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Comment by auxym | Hacker News Reader

I seem to remember N64 joysticks were somewhat fragile. Many of my friends as a kid had controllers with a joystick that had lost all springiness and barely responded to input.

I have not are that on any other controllers, even cheapo xbox360 clone controllers from AliExpress.

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The "return to center" behaviour of the N64 Control Stick is provided by a spring that pushes up against a plastic bowl which is underneath the stick. The stick itself slots through two curved plastic pieces for each axis, and the upward force basically forces the stick to 'center' at the lowest point of the bowl. The issue is as others have described. There actually never was any lubricant, so over time the bottom of the stick and the bowl just erode away. Eventually it reaches a point where the bowl is eroded away enough that the spring is no longer able to force the stick back to the center, and it just sort of flops in the dead space eroded in the bowl.

Nowadays, one can get replacement parts, and fairly easily restore/fix the problem. Add in a bit of PTFE lube or lithium grease and it greatly extends the lifespan of the replacement as well. Used to be able to get rather fancy steel bowls and analog sticks which significantly reduced the wear even more.

The more 'standard' thumbstick design has a similar self-centering mechanism. They are actually susceptible to the same problem. However, two things contribute to it being witnessed less frequently, I suspect. The first, is that the "bowl" in those sticks actually has lubricant which greatly reduces the wear, and the second is that the mechanical parts tend to outlast the potentiometers; that is, the sticks start to drift before you get the "floppy stick" problem to begin with and then you stop using it or replace the stick, and therefore it doesn't actually see enough wear to cause the floppy stick problem.

N64 controllers had an issue where once the lubricant dried out the joystick began grinding it's contained bowl into dust. It's not a springiness issue as much as it is a holder destruction. Massive design flaw.

kitsch bent makes a very good (injection molded, i believe) clone of the whole assembly. the controllers i did a few years ago actually only needed the bowl replaced. with a bit of silicone lubricant dabbed onto the places where plastic grinds together, they feel practically new again.

worlds apart from those awful gamecube style sticks that make playing quite a few games impossible.

I made the mistake of falling for buying those GameCube replacement sticks. I don’t get how people can say they’re better. Objectively worse. I should really swap them back with some new original style sticks.

Modern joysticks feel more fragile in some ways. In the N64's case, game design evolved to not have us abuse them as much anymore. Palm blisters from playing Mario Party's rotate-the-stick-as-fast-as-you-can minigames were pretty common... But the controllers lasted a while, even the third party ones, even if eventually they started showing problems. I wanted some nostalgia years ago on an emulator and tried that with an xbone controller, one match of tug-of-war was all it took and I found myself having to solder in a new sensor. Since then if I get the urge again, or some other game needs me to rotate fast to win, I just lose.

The kids call it stick drift today, its a big problem on the switch I heard.

IIUC stick drift essentially means the center dead zone moves away from the physical center. The N64 joystick problem was different and worse: with wear, the center dead zone would expand, to the point that the extreme position values could not actually be achieved. So, instead of walking slowly when you want to stand still, you are unable to run at full speed.

I didn't realize that's what stick drift meant at first, because calibrating when you turn the controller on is so easy and obvious that even the N64 could do it!

I think some other controllers will correct for drift after you push them all the way in each direction.

After a few hundred of hours of gameplay the electrical contacts inside the stick become worn out. Once that happens the stick becomes unpredictable and calibration won't help.

With the Switch it's more specific to the sticks on Joy-Con and presumably the Switch Lite. Drift affects other controllers as well including Xbox/Playstation.

What makes the Joy-Con sticks so horrendous in my understanding is 1) they're tiny 2) the shrouds protecting particle ingress into the sensor compartment is wildly inadequate. Rather than the stick having a very large hemisphere under the primary casing and surrounding the sensor compartment, whereby particles that manage to fall in it are directed into the case cavity, the Joy-Con sticks have this dinky paper thin rubber skirt that floats on top of a convex hemisphere on the sensor housing. In use, this skirt can expose the sensor compartment directly to air or it can pick up particles on the housing and drag them into the housing.

I recently found Hall effect Joy-Con sticks on Amazon and am giving those a go right now. This issue is something I'm overly invested in as I think the combination of independent controllers and some fine details in how Splatoon (twitchy shooter) manages motion controls yields the best control scheme for a shooter even compared to mouse and keyboard. Unfortunately outside of the concept the devices are horrible.

The n64 joystick gets a bigger and bigger deadzone. It’s different than drifting, in fact it’s quite the opposite: on the n64 you have to push harder to move your character while with the drifting you struggle to get it not to move

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