensive. The one for the 2600 was $70 in the early 80's and caused problems with garage door openers making it illegal in some cities.
There was a third party one for the NES but it wasn't much better than cords. If a person walked between you and the receiver, or you tilted it so it wasn't pointed straight ahead, it would disconnect and there was no way for the console to handle it except to freeze. Same problem persisted through the 16 bit era since most of the wireless controllers were IR.
And that was 2002, 25 years after the debut of the Atari 2600, 19 years after the debut of the NES. And it cost $35, which would be $61 today.
-Tycho Brahe
Do you mean these? https://www.ebay.com/itm/175443697920 I have two of those but I can't remember the system crashing.
(Also, Double Dare being considered a dated reference that kids don't get also makes me feel decrepit)
Nowadays it's all 30-foot HDMI cables leading everywhere.
PSN: Wstfgl | GamerTag: An Evil Plan | Battle.net: FallenIdle#1970
Hit me up on BoardGameArena! User: Loaded D1
Every time I see old controllers with concave buttons, my thumbs twinge from the memory of getting the skin worn off them when I was a kid.
Now I want a youtube video covering the history of wireless controllers and why it was so hard to make a good one before the wavebird. Are radio waves that hard??
A lot of it has to do with sun. In Japan, people who can do pretty consistently avoid sun exposure through hats, umbrellas, and sunscreen. That helps a whole lot. Japanese also don't grey as quickly as Caucasians. And finally there's weight. There's less obesity in Japan, which definitely causes quicker aging both physiologically but also cosmetically.
Some white people still get lucky, though. Matthew Broderick is kind of the poster child for hardly aging:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Broderick#/media/File:Matthew_Broderick_2022.jpg
This is him at 60. Imagine if his hair was still black and he was more slim. Even without that, I'd say he'd pass for 20 years younger.
But I did learn to organize my rooms in ways that theres no traffic over where the wires are. The hard way, but learned.
Though not limited to wireless:
https://pca.st/episode/beb1c596-7767-44a9-8124-679fa9d4c49a
https://pca.st/episode/7ee15776-d495-45d9-87a6-c28dd7c838ec
There's several issues that make radio waves hard:
1. Wavelength space is regulated and you can only use bands that have been made available by the government and generally only for given uses. This is why the old Atari one used the same band as garage door openers, which comes to problem 2
2. Interference. Because wavelengths are limited you'll always be sharing space with other devices of similar enough function that unintended interactions can happen like the Atari controller opening garage doors (a specific type of interference covered by local law in some parts of the US).
3. Video games need continuous, real time, and low latency control. Watching old airwave TV all these things meant the occasional pop of static or misaligned colors, or your neighbor watching TV a few tens of milliseconds ahead of you. In a video game it's the difference between a playable experience and an unplayable one.
4. It's hard to take something that was engineered to have wires and replace those wires with a signal. It adds complexity and failure points but most importantly it doesn't add error catching.
1 and 2 are largely solved by modern digital signals. They are lower power and shorter range so a band is more like a room full of hushed conversations than everyone shouting over each other. They also have fancy error correction so that small disruptions are accounted for with a couple extra bits and some math.
3 and 4 are fixed by the ubiquity of computer power - a modern controller is itself a computer more powerful than some of the whole gaming systems once were, and the console or computer itself is full of secondary computer chips that offload various processes away from the CPU and GPU. Some problems are just easily enough solved by throwing megahertz at them.
That said, 3 and 4 are sometime still problems sometimes. Latency and connection interruption are the biggest deal breakers with cheap or crappy controllers.
All that said, I have had exactly one moment where a sibling ran over my controller cable and knocked my console to the ground, and that was only because of the awkward arrangement I had in a hotel room at the time. At home, my setup is such that there's not really any way someone won't see what I'm up to long before they try to cross a mishmash of cables, and I keep my seat close enough the "slack" of the cable is across the floor instead of some precarious tightrope. Well, I mean it's either that or I'm lucky enough to have friends that watch where the hell they're walking.