A patent from Nintendo suggests that they're working on a magnetic joystick system, aka hall effect joysticks, which would solve stick drift.
A patent filed by Nintendo suggests that they’re working on Hall Effect style joysticks for the Switch 2 that would eliminate stick drift almost entirely.
I still wonder what was so special about my N64 joysticks that I never experienced drifting. They’d recalibrate every time you turned the console on (or held some key combination) and after that were golden.
Yeah, except they were also so horribly designed that normal use literally grinds away the plastic at the base of the stick until it starts flopping around like a wet noodle.
The N64 used optical sensors in its joysticks. If you take apart the N64 joystick you’ll see the joystick is attached to some disks with slits in them. The N64 had an optical sensor that would count how many slits passed by.
I still wonder what was so special about my N64 joysticks that I never experienced drifting. They’d recalibrate every time you turned the console on (or held some key combination) and after that were golden.
Yeah, except they were also so horribly designed that normal use literally grinds away the plastic at the base of the stick until it starts flopping around like a wet noodle.
The N64 used optical sensors in its joysticks. If you take apart the N64 joystick you’ll see the joystick is attached to some disks with slits in them. The N64 had an optical sensor that would count how many slits passed by.
Here is a GIF demonstrating the mechanism.
The rare comment praising the N64 controller joystick.