“The Great Drift”
By Scott Hamilton
I don’t know about you, but as the father of teenage boys I have heard them complain a lot about drift in their game system controllers. The interesting thing is that my Sega Genesis game system from 30-years ago had what appeared to be the same joystick controller that is on most of the modern game controllers, but I never experienced drift.
For those non-gamers out there, drift occurs when a joystick or other control on a video game system does not correctly center itself, causing your game character to move when you don’t expect it. This problem is most visible in popular first-person shooter games where it impacts your ability to accurately aim your gun. As you can imagine this can be quite frustrating to the avid gamer.
So I started digging a little deeper into the issue and noticed something rather unexpected. I originally thought this issue was always there and is just more noticeable in the faster response gaming systems of today. I was shocked to learn that it has always been a problem, or at least since the mid 1980s when the first joysticks with position detection came about. The early gaming systems were either on or off in four directions with no ability to move a game character faster or slower, but just one speed, in eight different directions. There was no room for drift because the directional control was always either on or off and not variable that needed centering.
The first controller with this variable control that needed a centering mechanism was the old paddle controllers on the classic Atari 2600 gaming system. On this particular controller you were the centering mechanism; it did not have any type of auto centering. These controllers were based on varying the resistance as the controller moved, and they still utilize this method in modern joysticks.
Unfortunately the more you use the joystick, the more you wear out the contacts on this variable resistor and change the base resistance. As a result the resistance that is read as center on the control begins to shift and this causes the first type of controller drift. What was the center is no longer the center and it is shifted by a set value. As a result, this one is easy to solve by calibrating the controller, which I hear from my sons you have to do at least once a month.
Eventually your controller reaches the second phase of drift. This occurs when the worn contact causes extra friction in the joystick, causing it to return to a random different location each time it centers. This random drift cannot be fixed by calibration and is difficult to fix within software, because it Is random. Sometimes you can get rid of this random drift by reducing the sensitivity of the controller, which in turn impacts game play by making the controls less responsive.
When you reach this second stage of drift, it’s time to spend money on a new controller, and they range in price from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars. I know now you might be wondering exactly what Sega did differently 30-years ago to solve the drift problem, and why are we not using that technology in new controllers. I can answer how they solved the problem, but the only reason I can think of that we don’t use it in modern controllers is what I like to call planned obsolescence. Thirty years ago there was a different problem for video game system developers. New systems were only coming out every five to ten years, so the focus was on new games for the existing platforms; all the money was made on games.
In the 2010s we started seeing rapid development of gaming systems, with new platforms being released nearly every Christmas season. The market shifted from making money on the games to making money on the platforms. First person shooters became the most popular games and each platform upgrade improved the visual, audio and sensitivity of controls, making the games more realistic. Now we have reached a slow-down in new platform development, so once again the profit had to shift. The gaming industry has two main money makers today, game subscription services and controllers. If they built a controller that never wore out, they would lose one of their two main sources of profit.
As for the fix Sega had 30 years ago, it was rather simple. Instead of using a variable resistor which required a physical contact between the joystick and the position sensor, they used Hall effect sensors, which work off of a change in a magnetic field, so instead of a contact dragging across the surface of a variable resistor, they swung a magnet over a hall effect sensor. With no contact, nothing wears out and the center is always the center. These Sega Saturn 3D controllers from 1994/95 had no drift and many are still working like new today.
There is one company that recently released a new controller utilizing hall-effect sensors, The GuliKit King Kong 2 Pro controller, and so far it has pretty good reviews. They are building the controllers for the Steam Deck’s joystick module as well. So if you are looking for a controller that will last a lifetime without drift it seems there may be a new option coming soon, or you could always build your own. Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
Affiliated Products Links:
https://amzn.to/3Disxx6 Gulikit KK3 Max Controllers
