Great post. Over of my favorite game hacks is players who carve out their controllers in games that don't clamp magnitude. Let's them move faster in diagonals. Sneaky sneaky!
You can do this with a lot of gamecube games because the system would set to default what ever values the system was receiving at bootup; turned out to be a great way to avoid costs by having different manufactures make the controllers
Hah, I was not aware of this. Goldeneye 64 however using the C buttons to walk you could walk diagonally much more quickly and you get used to going everywhere at an angle.
Quake was like this as well. When the walk and strafe keys were held it would set xvel and yvel both to the base walking speed (or its negative) resulting in faster diagonal movement. The correct approach would be to multiply them by √2/2 if diagonal movement is commanded, so that the magnitude of the velocity is the base walking speed.
I remember using a crappy joystick in the DOS racing game Screamer. The acceleration/steering was mapped to the unit square, but my joystick had a circular hole in the base, limiting movement. It made it impossible to turn around, since you couldn't accelerate and give max steering at the same time.
Good thing tuning's a thing. I always knew friends' controllers were not equally matched and it was not a level playing field. For this reason alone wanted my own system. Well described concepts and illustrations and I enjoyed the humor in the writeup.
"With controller age and abuse, this area will grow, shift and distort.
Every value within the inner dead zone is mapped to zero, giving us a reliable origin point for the game logic."
