Hacker News Reader

Comment by slim | Hacker News Reader

  the controller seems refusing to boot

that's when I realized that my idea of what is a controller is completely obsolete

View on HN

How come? Ever since controllers used Bluetooth they would need to use some sort of programmable microcontroller or cpu. Both of these things need to 'boot' at some point. And yes even microcontrollers have bootloaders.

A traditional videogame controller is not much more than a few switches and perhaps a few potentiometers, see for instance the pinout for the Master System: https://www.smspower.org/Development/ControllerPort

That is, someone who started playing videogames in the SMS/NES days might have formed a mental model of the controller being mostly a passive device, with at most a few active chips to multiplex the pins in the interface, to allow for more buttons than there are pins.

Sure (I was there) but the same can kind of be said about mice and keyboards, too.

Ever since USB took off ~30 years ago and basically killed off raw I/O pins on the front of computers, human interface devices have required microcontrollers on board.

Edit: added timeline.

> but the same can kind of be said about mice and keyboards, too.

AFAIK, even old keyboards (AT and PS/2 connectors) already had a microcontroller, and the same was true of mice. The communication between the keyboard or mouse and the computer was through a serial protocol, instead of the computer directly reading the keyboard matrix or the mouse buttons and wheels. The exception might have been computers with built-in keyboards. But the joystick port (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port) directly exposed the buttons and potentiometers from the joystick, instead of talking to a microcontroller on it.

Yeah, that was what the "kind of" was meant to shadily cover. Thanks for clarifying.

it is obvious in hindsight, but I never put a thought on it before reading that sentence

Reply on news.ycombinator.com