I’m here to make friends, enjoy the kind comments of the Internet, and tell the dark truth that everyone knows to be true: the N64 controller, Nintendo’s infamous trident joypad for its third home console, is, and always was, horrible.
You may think you like it. If you’re “of a certain age,” chances are you have fond memories of curled up in front of a television screen, screaming in fury as a blue shell hit you in the face. Mario Kart 64; get lost in the frenetic chaos of multiplayer Super Smash Bros.; or explore Hyrule with eyes wide open in Ocarina of time.
Nostalgia is a powerful force, though, and those warm, fuzzy memories of what is undoubtedly one of the golden ages of gaming blind you to the fact that you were doing all that with an abomination of a controller in your hands. .
Hate is a strong term for a video game controller, but I hate the N64 controller with a passion that must be unhealthy to direct at a bundle of plastic and cables. And being of that certain ageIt is a hatred that I have carried since I was little. However, as time passed, the hatred diminished, or at least took a backseat. This week, however, my anger has come to light again.
analog days
The reason for this renewed hatred? The revelation of Analog3Dan upcoming third-party console that not only plays original Nintendo 64 game cartridges, but also makes them acceptable on a modern 4K TV screen. Unlike the series of “mini” consoles released in recent years, such as the SNES Classic Mini or the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Mini, the Analogue team does not rely on game emulation, but instead runs those original cartridges and uses a FPGA chip to essentially emulate the hardware from the original console.
It’s not Analogue’s first attempt at reviving classic hardware, having previously released products like the Analogue Pocket, a Game Boy-shaped handheld that replicates original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance carts. It can also be equipped with adapters to drive the Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, TurboGrafx-16, and Atari Lynx carts, making it a retro game collector’s dream system.
Analogue3D also seems to be a promising technology. Analogue says it’s built around “a 220k LE Altera Cyclone 10GX, the most powerful FPGA Analogue has ever used in a product,” offering region-free support for N64 cartridges from anywhere in the world in NTSC or PAL format, a built-in version of the Nintendo Expansion Pak (an N64 accessory that doubled the console’s available memory from 4 MB to a whopping 8 MB, improving performance in select games) and outputs in 4K or original display modes that maintain “true CRT reference quality ” with “immersive scan lines and shadow masks.”