218: Products People Love

00:00SPEAKERI need to tell you about the greatest thing

00:01SPEAKERthat's ever happened to me.

00:02SPEAKER- Ooh.

00:04SPEAKER- I know that's a big setup, but just stick with me here.

00:06SPEAKER- Don't undersell, don't oversell this.

00:08SPEAKER- So you remember when we talked about

00:10SPEAKERclass action lawsuits recently?

00:12SPEAKERI think it was on a Q and A.

00:13SPEAKER- Yeah, we talked about it.

00:14SPEAKERYeah, it might've been the patron episode,

00:15SPEAKERbut yeah, we talked about like the surprise,

00:17SPEAKERoh, hey, here's $20 back, yeah.

00:20SPEAKER- And which ones are legit and which ones are not.

00:22SPEAKERAnyway, I mentioned during that

00:23SPEAKERthat I had received $75 in the last like year or two.

00:26SPEAKER- Congratulations.

00:28SPEAKER- As part of Maldonado versus Apple Incorporated at all.

00:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

00:32SPEAKER- Which I went back and looked,

00:33SPEAKERit just has to do with if you bought AppleCare+

00:36SPEAKERwithin a certain range and then got a device

00:38SPEAKERrepaired or replaced on it.

00:39SPEAKER- Oh.

00:40SPEAKER- Within a certain range, that's all it was.

00:41SPEAKERLike it was just, I think it's some class action

00:44SPEAKERabout like the language was you will receive

00:47SPEAKERa sort of a like new product as a replacement.

00:51SPEAKERAnd the class says those products were not like new.

00:55SPEAKERAnyway.

00:56SPEAKER- I got a scratched iPod once.

00:58SPEAKER- Right.

00:59SPEAKER- When I sent my iPod in for repair.

01:00SPEAKER- Yes, something like that.

01:01SPEAKERAnyway, I got a $75 check sometime.

01:04SPEAKER- Congratulations.

01:05SPEAKER- A while back, okay, the other day, this shows up

01:07SPEAKERalso from replacement device lawsuit as the return address.

01:11SPEAKERI'm just gonna read from this letter.

01:13SPEAKERYou're receiving this check because you were a class member

01:15SPEAKERwho cashed a check from the initial disbursement

01:18SPEAKERof the settlement fund.

01:19SPEAKER- Ooh.

01:20SPEAKER- Because not all class members

01:21SPEAKERredeemed their initial payments,

01:22SPEAKERthere is money left in the settlement fund

01:24SPEAKERthat is now being distributed to class members

01:26SPEAKERwho did redeem a payment from the initial disbursement.

01:28SPEAKER- Ooh.

01:29SPEAKER- This check is for $130.

01:31SPEAKER- What?

01:34SPEAKERWell, I mean, it's weird.

01:35SPEAKER'Cause sometimes like you get a check in the mail,

01:36SPEAKERyou forgot you did a thing.

01:38SPEAKERAnd it's like often those checks

01:40SPEAKERthat look real scammy, right?

01:42SPEAKER- Yes, but I don't know.

01:43SPEAKERI mean, I cashed the first one, it went just fine.

01:45SPEAKER- Wow, congratulations, 205 free bucks.

01:48SPEAKER- The idea that because I cashed the first check,

01:51SPEAKERthey sent me another check for almost twice as much.

01:53SPEAKER- I mean, wow, way to follow through there, Brad.

01:55SPEAKER- I guess I feel bad for the people

01:57SPEAKERwho didn't cash their initial checks, but only so bad.

02:00SPEAKER- When we talked about that, I forgot the most obvious one,

02:03SPEAKERwhich is that I'm eligible for the Bolt recall.

02:06SPEAKER- Oh.

02:07SPEAKER- So they did the Bolt batteries.

02:08SPEAKERAnd if you didn't do the batteries,

02:10SPEAKERif you had a car that was new enough

02:12SPEAKERthat they weren't worried

02:12SPEAKERthat the batteries were actually gonna go,

02:14SPEAKERbut still fell under the realm of the thing,

02:17SPEAKERthen they made, it's a terrible deal.

02:19SPEAKERThey were like, hey, we'll give you $1,500,

02:23SPEAKERbut only if you run the software on your car

02:28SPEAKERthat reduces the capacity by 20% of the battery

02:32SPEAKERfor three months to test if we think it's going,

02:34SPEAKERwhich will give us the data we need to know

02:36SPEAKERif it's going to actually explode.

02:38SPEAKER- Three months.

02:40SPEAKER- Three months.

02:41SPEAKER- Tough out for 500 bucks a month.

02:43SPEAKER- Well, it depends on if we have to go someplace.

02:44SPEAKERIf we wanna drive to like Tahoe or something,

02:46SPEAKERit's a real pain in the butt.

02:47SPEAKER- True, true, I didn't think about that.

02:48SPEAKER- Yeah, but anyway, 1500 bucks, pretty good.

02:51SPEAKERThat would reduce the total spend on that car

02:53SPEAKERto under $2,000, I think.

02:55SPEAKER- Wow.

02:56SPEAKER- Yeah.

02:57SPEAKER- Man.

02:58SPEAKER- Yeah.

02:59SPEAKER- We should have gotten an EV when the getting was good.

03:01SPEAKER- Yeah, the deals are gone now.

03:03SPEAKERPeople want EVs now it turns out.

03:05SPEAKER- That's a shame.

03:06SPEAKER- Something about $5 a gallon gas, I don't know.

03:08SPEAKER- Yeah, well, hey, there's a couple of life lessons for you.

03:10SPEAKERCash your class action checks and buy an electric car.

03:14SPEAKER(upbeat music)

03:18SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

03:42SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.

03:45SPEAKERI'm Will.

03:46SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

03:47SPEAKER- Ahoy, ahoy.

03:48SPEAKER- Ahoy, salutations.

03:51SPEAKER- Greetings.

03:52SPEAKER- I was trying to think of something nautical.

03:53SPEAKERWhat else is there besides ahoy

03:55SPEAKERthat you would say on the high seas?

03:56SPEAKER- I think it's just ahoy, right?

03:59SPEAKERLand ho, but that's only if you see land.

04:01SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.

04:02SPEAKERIt's some kind of naval greeting of some kind,

04:04SPEAKERnaval address.

04:05SPEAKER- Greetings comrade, I think is certain navies,

04:08SPEAKERbut some probably not others.

04:10SPEAKER- Sure.

04:10SPEAKER- I don't know.

04:12SPEAKERBrad, I think this week,

04:13SPEAKERI think we should take a trip down memory lane.

04:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I like doing that.

04:17SPEAKER- We've got show notes here.

04:18SPEAKERWe've done some research.

04:19SPEAKER- I went into my deep into the garage

04:22SPEAKERwhen I was cleaning out some stuff before the holidays.

04:24SPEAKERAnd one of the things that came up

04:26SPEAKERwas my 1996 vintage Space Orb 360.

04:31SPEAKER- Okay, that's where this came from.

04:33SPEAKER'Cause I thought this was like a highly specific suggestion

04:35SPEAKERfor an episode topic when you made it.

04:37SPEAKERAnd wow, look at that.

04:38SPEAKERIt's right there.

04:40SPEAKER- Yeah.

04:40SPEAKER- Hang on, hold that pose.

04:42SPEAKER- Yeah.

04:42SPEAKER- I might use this as-

04:44SPEAKER- Well, let me turn the lights on.

04:46SPEAKER- All right.

04:47SPEAKEROkay, now, great.

04:49SPEAKEROkay, we've got show.

04:50SPEAKER- It's either that or the picture of Romero

04:51SPEAKERthat we'll talk about in a minute.

04:52SPEAKER- We've got show art.

04:54SPEAKER- So yeah, so I found this thing and I was like,

04:56SPEAKERman, look, the Xbox 360 era standardization

05:02SPEAKERof PC controls on two sticks, four face buttons,

05:06SPEAKERfour triggers, two analog, two digital,

05:09SPEAKERand so start and select or box and hamburger and share

05:14SPEAKERor whatever you want to call them.

05:16SPEAKER- Don't get me started.

05:18SPEAKERDon't get me started.

05:18SPEAKERThe schism that's happened on the start and select buttons

05:21SPEAKERin the last few years is one of my least favorite things

05:24SPEAKERabout where video games have gone.

05:26SPEAKERJust call them start and select.

05:28SPEAKER- I guess they're not the same.

05:29SPEAKERLike Xbox is share and yeah, anyway,

05:32SPEAKERstart and select is the right answer.

05:33SPEAKERYou're correct about that.

05:34SPEAKER- Like PlayStation's options and share now,

05:36SPEAKERoption and share, something like that.

05:37SPEAKERAnd like Xbox doesn't even label them,

05:39SPEAKERbut they do have names.

05:40SPEAKERLike one of them is guide, right?

05:41SPEAKEROr something like that.

05:42SPEAKER- I think, well, I think Xbox,

05:44SPEAKERthe one formerly known as the start button

05:47SPEAKERis the hamburger button is screen printed

05:50SPEAKERon both of my controllers that are sitting here.

05:53SPEAKERBut the other one is where things get crazy

05:55SPEAKERand on PlayStation's share on an Xbox,

05:56SPEAKERit used to be share and now it's something else.

05:58SPEAKERI don't know what it does on an Xbox.

06:00SPEAKER- Oh, the view button is now.

06:02SPEAKER- Oh, right, yeah, the view.

06:03SPEAKER- The view button is select the due to two menu.

06:06SPEAKERIt's menu and view on an Xbox controller,

06:09SPEAKERwhich is blasphemy.

06:11SPEAKER- I think you mean start and select is what I'm hearing.

06:13SPEAKER- Definitely what I mean.

06:14SPEAKER- Anyway, yeah, so like undoubtedly good for games, right?

06:19SPEAKERIt's made everything easier,

06:20SPEAKERbut we've lost a lot of the mad science vibe

06:23SPEAKERthat came with controllers in the 90s and early 2000s.

06:26SPEAKER- Sure, looking at this list we've assembled,

06:28SPEAKERI can agree with you.

06:30SPEAKER- Yeah, so if you are young to the point

06:33SPEAKERthat you do not remember these days,

06:35SPEAKERthere was a period of time before the mouse and the keyboard

06:38SPEAKERwas the dedicated preferred way to play first person shooters

06:42SPEAKERand I think part of that, like Wolfenstein,

06:45SPEAKERI don't think there was a mouse option.

06:46SPEAKERI don't think there was a mouselook option in Wolfenstein.

06:48SPEAKERI think it was just, sorry, it was arrow keys

06:51SPEAKERand control, alt, shift, space.

06:53SPEAKER- That sounds right.

06:54SPEAKER- To do the different things.

06:55SPEAKERI think control was how you shot

06:56SPEAKERand alt was maybe how you opened doors, space.

07:01SPEAKERWas there a jump?

07:01SPEAKERNo, jump was shoot.

07:03SPEAKERSpace was shoot and control, anyway.

07:08SPEAKERThere was an option button.

07:09SPEAKERThere was other stuff that you had to do.

07:11SPEAKERIn Doom, most people use the same config.

07:14SPEAKERVery few people aimed with the mouse in Doom

07:17SPEAKERand I think part of it is

07:18SPEAKER'cause when you push forward and back in Doom,

07:20SPEAKERit moved you forward and back in the game.

07:21SPEAKER- Yes, which always felt terrible.

07:23SPEAKER- Yeah, it felt bad.

07:25SPEAKERHowever, if you took the time to learn

07:27SPEAKERhow to aim with the mouse in Doom

07:29SPEAKERand you played any kind of multiplayer games at all,

07:31SPEAKERyou would just utterly decimate the people

07:33SPEAKERwho couldn't turn and strafe at the same time.

07:38SPEAKERThe circle strafe is what we call it now.

07:40SPEAKEREverybody knows about it.

07:42SPEAKERBut at the time, it was a revolutionary new technique

07:45SPEAKERwhere you could go sideways and rotate the mouse

07:48SPEAKERso you were aiming at the center of the circle, basically,

07:50SPEAKERas you were going.

07:52SPEAKERAnd having spent a fair amount of time

07:54SPEAKERplaying in college lands, playing Doom in college lands,

07:58SPEAKERpeople thought you were cheating.

08:00SPEAKERLike people who had always used the keyboard only to play,

08:04SPEAKERwhen you started doing that, they were like,

08:05SPEAKER"What the fuck are you doing, man?

08:06SPEAKER"You are cheating.

08:07SPEAKER"Why, how are you killing me?

08:09SPEAKER"What devilry is this?"

08:10SPEAKER- I was not smart enough to use a mouse to play Doom,

08:12SPEAKERbut I did have a Gravis gamepad,

08:13SPEAKERand I mapped strafe to one of the face buttons.

08:16SPEAKERSo I could turn, but then I could quickly hit a face button

08:19SPEAKERlike as a toggle to strafe when necessary.

08:21SPEAKERAnd even that got me similar accusations

08:23SPEAKERwhen I played head-to-head over the modem with friends

08:25SPEAKERof like, "Hey, these rockets are just slow enough

08:27SPEAKER"that if you just sidestep them, they won't hit you."

08:30SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, what happened after Doom came out,

08:35SPEAKERand it had accelerated after Quake came out.

08:36SPEAKERSo Doom came out December of '93,

08:38SPEAKERQuake came out in the fall of '96.

08:42SPEAKERWhat happened after that was the crazy controllers

08:47SPEAKERaccelerated, 'cause everybody was like,

08:49SPEAKER"Well, the mouse and keyboard clearly isn't the way

08:51SPEAKER"to play these games.

08:52SPEAKER"We're gonna make a whole bunch of other crazy things."

08:54SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I'd jump in there and I would say

08:56SPEAKERthat plus M look happened in that range.

09:00SPEAKER- And M look was not universal.

09:01SPEAKERIt took a long time for M look to be,

09:03SPEAKERlike it wasn't until the kind of second wave

09:05SPEAKERof Quake engine games landed that M look became universal.

09:08SPEAKER- Absolutely, so I can't remember,

09:09SPEAKERI wish I'd made a note of where I read this.

09:11SPEAKERI don't think it was in the Romero memoir

09:12SPEAKERthat I read last year.

09:13SPEAKERIt might've been just like,

09:15SPEAKERmight've been like Carmack on Twitter

09:16SPEAKERor somewhere I was reading about them talking about

09:20SPEAKERgoing through those iterations as Quake was coming,

09:22SPEAKERlike heading to the finish line.

09:24SPEAKER- Yeah.

09:26SPEAKER- They had all these different options

09:27SPEAKERfor how they thought the mouse might work

09:28SPEAKERbecause nobody had ever used a mouse

09:29SPEAKERto look in 3D space before.

09:31SPEAKERAnd they had like, at one time they had it

09:33SPEAKERwhere if you were looking with the mouse,

09:35SPEAKERbut then started walking forward,

09:36SPEAKERthe view would then default snap back down to level again.

09:39SPEAKER- Ooh, that seems sad.

09:40SPEAKER- But ultimately they decided to ship the game

09:42SPEAKERwith M look in there, but disabled,

09:43SPEAKERand like you could only turn it on with the console command.

09:46SPEAKER- Which is crazy, right?

09:47SPEAKER- Right, 'cause then, you know, I still remember,

09:50SPEAKERyou know, I vaguely remember at least like the day

09:53SPEAKERthat I enabled M look for the first time.

09:55SPEAKERChanged my life, right?

09:56SPEAKERBut at the time it was not seen as like the way

09:59SPEAKERto play a first person shooter.

10:00SPEAKER- Yeah, it was definitely a third tier kind of choice.

10:04SPEAKERAnd I think the way it shipped was you had to press,

10:07SPEAKERyou had to press alt, you had to hold a key down

10:09SPEAKERto look up and down for the mouse to move

10:12SPEAKERfrom the Doom style to, you know,

10:14SPEAKERwhere it controlled your movement axis,

10:16SPEAKERyour forward and back, to looking up and down.

10:18SPEAKERI don't remember, but the upshot is M look

10:21SPEAKERwasn't the default, it took a long time to get there.

10:25SPEAKERAnd Mad Cats, and like it was the '90s,

10:29SPEAKERso there were a lot of hardware companies still,

10:30SPEAKERthey hadn't all consolidated.

10:31SPEAKERLogitech, Mad Cats, Thrustmaster,

10:35SPEAKERand then a bunch of other smaller places all were like,

10:39SPEAKERokay, we've done joysticks, we've done game pads,

10:41SPEAKERwe've done wheels, we've done yokes, we can do this.

10:46SPEAKERAnd there was a lot of weird first person shooter

10:50SPEAKERspecific hardware that came out.

10:51SPEAKER- It's like an arms race, looking at,

10:54SPEAKERlooking at all these ridiculous experiments.

10:56SPEAKER- It really was.

10:57SPEAKER- Can I, I'm also gonna mention Descent real quick.

11:00SPEAKERCame out in March '95, which is unique

11:03SPEAKERbecause you were actually moving in a 3D space,

11:05SPEAKERnot just looking, right?

11:06SPEAKERYou weren't just a bipedal dude on the ground.

11:10SPEAKERIt was looking around, you know,

11:11SPEAKERyou were actually a ship in zero gravity,

11:13SPEAKERlike flying in six degrees, right?

11:17SPEAKERSo there were games on the market

11:19SPEAKERthat were really starting to demand something

11:21SPEAKERthat lets you move and look around in 3D space properly.

11:24SPEAKER- Yeah, so a lot of these early controllers,

11:27SPEAKERthe first one that I saw was the Logitech Cyberman.

11:30SPEAKERThis came out in '93.

11:31SPEAKERI think I bought one of these and returned it,

11:34SPEAKERor maybe I bought it and just checked it in a box someplace

11:36SPEAKERand then never used it.

11:38SPEAKERBut it was, it was a, it was basically a mouse

11:41SPEAKERthat had a stalk coming out of the bottom.

11:43SPEAKERAnd then the stock was attached to a flat plane

11:46SPEAKERthat slid inside a thing.

11:49SPEAKERSo you could turn, twist and tilt the mouse on top of it.

11:53SPEAKERYou could also scooch it from side to side,

11:55SPEAKERslide it forward, the whole stem forward and back.

11:58SPEAKER- Oh, it slid as well. It didn't just rotate on this axis.

12:02SPEAKER- Yeah. And just, you know,

12:03SPEAKERwe're going to put the link to the show notes.

12:05SPEAKERLike there's a Google doc with pictures and links to stories

12:07SPEAKERabout stuff and the whole thing in the show notes.

12:11SPEAKERSo if you want to see what we're talking about

12:12SPEAKERand not just have us hear the descriptions, check that out.

12:16SPEAKER- Yes. Yeah, we'll just make that Google doc public

12:18SPEAKER'cause there's too much to cram into the like,

12:21SPEAKERpodcast post show notes.

12:22SPEAKER- Yeah. But yeah, so that thing slid forward and back.

12:25SPEAKERIt was, the tilting wasn't great.

12:28SPEAKERI remember playing Duke Nukem specifically with it

12:30SPEAKER'cause Duke Nukem, you could look up and down,

12:31SPEAKEReven though it was a 2.5D first person shooter.

12:35SPEAKERBut it wasn't, it didn't feel good.

12:38SPEAKERLike it actually felt pretty terrible.

12:41SPEAKERAnd when you hit the limits, it didn't always,

12:44SPEAKERlike the games, you had to configure the software.

12:47SPEAKERThe software had a bunch of stuff to configure.

12:49SPEAKERAnd when you hit the limits of the stem into the bottom,

12:53SPEAKERthe slidey part, instead of the tilty and turny parts,

12:56SPEAKERyou basically didn't, it didn't work right in most games.

13:01SPEAKERAnd you had to change it for every single game pretty much.

13:04SPEAKER- Did this require specific support in a game?

13:06SPEAKER- No, so this showed up as a mouse and keyboard,

13:08SPEAKERI believe you plugged it into,

13:10SPEAKERbut I think you plugged it into a game pad.

13:13SPEAKERMaybe it showed up as a game pad and a mouse.

13:15SPEAKERI can't remember.

13:17SPEAKERBut it was a weird, it was a very weird device.

13:20SPEAKERIt was very janky.

13:21SPEAKERYeah, I didn't review well.

13:23SPEAKERI looked for some reviews of it

13:24SPEAKERand couldn't really find a whole lot.

13:26SPEAKER- No, what I did find was,

13:27SPEAKERwe'll talk about the Logitech Cyberman 2 in a little bit,

13:30SPEAKER'cause we're going to go chronologically here,

13:32SPEAKERbut I saw references to the original Cyberman

13:34SPEAKERin Cyberman 2 reviews and they were not kind references.

13:38SPEAKERAnd I have to, I mean, I have to say,

13:39SPEAKERthis thing looked like a prototype to me.

13:40SPEAKERLike the mouse part looks like the most generic 90s ass.

13:44SPEAKERLike it looks like the crappy mouse

13:47SPEAKERthat comes with your Packard Bell.

13:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

13:50SPEAKER- In terms of just the form factor

13:51SPEAKERand ergonomics of the mouse.

13:52SPEAKERIt looks, and it looks like that just bolted to a base,

13:54SPEAKERyou know, like this thing looks like a proof of concept.

13:59SPEAKER- Part of the problem I think is, if I remember right,

14:01SPEAKERwas you had to, when you grabbed it,

14:03SPEAKERyou had to kind of grab the stem part.

14:07SPEAKERSo like in order to tilt the mouse forward,

14:09SPEAKERyou had to kind of pull up on the back of it

14:10SPEAKERat the same time.

14:11SPEAKERLike it was, it was weird.

14:13SPEAKERSo it was hard to press the buttons

14:15SPEAKERand do the movement and all the things.

14:16SPEAKERAnd also when you think about it,

14:18SPEAKERit's weird to put movement and look on the same hand.

14:21SPEAKERLike what was your left hand doing

14:23SPEAKERwhen you're using this thing?

14:24SPEAKERI don't know.

14:25SPEAKERSo anyway, it was a weird, it was a weird product.

14:29SPEAKERLike I said, I think it's something that I bought

14:30SPEAKERat Sam's Club or something and then returned

14:32SPEAKER'cause it was bad, actively terrible.

14:35SPEAKERAnd it didn't work.

14:36SPEAKERLike if I had to guess, I would say I bought this

14:39SPEAKERover in the Duke Nukem, Doom slash maybe Descent era

14:45SPEAKER'cause it was, like coming into Descent,

14:47SPEAKERit felt like you needed something, a new controller.

14:49SPEAKERAnd I didn't have rudders for my joystick and throttle.

14:54SPEAKERSo clearly Descent wouldn't be a playable.

14:57SPEAKER- I think we said it, but just in case we didn't,

14:59SPEAKERto be fair to this thing, it did come out in '93.

15:01SPEAKERSo it was actually kind of way ahead of its time.

15:04SPEAKERAnd this edenwaeth.com link in the show notes

15:08SPEAKERis actually somebody trying to resurrect

15:10SPEAKERone of these things in modern times.

15:12SPEAKER- Oh, wow.

15:13SPEAKER- Because it's so pre-USB, it's a serial device.

15:16SPEAKER- Yeah.

15:17SPEAKER- And so they literally had to buy like a USB

15:18SPEAKERto serial adapter and try to like dump the protocol

15:22SPEAKERor whatever, like they've got a bunch of like hex codes

15:24SPEAKERand stuff on here that they're going through

15:25SPEAKERtrying to make this thing work.

15:27SPEAKER- I wonder if this, it looks like it came out pre-Doom.

15:33SPEAKERIt was released pre-Doom,

15:35SPEAKERlike the Rise of the Triad and MechWarrior 2.

15:37SPEAKERSo like the thing about MechWarrior 2,

15:39SPEAKERif you've never played that, it wasn't a Twitch aiming game.

15:42SPEAKERIt was like a lock onto your target

15:44SPEAKERand kind of point the general direction game.

15:46SPEAKERSo it makes a lot of sense for this kind of controller.

15:49SPEAKERIf you were playing an actual first person shooter,

15:51SPEAKERit would be a little more difficult.

15:52SPEAKERAlso, this Eden Way thing points out that it had rumble,

15:57SPEAKERwhich I had completely forgotten.

15:58SPEAKERSo you had to put batteries in it

16:00SPEAKER'cause serial obviously didn't provide power,

16:02SPEAKERbut it would bounce, it had a little tumbly motor in it

16:08SPEAKERthat would make buzzing noises when you whacked into stuff,

16:12SPEAKERif the game supported it, I guess.

16:13SPEAKER- Yeah, fun.

16:15SPEAKER- So for weird controller aficionados,

16:17SPEAKERit was a dark time from then until 1996

16:21SPEAKERwhen the Mad Catz Panther XL came out.

16:25SPEAKERAnd I'm gonna say this is maybe one of the only ones

16:27SPEAKERof these things that was actually good.

16:29SPEAKER- Did you use one?

16:30SPEAKER- Yeah, I used one of these.

16:31SPEAKER- I'm impressed, I have to say I'm impressed

16:32SPEAKERat how many of these you seem to have touched at some time.

16:35SPEAKER- So I went to land parties,

16:37SPEAKERlike pretty good sized land parties

16:39SPEAKERon the East Coast at the time

16:41SPEAKER'cause you couldn't really play a lot of multiplayer games.

16:42SPEAKERAnd I went to, I want to say DC Con in '96

16:46SPEAKERwhen a lot of these people had stuff set up.

16:49SPEAKER- Was that full on, that was full on BYOC,

16:51SPEAKERlike you hauled your--

16:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I hauled my pizza box up there, yeah.

16:55SPEAKER- Man.

16:56SPEAKER- And a 25 pound CRT probably.

17:00SPEAKERSo the Panther was a joystick,

17:03SPEAKERlike a flight stick type joystick with a hat and triggers

17:06SPEAKERand multiple top buttons and the whole thing.

17:08SPEAKERAnd then on the left,

17:10SPEAKERand then there was a kind of kidney shaped base.

17:12SPEAKERAnd on the left side of the base

17:13SPEAKERwas a pretty good sized track ball,

17:15SPEAKERalmost like a missile command

17:16SPEAKERor like an arcade track ball, a centipede track ball.

17:20SPEAKERNot quite as big as a centipede or millipede track ball,

17:22SPEAKERbut same ballpark, probably a two inch ball

17:24SPEAKERif I had to guess.

17:25SPEAKER- Sure, it's not the worst idea,

17:27SPEAKERlike joystick plus track ball.

17:28SPEAKERLike that actually, those are both proven input methods.

17:32SPEAKERYou could kind of see them working in tandem.

17:34SPEAKER- Yeah, it felt pretty good.

17:36SPEAKERI didn't, so this was one,

17:38SPEAKERI'm pretty sure they had it set up there.

17:39SPEAKERMaybe I played one that somebody had brought,

17:40SPEAKERplayed with one that somebody had brought.

17:42SPEAKERAnd the weird, so the,

17:46SPEAKERyou were shooting and moving with your right hand

17:48SPEAKERand aiming with your left hand, which was different.

17:50SPEAKERBy this point, I would have been using mouse and keyboard

17:52SPEAKER'cause I think, I feel like if Quake hadn't been out,

17:54SPEAKERQ3 test was out and you were like,

17:57SPEAKERit became clear that you were gonna have to be able

17:59SPEAKERto aim up and down before long.

18:00SPEAKERYou couldn't just drift on aiming perfectly straight

18:04SPEAKERall the time.

18:05SPEAKER- You had to shoot down through those murder holes below you

18:08SPEAKERand play below you.

18:09SPEAKER- You had to shoot rockets at people's feet

18:11SPEAKERor they wouldn't be, you wouldn't be able to do a murder

18:12SPEAKERon them.

18:15SPEAKERSo yeah, like, so you use the mouse,

18:19SPEAKERthe track pad, track ball worked like a mouse.

18:22SPEAKERYour movement was on the stick.

18:24SPEAKERThe hands were reversed from what you normally do

18:26SPEAKERwith mouse and keyboard now, unless you're left-handed.

18:28SPEAKER- Yes, that's what I was waiting to say is,

18:29SPEAKERI think it's kind of an odd choice to put the joystick

18:31SPEAKERon the right, like normally.

18:32SPEAKERI mean, granted that's biasing for right-handed people.

18:37SPEAKERLike obviously left-handed people probably had a good time

18:39SPEAKERwith this thing, but generally I would want my pointing

18:41SPEAKERdevice on my dominant hand and the joystick

18:43SPEAKERwas less important there.

18:44SPEAKER- I don't think we realized that that was important

18:46SPEAKERat the time and also I would say that because the joystick

18:50SPEAKERis handed, it's clearly a right-handed joystick

18:51SPEAKER'cause it has a thumb button.

18:54SPEAKERI think that probably the cost, like the cost of doing this

18:57SPEAKERthe way that you would expect with the aiming

18:59SPEAKERon the right hand and the movement on the left hand

19:03SPEAKERprobably would have multiplied the cost of this thing

19:05SPEAKERby a pretty substantial margin 'cause they would have

19:07SPEAKERto make left-handed molds.

19:08SPEAKER- Sure.

19:10SPEAKER- But yeah, like it worked pretty well.

19:11SPEAKERThe trackball was, like using a trackball

19:13SPEAKERfor first person shooter controllers

19:14SPEAKERworks actually surprisingly well.

19:18SPEAKERI don't know if you remember this, but Jason Bergman,

19:20SPEAKERknown as Looney Boy at the time over on Blues News,

19:23SPEAKERwho's gone on to work on a bunch of different games

19:26SPEAKERover the years, but famously posted on Blues News

19:30SPEAKERabout his one-handed doom and quake playing technique,

19:33SPEAKERwhich was that he bound I think mouse three on a trackball

19:37SPEAKERand a large check thumb trackball to walk forward

19:40SPEAKERand then would steer with the mouse

19:41SPEAKERand shoot with the left mouse button.

19:44SPEAKER- Oh, that's intense.

19:45SPEAKER- Yeah.

19:47SPEAKER- I think I've talked about this before.

19:48SPEAKERI had walked forward on mouse two for years and years.

19:53SPEAKER- Madness.

19:53SPEAKER- But even I still needed the keyboard.

19:55SPEAKERI still had most of the other stuff on keyboard keys.

19:58SPEAKERSo to do everything with one hand is impressive.

20:02SPEAKER- Absolutely madness.

20:02SPEAKERSo I think the Panther, so a lot of these devices

20:05SPEAKERare combo joystick port and serial devices,

20:08SPEAKERwhich I think is what the Panther was.

20:09SPEAKERThe joystick port was a MIDI port that Creative Labs

20:14SPEAKERand Microsoft had done some software work on.

20:17SPEAKER- Oh, is that what the, okay, was it called a game port?

20:20SPEAKERI think they--

20:21SPEAKER- Called a game port, yeah.

20:22SPEAKER- Okay, I didn't realize that was like a custom thing.

20:24SPEAKERI had always wondered where the game port came from

20:26SPEAKERand who standardized it and et cetera, et cetera,

20:28SPEAKER'cause it was often on your sound card.

20:30SPEAKER- So yeah, it was a standard MIDI port

20:32SPEAKERand you could use most MIDI ports for game ports

20:35SPEAKERif there were drivers for them.

20:36SPEAKERBut Creative Labs and Microsoft had done some custom work

20:39SPEAKERon the driver to make it work with game controllers.

20:42SPEAKER- That explains why I plugged my Gravis game pad

20:45SPEAKERinto my Sound Blaster for so long.

20:46SPEAKER- Well, and it also, the nice thing about MIDI

20:48SPEAKERwas it let you do analog and digital feeds

20:51SPEAKERfor different inputs.

20:52SPEAKERSo you could do, I think, two analog axes

20:55SPEAKERand 16 buttons or something like that.

20:58SPEAKERMaybe three analog axes, I can't remember.

21:02SPEAKERSo yeah, Panther XL, it was weird.

21:05SPEAKERThey didn't make it for super long.

21:09SPEAKERIt only produced until 1998,

21:11SPEAKERwhich means basically it was out.

21:13SPEAKERIt was done before Quake multiplayer stuff

21:16SPEAKERhad really even taken off,

21:18SPEAKERwhich is a weird thing to think about.

21:21SPEAKER- Is it safe to,

21:22SPEAKERI don't know if we can dig this up on every product.

21:23SPEAKERIs it safe to assume most of these

21:25SPEAKERwere not in production for very long?

21:26SPEAKERI don't think any of them would truly hit.

21:28SPEAKER- I think that, yeah, probably there's a couple

21:32SPEAKERdown here later that went for a little bit longer.

21:35SPEAKERBut yeah, most of these were one to three years

21:39SPEAKERon the outside.

21:41SPEAKERSo the next one is one of my favorites.

21:43SPEAKERIt's what we talked about earlier in the show.

21:45SPEAKERIt's the Space Orb 360.

21:46SPEAKERI won this at a LAN party.

21:49SPEAKER- Nice.

21:50SPEAKER- Which is maybe the only thing I've ever won

21:51SPEAKERat a LAN party.

21:54SPEAKERAnd just to be clear, drawing, not competitive,

21:57SPEAKERI believe, if I recall right.

21:59SPEAKERBut Space Orb is, you've probably seen pictures of this.

22:02SPEAKERIt's popular on the internet 'cause it looks really weird.

22:04SPEAKERIt's got a ball.

22:07SPEAKERIt's got a ball on the left side

22:08SPEAKERwhere the analog stick on a Dreamcast controller would be.

22:12SPEAKERAnd then on the right side, there's four face buttons,

22:14SPEAKERand it's got two triggers on the top,

22:15SPEAKERwhich I think this was maybe the first thing I ever saw

22:18SPEAKERthat had triggers on it, on a gamepad situation as well.

22:21SPEAKER- And then we should point out the Orb

22:23SPEAKERis something you palm.

22:24SPEAKERIt's not like on the face of the controller.

22:26SPEAKERIt's more like the entire kind of upper left quadrant

22:29SPEAKERof the controller is scooped out

22:30SPEAKERand a giant rubber ball is there in its place.

22:33SPEAKERLike it's a pretty sizable orb.

22:35SPEAKER- Yeah, so the idea was that you put your thumb

22:37SPEAKERon the center of the ball on the face side

22:39SPEAKERso you could push it forward and back

22:41SPEAKERand you kind of grip it so it's like twisty.

22:45SPEAKERI don't know if you can see that,

22:46SPEAKERbut you kind of grip it on the back with two fingers

22:48SPEAKERso you can, basically the ball was a 6DOF controller.

22:51SPEAKERSo you could go forward, back, left, right, and up and down.

22:55SPEAKERAnd then also twist X, Y, Y, Z, whatever the other one, X, Z.

23:01SPEAKERSo you could twist on all three axes

23:03SPEAKERor any combination thereof.

23:05SPEAKERAnd there's like a little, I don't know if you can hear it,

23:07SPEAKERbut there's like a little springy kind of mechanism in there.

23:12SPEAKER- It looks like a stress ball.

23:14SPEAKER- It does look like a stress ball, yeah.

23:16SPEAKERAnd surprisingly, unlike every other piece

23:18SPEAKERof 20 year old rubber I have in the house,

23:20SPEAKERit doesn't have like a weird tacky feel

23:22SPEAKERor anything like that to it.

23:23SPEAKER- They made it out of a, this thing was built to last.

23:25SPEAKERThe company that made this also made

23:28SPEAKERwhat I would describe as weird CAD controllers as well

23:31SPEAKERthat were like 1500 bucks.

23:33SPEAKERI think this launched at 100 bucks, maybe 150 bucks.

23:36SPEAKER100 bucks according to Boop magazine.

23:39SPEAKER- Who did make this thing?

23:40SPEAKERI'm actually not seeing that.

23:42SPEAKER- The company, they spun off a separate company to do it,

23:45SPEAKERbut I think it might've been called Space Warp,

23:47SPEAKERSpace Tech, IMC. - Space Tech, yes.

23:48SPEAKERSpace Tech, TEC, Space Tech IMC, first bought by Lab Tech.

23:52SPEAKER- God, remember Lab Tech? - Yeah, Lab Tech

23:54SPEAKERwas big in the CAD space for a long time.

23:57SPEAKER- Wait, were they? - Yeah.

23:58SPEAKER- Jeez, I both have not thought about Lab Tech

24:02SPEAKERin like 20 years and also feel like we could maybe

24:05SPEAKERdo an entire episode about Lab Tech.

24:07SPEAKER- Maybe, yeah.

24:08SPEAKER- They made a lot of stuff.

24:09SPEAKER- So the Space Orb, because of the 60 OF nature

24:13SPEAKERof the controls, it was great for games like Descent, right?

24:17SPEAKERLike you could push forward, you'd go up, down.

24:19SPEAKERYou are an unstoppable killing machine in Descent.

24:21SPEAKER- The twist, the lateral translational movement,

24:24SPEAKERthe strafing, basically, was quite good and very reliable.

24:27SPEAKERThe twisting, as I recall, was a little jittery,

24:29SPEAKERand I feel like it's the kind of thing

24:31SPEAKERthat in a modern context, they would've added

24:34SPEAKERa little bit of software smoothing to,

24:35SPEAKERand you would've never noticed that it had a problem.

24:38SPEAKERBack then, we didn't do such things,

24:40SPEAKERand so it would skip.

24:42SPEAKERBecause you were passing all this data over a serial port,

24:45SPEAKERI think 112 kilobits per second or whatever it was

24:50SPEAKERthat you got out of a serial port

24:51SPEAKERwas maybe gating your perf.

24:54SPEAKER- Interesting.

24:56SPEAKER- But yeah, it was a pretty remarkable thing,

24:59SPEAKERand it worked.

25:00SPEAKERLike I said, I ended up not using it for very long,

25:03SPEAKERbut I'd whip it out for Descent, was the reg,

25:05SPEAKERuntil I got a Thrustmaster, like a FLCS,

25:10SPEAKERlike a F16 flight stick with the hotas and the whole thing.

25:14SPEAKERIt was my Descent thing of choice.

25:16SPEAKER- Yeah, and it seems to have been pretty popular.

25:18SPEAKERI found a post on Scott Hanselman's blog.

25:20SPEAKERI swear that name sounds familiar.

25:22SPEAKERI don't know why I know him.

25:23SPEAKER- Scott Hanselman is a noted hacker of things.

25:28SPEAKER- Okay, a programmer, teacher, speaker, technologist

25:31SPEAKERis how he seems to, anyway.

25:34SPEAKERThis blog post is from 2010, so it itself is fairly old,

25:37SPEAKERbut at the top, it's about the space orb.

25:40SPEAKERHe says, "15 years later, and I'm still convinced

25:42SPEAKER"that the space orb 360 is the greatest game controller

25:44SPEAKER"of all time," but this whole blog post

25:46SPEAKERis about this cottage industry or scene

25:49SPEAKERof people who have come up with an Arduino-based solution

25:53SPEAKERfor getting the space orb 360

25:54SPEAKERto continue to work on modern PCs.

25:56SPEAKER- Yeah, so it basically makes it show up

25:58SPEAKERas a USB head device, and you have two different modes for it.

26:03SPEAKEROne is mouse and keyboard, and one is joystick.

26:06SPEAKERUnfortunately, the shield is no longer available anywhere

26:09SPEAKERthat I could find.

26:09SPEAKERI was gonna buy one, so I could put it together

26:11SPEAKERand try it out.

26:12SPEAKER- That's a shame.

26:13SPEAKER- Scott's a vice president at Microsoft also.

26:15SPEAKERHe's a developer community guy.

26:17SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

26:18SPEAKERThat's why I've heard of that.

26:19SPEAKER- That's why you know him, yeah.

26:19SPEAKER- Okay.

26:22SPEAKER- So yeah, space orb, kinda cool, I'm gonna say.

26:25SPEAKER- Yeah, seems like a neat idea.

26:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it's unlike anything.

26:29SPEAKERIt is completely unique amongst these controllers.

26:33SPEAKER- It's probably the most, I don't know if,

26:36SPEAKERI don't wanna use the word innovative as a bit grandiose,

26:38SPEAKERbut it's the most thoughtful thing on here, I think,

26:42SPEAKER'cause everything else is some maybe ill-advised combination

26:45SPEAKERof existing input methods, you know,

26:47SPEAKERor it's just a joystick with a little extra or something,

26:50SPEAKERbut this thing is actually, it's unique on this list,

26:53SPEAKERand it seems like they actually put thought

26:54SPEAKERinto how you would play a game with it.

26:56SPEAKER- Well, yeah, some of the other ones,

26:58SPEAKERI would say maybe the cost of manufacturing

27:01SPEAKERimpacted the usability of them.

27:05SPEAKERThis one actually, this one's pretty good.

27:09SPEAKERLike I said, I distinctly remember

27:11SPEAKERthe movement being a little bit,

27:12SPEAKERthe aiming being a little bit jittery,

27:15SPEAKERbut yeah, it was unlike, it didn't feel cheap, I guess,

27:19SPEAKERcompared to some of these other boxes.

27:22SPEAKERLike the next one, the Logitech Wingman Warrior.

27:27SPEAKER- Yes.

27:28SPEAKER- Which, this came, it was '97?

27:31SPEAKERThis is a '97 release.

27:32SPEAKER- Yes, this is kind of what I was thinking of

27:35SPEAKERwhen I said like, hey, it's just a joystick with some stuff.

27:37SPEAKERLike in this case, instead of a trackball, it's a dial.

27:40SPEAKERIt's like a straight-up centipede machine dial

27:43SPEAKERon the side of a joystick.

27:44SPEAKER- Or Tempest dial, yeah, it's not even a two-axis dial.

27:48SPEAKERIt's just a one-axis dial.

27:50SPEAKERIt seems like it was made for Doom, specifically, in 1997,

27:54SPEAKERwhich was a little bit late for Doom.

27:57SPEAKER- Yes, you linked the manual on archive.org for this thing,

28:01SPEAKERand I was looking through it,

28:03SPEAKERand then looked at the date it came out,

28:04SPEAKERand I was just like, you poor...

28:06SPEAKER- Yeah.

28:07SPEAKER- Like, how did you do this to yourselves?

28:10SPEAKERThis thing is just for aiming on the x-axis back and forth

28:13SPEAKERat a time when that was five, almost five years outdated.

28:18SPEAKER- Well, this was, also, this was a time

28:20SPEAKERbefore joystick twist was a thing, right?

28:23SPEAKERLike, they were still trying to sell rudders

28:24SPEAKERfor every flight stick that they sold,

28:27SPEAKERso nobody was putting a z-axis twist on a rudder twist

28:33SPEAKERon the joystick, which is essentially what this wheel is.

28:37SPEAKERI think it showed up as a mouse.

28:38SPEAKERI was looking for people who were trying to get it working,

28:40SPEAKERso this was another joystick plus serial port thing.

28:47SPEAKERThis one flummoxed me.

28:48SPEAKERI think there's another spinner

28:52SPEAKERthat was the y-axis for your thumb on the twisty side,

28:56SPEAKERon the left side of the...

28:57SPEAKERSo, just to paint a word picture,

28:59SPEAKERthis is another joystick with a thing

29:02SPEAKERdangling off the left side of it.

29:03SPEAKERIn this case, the left side is a big inch and a half

29:07SPEAKERred spinny top.

29:09SPEAKERIt wasn't loose like a Tempest spinner, though, as I recall.

29:13SPEAKERI never bought one of these.

29:14SPEAKERI used it, and I touched it in Best Buy.

29:16SPEAKERI was like, "Oh, yeah, no, this is a no-for-me dog."

29:20SPEAKERIt has a mouse wheel-type spinner below the thing,

29:25SPEAKERand then it has some thumb buttons.

29:26SPEAKERIt's a right-handed joystick again,

29:28SPEAKERso you're doing your aiming with your left hand,

29:32SPEAKERand you're moving with your right hand,

29:33SPEAKERwhich feels...

29:35SPEAKER- I mean, I guess when you're doing a gamepad,

29:37SPEAKERyou use your right hand to aim, right, usually?

29:42SPEAKER- Now, yes, now.

29:42SPEAKER- Yeah, now, in the modern context.

29:44SPEAKER- On a dual-analog, yes.

29:46SPEAKER- The most notable thing about this

29:48SPEAKERis I was looking through some old boot magazines

29:50SPEAKERto find people talking about the different products here.

29:56SPEAKERThere was an ad from Logitech

29:58SPEAKERwith John Romero holding one of these up above his head,

30:02SPEAKERand the quote at the top is great.

30:04SPEAKERJohn Romero, who is listed as id Software stud

30:09SPEAKERand co-creator of Doom, Doom II,

30:10SPEAKERAyrton, Hexen, and Quake.

30:12SPEAKER- Oh, I hadn't, in the Google Doc,

30:14SPEAKERit's a little too small to notice that text.

30:16SPEAKERI had missed id Software stud.

30:19SPEAKERBut this is absolutely, well,

30:20SPEAKERbut this was well after he was out of there.

30:24SPEAKER- Almost certainly, yeah.

30:25SPEAKER- Unless this ad long predates the launch of the product,

30:28SPEAKER'cause he was out of there mid-'96.

30:30SPEAKER- Well, so the quote is--

30:32SPEAKER- Yes, very much in the heyday

30:33SPEAKERof him being in ads and promoting his brand, though.

30:37SPEAKER- This is when he was gonna make you his something or other.

30:41SPEAKERIt says, "When I created Doom,

30:43SPEAKER"I never imagined there'd be a killer way to play it.

30:46SPEAKER"Wingman Warrior is it."

30:49SPEAKERSo yeah, so it's shocking to me

30:54SPEAKERthat this thing shipped ever.

30:56SPEAKERThey must've spent a lot of money making the molds for this

30:58SPEAKERin order to release this in a post-Quake world.

31:00SPEAKER- Yeah, for sure.

31:01SPEAKERAlso, I wanna point out,

31:03SPEAKERin contrast to the general swagger of the rest of this ad,

31:07SPEAKERLogitech's motto at the time,

31:10SPEAKER"Product people love."

31:12SPEAKER- That's true.

31:13SPEAKERThat was their motto at the time.

31:15SPEAKER- There maybe has never been a more generic corporate slogan

31:18SPEAKERthan that in history.

31:20SPEAKER- What was Sony's make-believe?

31:22SPEAKER- Yeah. - Oh, no, sorry,

31:23SPEAKERit was make.believe.

31:24SPEAKER- Sure. - Yeah.

31:25SPEAKER- Products people love.

31:27SPEAKER- Okay, also in 1997,

31:29SPEAKERconfusing the market was the Logitech Cyberman 2.

31:33SPEAKER- Yes.

31:34SPEAKER- No, it was not for online fornication.

31:38SPEAKERThat'll come later.

31:39SPEAKER- Yes, yes, we'll get to the Falcon later.

31:42SPEAKER- Yeah, the Cyberman 2, the boot review

31:45SPEAKERwritten in, let's see, July of '97,

31:49SPEAKERthe July of '97 issue,

31:50SPEAKERwhich had been written in probably April,

31:52SPEAKERwas, said it's better than the first.

31:55SPEAKERThis is another kidney-shaped thing

31:56SPEAKERthat's in your desk,

31:57SPEAKERbut instead of having a joystick on one side

31:59SPEAKERand some sort of aiming controller on the other side,

32:01SPEAKERthis one puts the aiming thing on the right

32:04SPEAKERand the movement thing on the left.

32:06SPEAKERSo the movement part is a slidey top

32:08SPEAKERthat is like forward, back, X.

32:10SPEAKERIt's like there's a circle that moves on the X, Y axis,

32:14SPEAKERand you can use that to basically pass WASD commands

32:19SPEAKERthrough as if it's a keyboard.

32:21SPEAKERThere's some buttons on that side,

32:22SPEAKERso you can do like gun selection, jumping,

32:25SPEAKERthat kind of stuff at finger position

32:28SPEAKERand thumb position, so you could palm it, basically.

32:30SPEAKERSo you put your palm on this thing,

32:32SPEAKERyou move it forward and back, left and right.

32:34SPEAKERThat part, actually pretty good.

32:37SPEAKERLike, it felt pretty good.

32:39SPEAKERThe aiming part was like a,

32:41SPEAKERdo you remember those eraser heads

32:44SPEAKERon old Lenovo and IBM laptops?

32:47SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah, the classic, the nub.

32:49SPEAKER- Big one of those guys.

32:51SPEAKER- Okay, okay.

32:51SPEAKER- But it was a knob that was two and a half inches across

32:55SPEAKERand rubber and grippy.

32:57SPEAKERYou'd kind of grab it and you could tilt it forward, back,

32:59SPEAKERleft and right a little bit, and twist it as well,

33:03SPEAKERwhich would let you do all of the things you do

33:07SPEAKERwith a mouse, I guess.

33:09SPEAKER- This review from Boot Magazine by Brian Del Rizzo

33:13SPEAKERdescribes it as a puck.

33:14SPEAKER- Yeah, it's puckish.

33:16SPEAKER- Kind of a way to think of it.

33:17SPEAKERI mean, I have a little bit of a bone to pick

33:19SPEAKERwith old BDR here.

33:21SPEAKERNot a lot of description in this review

33:22SPEAKERof how it feels to use.

33:24SPEAKER- No, my guess is, this review feels a little soft.

33:29SPEAKERSorry, Brian, we love you.

33:31SPEAKERBut yeah, it was, he does describe it as fully digital.

33:35SPEAKERThere's like a patent diagram of how it works

33:38SPEAKERon the twisting and all that, 'cause it's all,

33:39SPEAKERthey made a big point of it being all digital

33:42SPEAKERand not analog, because at that point,

33:45SPEAKERthat was the time in history when if you plugged your,

33:49SPEAKERyou initialized your joystick at the wrong time,

33:52SPEAKERit would be off-axis and you'd have to reinitialize it.

33:57SPEAKERHe talks a lot, I mean, this is 175 or 200 word review,

34:02SPEAKERprobably, so it's a little short, maybe 300, I don't know.

34:06SPEAKERHe doesn't, yeah, he doesn't talk about how you use it

34:08SPEAKERin like Quake or Doom or something like that,

34:10SPEAKERwhich is what I would, I really wanna know.

34:12SPEAKERI don't, I didn't spend much time with this at all.

34:15SPEAKERI don't think I ever used it actually plugged in.

34:16SPEAKERI just, or if I did, it was only for a minute or two.

34:20SPEAKERIt was already gone by the time I,

34:22SPEAKERlike it's time had passed by the time

34:24SPEAKERI was covering this stuff as a real thing.

34:27SPEAKERThis one actually looks like they had played video games

34:29SPEAKERbefore they designed it though.

34:30SPEAKER- Yeah, this one, like the space war business,

34:32SPEAKERgot some thought put into it.

34:34SPEAKERIt's a unique design at least.

34:36SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's definitely not for,

34:39SPEAKERhe does say it's not for flight games,

34:41SPEAKEReven though you do have a kind of joystick thing on there.

34:44SPEAKERI don't know, this is a weird one.

34:46SPEAKERI'd be curious to fire one of these up.

34:50SPEAKERThe thing that he does include in this review

34:52SPEAKERthat I love is the configuration app,

34:55SPEAKERthe screenshot of the configuration app

34:56SPEAKERwhere they have like presets for different games,

34:59SPEAKERbut you can literally bind all the axes and twist

35:01SPEAKERand all the different stuff

35:02SPEAKERto all the different possible uses for the device,

35:06SPEAKERwhich is weird.

35:10SPEAKEROkay, this is the real, this is,

35:13SPEAKERI think this next one is maybe the bottom of the barrel,

35:15SPEAKERwhich is really saying something.

35:17SPEAKERThe Thrustmaster Fragmaster.

35:21SPEAKERBrad, do you want to take a stab at describing this one?

35:25SPEAKER- The best thing I can think of to say about it

35:27SPEAKERis that it looks kind of like some of the alien architecture

35:29SPEAKERfrom the Alien and Aliens films,

35:31SPEAKERor Alien in particular,

35:33SPEAKERlike the HR Giger spaceship stuff from Alien.

35:36SPEAKERLike it looks like a control interface from that.

35:39SPEAKER- It's Giger-esque.

35:41SPEAKERSo there's a round base that's fairly substantial,

35:44SPEAKERand then coming out of the center of the base,

35:47SPEAKERthere's like a delta-shaped thing, basically,

35:50SPEAKERis how I would describe it.

35:51SPEAKER- Triangular, it's not a joystick

35:53SPEAKERbecause there are two hand grips.

35:55SPEAKERIt's almost like an arch.

35:56SPEAKERIt's like a triangular thing,

35:58SPEAKERbut with a big cutout in the middle

35:59SPEAKERso your hands, your fingers can grip both sides of it.

36:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I never used one of these.

36:04SPEAKERI never, we had one at Maximum PC

36:06SPEAKERthat was just basically glued to the wall

36:09SPEAKERin the top of the lab as part of our wall of shame.

36:14SPEAKERBut yeah, this was made by Thrustmaster.

36:16SPEAKERIt's called the Fragmaster.

36:18SPEAKERThey sold it as a first-person shooter controller,

36:20SPEAKERand as it was designed for games like Quake.

36:25SPEAKERI don't know,

36:28SPEAKERI don't exactly understand how it was supposed to work.

36:30SPEAKERI think you were moving by pressing the buttons

36:35SPEAKERand steering this thing,

36:37SPEAKERalmost like it was a yoke for your steering.

36:42SPEAKER- I would love to hear, we put this in here,

36:45SPEAKERlike I said, I don't think anybody really used this ever.

36:52SPEAKERThere were a couple of videos where people dredged it out

36:54SPEAKERon YouTube and tried to make it work

36:57SPEAKERand kind of had mixed results.

37:01SPEAKERAnd the reviews that we were able to find

37:04SPEAKERdescribed it as very uncomfortable

37:06SPEAKERand didn't feel the least bit natural.

37:09SPEAKERYeah, it looks like the kind of thing

37:10SPEAKERthat somebody was like, hey man,

37:11SPEAKERwe got to get a FPS controller,

37:13SPEAKERyou better make it look weird.

37:14SPEAKERAnd also it's going to have a thing called megahertz mode,

37:17SPEAKERwhere it works just like a real mouse.

37:19SPEAKER- Hang on, I think you need to explain.

37:21SPEAKERWe need to spell megahertz, M-E-G-A-H-U-R-T-S.

37:25SPEAKER- Is it S or Z? - Yes.

37:27SPEAKERI'm looking at the box here.

37:28SPEAKER- Oh.

37:29SPEAKER- I'm looking at a photo of the box, megahertz mode.

37:32SPEAKERIt's like you're going to hurt the mega.

37:34SPEAKER- Disappointing.

37:36SPEAKER- I don't know about the branding here.

37:38SPEAKERThrustmaster, Fragmaster,

37:40SPEAKERI don't think you can do that.

37:41SPEAKER- I think they called most of their things

37:43SPEAKERthe something master.

37:44SPEAKER- Were they all like that?

37:45SPEAKER- Yeah.

37:45SPEAKER- I guess that makes a little more sense.

37:46SPEAKER- Yeah, it was either something master

37:49SPEAKERif it was an arcade controller

37:51SPEAKERor it was like they would knock off the A-10 Warthog

37:56SPEAKERor the F-16 FLCS system

37:59SPEAKERand like do an actual military joystick.

38:01SPEAKERThey were, Thrustmaster at that point

38:03SPEAKERwas mainly real airplane joysticks was their,

38:07SPEAKERwas their kind of bread and butter.

38:10SPEAKERSo like, and just to be clear,

38:12SPEAKERthis was an expensive thing to make.

38:14SPEAKERLike this has got a boatload of plastic parts.

38:16SPEAKERSo they spent at least, you know,

38:18SPEAKERhundreds of thousands of dollars making these molds.

38:21SPEAKERAnd so this must've been perceived

38:23SPEAKERas an incredibly lucrative opportunity

38:26SPEAKERfor the entire market to figure out

38:29SPEAKER'cause they were all trying to do

38:30SPEAKERthese weird proprietary things

38:31SPEAKERthat really didn't work at all.

38:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

38:34SPEAKERWell, this came out in '98.

38:36SPEAKERI mean, this was right in the middle

38:37SPEAKERof the quake explosion, right?

38:38SPEAKERAnd like Unreal came out in '98,

38:40SPEAKERlike the first person shooter scene on PC

38:42SPEAKERwas just exploding at this time, so.

38:45SPEAKER- '97, '98, Quake was an enormous thing.

38:49SPEAKERDuke Nukem was, people were playing a lot of Duke Nukem

38:52SPEAKERand we were all looking,

38:53SPEAKERlike the heady coverage online and in print

38:57SPEAKERof the first wave of Quake engine games

38:59SPEAKERand then Unreal engine games after that was enormous, right?

39:03SPEAKER- Yeah, like Sin and Half-Life came out in '98 as well, so.

39:06SPEAKER- Sin, Half-Life, Heretic II.

39:10SPEAKERQuake II was supposed to ship in '98.

39:11SPEAKERI don't think it shipped until '99.

39:13SPEAKER- I always, I'm just thinking in retrospect,

39:17SPEAKERI always pair Sin and Half-Life in my mind

39:19SPEAKERbecause they're two Quake engine games

39:20SPEAKERthat came out very close together.

39:21SPEAKERThey were like the first two big ones, I guess I would say.

39:24SPEAKERIt might be a little generous to mention Sin

39:26SPEAKERand the same company as Half-Life to stay in age.

39:29SPEAKERI don't know.

39:30SPEAKER- But at the time, Sin came out, what, a week before,

39:32SPEAKERsomething two weeks before Half-Life?

39:35SPEAKERAnd then Heretic II came out the week after?

39:37SPEAKERThose were all three Quake engine games.

39:40SPEAKERHeretic II was made by Raven.

39:42SPEAKER- Quake I.

39:43SPEAKER- Quake I engine games.

39:44SPEAKER- So some of that stuff's a little messy, I think.

39:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

39:48SPEAKER- I think Half-Life is all Quake I code.

39:49SPEAKERI don't think they put in Quake II.

39:52SPEAKER- I think it's hard to say.

39:53SPEAKER- Yeah, like it's--

39:54SPEAKER- 'Cause I think they took code dumps from it

39:55SPEAKERall the way through and cherry picked the stuff

39:58SPEAKERthat they wanted would be my guess.

39:59SPEAKER- That's touched on in the Romero book.

40:01SPEAKERThat was part of the reason Daikatana took so long

40:03SPEAKERto come out is they did a ton of work on Quake I code

40:05SPEAKERand then he saw Quake II at E3 and was like,

40:08SPEAKER"Well, we gotta be on that engine."

40:09SPEAKERSo they went and re-licensed

40:11SPEAKERand had to throw a bunch of work away.

40:13SPEAKERAnyway, Sin came, oh, you're right, actually.

40:17SPEAKERSin came out November 5th of '98.

40:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

40:22SPEAKER- Half-Life came out--

40:23SPEAKER- Like November 17th or 11th or something.

40:25SPEAKER- November 19th, wow, they were like,

40:27SPEAKERGod, you're right, they were two weeks apart.

40:29SPEAKER- And then literally Heretic II,

40:30SPEAKERwhich was a third person game,

40:31SPEAKERbut also based on the Quake engine came out from Raven,

40:34SPEAKERwho had made the good Quake mission packs,

40:37SPEAKERcame out the week after Half-Life II, Half-Life I.

40:39SPEAKER- I did not realize that, you're right.

40:40SPEAKERI never played Heretic II, that's cool.

40:43SPEAKER- No one did 'cause Half-Life came out the week before.

40:45SPEAKER- Yeah, oh, you're not wrong.

40:48SPEAKER- So yeah, it was like people,

40:54SPEAKERthe perception in the hardware manufacturers

40:56SPEAKERhad to be that there was a lot of money

40:57SPEAKERfor whoever cracked this first, right?

40:59SPEAKERAnd that's why they kept, like, we've seen,

41:01SPEAKERwe've talked about three Logitech things already.

41:04SPEAKER- Yes. - Right?

41:04SPEAKER- Yes, of course the amusing punchline here

41:06SPEAKERis that I guess nobody ended up cracking it.

41:09SPEAKER- Well, yeah, well, hold on, we'll get there.

41:11SPEAKER- We'll get there. - We'll get there.

41:13SPEAKER- In 1998, the Sidewinder Freestyle Pro,

41:15SPEAKERnot really a first person shooter controller,

41:17SPEAKERbut we're gonna talk about it

41:18SPEAKER'cause it had motion control,

41:21SPEAKERwas a game pad with a D-pad and some face buttons,

41:25SPEAKERbut it also had an accelerometer

41:26SPEAKERso you could tilt on two axes to control your games.

41:30SPEAKER- Yes, so was this just the form factor

41:33SPEAKERof the regular Sidewinder?

41:34SPEAKER- Oh no, no, it was much worse.

41:38SPEAKERThey made it look like a big, long boomerang.

41:40SPEAKERSo it has like dangly prongs that you hold

41:44SPEAKERthat rendered the D-pad almost completely unusable

41:47SPEAKERin any configuration.

41:48SPEAKERSo I bought one of these 'cause I needed a game pad

41:51SPEAKERand I went to the store and I was like,

41:52SPEAKER"Oh, this one's $3 more.

41:54SPEAKER"I'll get this one 'cause it has this motion shit

41:55SPEAKER"that I'm probably never gonna use."

41:56SPEAKERBut it also comes with motocross madness,

41:58SPEAKERwhich that looks cool.

42:01SPEAKEROh my God, it was maybe the worst game pad I've ever used.

42:04SPEAKERIt's right up there with the N64 game pad.

42:10SPEAKERThe D-pad, I don't know that there was a way

42:13SPEAKERto physically hold this device

42:15SPEAKERthat made the D-pad comfortable.

42:17SPEAKERIn order to use the accelerometer,

42:20SPEAKERI couldn't find confirmation of this online,

42:22SPEAKERbut judging by the price and the time period,

42:24SPEAKERI'm reasonably sure it's just an accelerometer inside,

42:27SPEAKERnot an accelerometer in gyro.

42:32SPEAKERYou had to switch the device over

42:33SPEAKERfrom analog to digital modes.

42:36SPEAKERI think the D-pad showed up as a hat switch on the joystick

42:39SPEAKERif you were in accelerometer mode, but yeah, it was weird.

42:45SPEAKERMotocross madness, reasonably fun with it, I'll say,

42:47SPEAKER'cause you tilted the thing up to do wheelies.

42:51SPEAKEROther than that, it was unusable and was a terrible device.

42:54SPEAKEROh, you should put it in the hall of shame

42:55SPEAKERwith the U-Force and the Fragmaster.

42:58SPEAKEROh, you mean the game that shipped with it

42:59SPEAKERwas the only game to make good use

43:01SPEAKERof its weird bespoke feature?

43:02SPEAKERLook, there were several other Microsoft's Game Studios

43:05SPEAKERtitles that also supported it to lesser, greater amounts.

43:09SPEAKERLook, the thing I'll say about this is it's a testament

43:12SPEAKERto how much the Fragmaster looks awful

43:15SPEAKERthat I used this thing and know how bad it is,

43:17SPEAKERand I still think probably the Fragmaster's

43:18SPEAKERthe worst thing on this list.

43:20SPEAKERFair, fair.

43:22SPEAKERSeeing this, the full name, let me just,

43:26SPEAKERSidewinder Freestyle Pro is the full name of that product,

43:28SPEAKERbut I looked up, this has reminded me

43:30SPEAKERI did own a regular Sidewinder somehow.

43:32SPEAKERThe one with the four face buttons?

43:35SPEAKERYeah, I think it has six.

43:38SPEAKEROh, there were multiples, weren't there?

43:40SPEAKERThere were multiples, yeah.

43:41SPEAKERI had the one with six that also has prongs that you grip,

43:44SPEAKERbut it had six face buttons.

43:45SPEAKEROkay, is it the blue one?

43:48SPEAKERIt was black or grayish or gray.

43:49SPEAKEROkay.

43:50SPEAKERCrucially, it has the same god awful D-pad

43:52SPEAKERas the Freestyle Pro that we're talking about with the tilt.

43:55SPEAKERIt is the ugliest D-pad in history.

43:57SPEAKERIt looks like it's melted plastic.

43:58SPEAKERIt literally looks like they took a regular D-pad,

44:02SPEAKERmelted it halfway, and then put like a heavy ball bearing

44:04SPEAKERin the middle of it or something.

44:06SPEAKERYep, well, Nintendo had the plus.

44:08SPEAKERThey patented a plus, so you couldn't do a plus at the time.

44:11SPEAKERYeah, and so Sony had done the weird fake

44:13SPEAKERfour-way buttons design.

44:15SPEAKERSo there's also the, they did multiple generations

44:19SPEAKERof the Sidewinder Gamepad, which also,

44:21SPEAKERthey also had the Sidewinder Gamepad Pro,

44:23SPEAKERwhich kind of split the difference between the Freestyle.

44:27SPEAKERI'll put a picture of the Freestyle in the show notes.

44:32SPEAKERBut the Sidewinder Pro was more of a boomerang design

44:35SPEAKERthat looked almost like those prototypes

44:36SPEAKERof the PS3 Gamepad that came out for a little while.

44:41SPEAKERYeah, actually, you're right.

44:42SPEAKERThe Batarang.

44:44SPEAKERYeah, the Batarang.

44:45SPEAKERThe Batarang PS3 controller, yeah, I can see that.

44:47SPEAKERThe Freestyle Pro is an all-time bad tier

44:50SPEAKERfor gamepad design.

44:51SPEAKERYes, it's fugly.

44:53SPEAKERYeah.

44:54SPEAKERNext, 1998 brought the Sidewinder DualStrike.

44:57SPEAKERMicrosoft clearly invested heavily in this space.

44:59SPEAKERThey thought there was something here.

45:00SPEAKERThe DualStrike is, imagine if you had a gamepad

45:04SPEAKERwith a ball and socket joint

45:06SPEAKERconnecting the left and the right halves,

45:08SPEAKERand that ball and socket joint is an XY joystick,

45:10SPEAKERso you can mouse with the gamepad.

45:13SPEAKERBy twisting it, it's almost like a,

45:15SPEAKERis it the JOG-CON or the NEG-CON?

45:17SPEAKERWhat's the name?

45:18SPEAKERIs it the NEG-CON or the NEG-CON?

45:20SPEAKERYeah, that thing, but it's two axis.

45:22SPEAKERIt's not just one axis.

45:23SPEAKERWas it the NEG-CON?

45:25SPEAKERWhich I cannot remember which NEG-CON controller it is,

45:27SPEAKERthe twists in the middle,

45:28SPEAKERbut it's not entirely dissimilar to that,

45:30SPEAKERalthough this moves on, like you said, on more axes.

45:33SPEAKERIt was the NEG-CON.

45:34SPEAKERThe NEG-CON, yeah.

45:35SPEAKERWas the NEG-CON twisty controller.

45:36SPEAKERBut this is more elaborate than that.

45:38SPEAKERAlso, this is like, when you look at it,

45:41SPEAKERit actually kind of looks like two Wiimos,

45:43SPEAKERlike two Wii controllers,

45:44SPEAKERbut just with this big connective thing in the middle

45:46SPEAKERthat actually is binding them together on this joint.

45:49SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, like, I don't,

45:52SPEAKERI feel like I used this one

45:53SPEAKERand really immediately dismissed it.

45:56SPEAKERPeople really like it.

45:57SPEAKERLike, people use this today still.

45:58SPEAKERPeople have done a lot of effort to get this.

46:00SPEAKERThis is, by this time,

46:01SPEAKERby the time the Freestyle Pro came out,

46:03SPEAKERwe ran to USB and weren't using

46:04SPEAKERserial and joysticks anymore,

46:06SPEAKERso people can write custom drivers for these things

46:08SPEAKERin the today, the world of today.

46:12SPEAKERI think the Freestyle Pro and this both had

46:14SPEAKERjoystick port connector that then you could,

46:18SPEAKERthat came with a USB adapter as well, though,

46:19SPEAKERso you can still use them.

46:23SPEAKERIt, like I said, either I don't remember using this

46:27SPEAKERor I immediately dismissed it

46:28SPEAKERand wasn't reviewing the stuff yet,

46:31SPEAKERbut it was, like I said,

46:33SPEAKERthe reviews are really positive for this.

46:35SPEAKERPeople seem to really like it

46:36SPEAKERand express why they like it

46:38SPEAKERin ways that make me think it's probably actually

46:41SPEAKERweirdly okay,

46:43SPEAKERunlike, it would work with all the current games,

46:47SPEAKERis the thing.

46:48SPEAKERLike, the controls are still valid today

46:50SPEAKERfor all that's the purpose.

46:51SPEAKER- And I'm trying to find if this was USB.

46:54SPEAKERThis was probably USB at this point.

46:56SPEAKER- This was both.

46:57SPEAKERThis had an adapter.

46:58SPEAKERSo this was USB and there was a game port.

47:01SPEAKERIt was game port by default and had an adapter

47:03SPEAKERthat you could plug in for USB, I believe.

47:07SPEAKERIt might actually just, I'm looking at this Neo

47:09SPEAKERor ActiveWin review and it might just be,

47:16SPEAKERmaybe it's USB only.

47:17SPEAKERThis might be the first USB only one.

47:19SPEAKER- This was '99.

47:20SPEAKERThis was about when, like, mice were starting

47:22SPEAKERto go USB only, stuff like that.

47:24SPEAKER- Yeah, you'd have more than two USB ports

47:26SPEAKERon your computer by this point.

47:30SPEAKERI'm, it is unclear to me.

47:34SPEAKER- Anyway.

47:35SPEAKER- Yeah, this might be USB only.

47:36SPEAKER- Okay.

47:37SPEAKERI wouldn't be surprised if there were people

47:39SPEAKERstill out there trying to make this thing work right now.

47:41SPEAKER- There are, I will tell, oh yeah.

47:43SPEAKEREveryone take note, the dual strike controller

47:45SPEAKERis USB only according to the ActiveWin.com review.

47:48SPEAKERIt is 100%.

47:51SPEAKERThere are 100% people still using this.

47:52SPEAKERI saw a thread of people trying to use this with Rage

47:57SPEAKERlike five, six years ago.

47:59SPEAKER- Interesting.

47:59SPEAKER- Rage 2 maybe.

48:01SPEAKER- Oh, interesting.

48:03SPEAKERI think I have found a thread on Vogons.org.

48:06SPEAKERAre you familiar with that site?

48:07SPEAKER- I remember Vogons.org, yeah.

48:09SPEAKER- I believe that's a good place to get a lot of old drivers

48:11SPEAKERfor computer stuff, old computer stuff,

48:14SPEAKERbut I found somebody on here who apparently

48:15SPEAKERhas developed their own open source

48:17SPEAKERinter, like, driver and interface for the dual strike.

48:22SPEAKER- Yeah, imagine if you took the time

48:24SPEAKERto build muscle memory using a device like this

48:26SPEAKERand then, like, they stopped making more.

48:28SPEAKERLike, imagine if you learned how to use a mouse in 1998

48:31SPEAKERand then they suddenly stopped making mice

48:34SPEAKERand it was just all track pads from here on out

48:36SPEAKERand you're like, "Man, I hate track pads."

48:39SPEAKERWe got the Sidewinder Dual Strike Next in 1999.

48:41SPEAKEROh, that's this one, sorry.

48:43SPEAKERWe have the Sidewinder Game Voice came out in 2000.

48:47SPEAKERThat launched at the same time as the Strategic Commander,

48:49SPEAKERwhich we've talked about in the past,

48:50SPEAKERbut it's basically, the Strategic Commander

48:53SPEAKERis basically the Cyberman 2 slidey movement thing

48:56SPEAKERplus a whole buttload of buttons.

48:58SPEAKERThe Game Voice was an interesting, weird thing.

49:00SPEAKERIt used MSN messenger and some proprietary software

49:03SPEAKERto give you a, like, essentially early team speak

49:07SPEAKERor type experience, but you could bind,

49:10SPEAKERthey had a bunch of keys on it.

49:11SPEAKEROne of them switched between the speaker input

49:13SPEAKERand the mouse and the headset,

49:15SPEAKERso basically you could bypass your speakers

49:18SPEAKERonly if you had a stereo speaker configuration.

49:22SPEAKERIf you had multi-channel, you were out of luck there,

49:25SPEAKERwhich was beginning to become popular in 2000.

49:28SPEAKERBut you had push-to-talk buttons

49:30SPEAKERfor multiple groups of people.

49:31SPEAKERYou could do, like, an all-talk.

49:32SPEAKERYou could do just your team.

49:33SPEAKERYou could do just your squad if you were playing a game

49:35SPEAKERthat had a bunch of people in it.

49:37SPEAKER- That's what this little dongle is for, I assume.

49:40SPEAKER- Yeah, the dongle is just, I think,

49:43SPEAKERa hardware switch for the speakers and the headphones,

49:47SPEAKERand then, like, this showed up as keyboard

49:49SPEAKERor joystick buttons for push-to-talk

49:51SPEAKERthat were not accessible to anything

49:54SPEAKERexcept for the Game Voice software, as I recall.

49:56SPEAKER- I see.

49:57SPEAKER- I can't remember if I reviewed this or someone else did.

50:00SPEAKERI don't think we gave this a very good review

50:01SPEAKERin Maximum PC, as I recall.

50:02SPEAKER- I'm guessing, yeah, just thinking about

50:04SPEAKERwhat voice stuff was like at that time.

50:06SPEAKERIt probably didn't work all that well.

50:08SPEAKER- Well, so the voice stuff worked pretty well.

50:10SPEAKERIt also had voice recognition.

50:12SPEAKERThe problem was nobody did voice,

50:14SPEAKER'cause almost everybody was on modem still.

50:16SPEAKERLike, broadband hadn't reached any kind of penetration.

50:20SPEAKERGetting your friends to install some weird software

50:23SPEAKERso they could hear you was unlikely.

50:25SPEAKERNobody, like, headsets were unusual at this point still.

50:29SPEAKERSo it wasn't until Microsoft shipped the first,

50:32SPEAKERwhat was it, the second Xbox?

50:34SPEAKER- Yeah, 360.

50:35SPEAKER- The 360 came with a headset that, like,

50:37SPEAKERheadsets became a thing that you had to have.

50:39SPEAKER- Yes, 360.

50:40SPEAKEREvery single one had headsets in there.

50:42SPEAKERI think did the Xbox LiveKit for original Xbox also all?

50:46SPEAKERDid those all come with headsets?

50:47SPEAKERI don't know if that was separate or not.

50:49SPEAKER- Yeah, the LiveKit had a CD, right?

50:51SPEAKERYou had a CD, had a game disc, and a headset,

50:55SPEAKERand a dongle for the controller, I think.

50:58SPEAKER- I never got on Xbox Live on the first Xbox

51:01SPEAKERfor some reason, which is insane to me in retrospect,

51:03SPEAKER'cause everybody around me was doing it.

51:05SPEAKER- Yeah, there wasn't, I think I mostly--

51:07SPEAKER- There weren't that many games, actually.

51:09SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause was Halo 2 on Xbox Live at that point?

51:11SPEAKERIt was.

51:12SPEAKERThat was pretty much the only thing.

51:13SPEAKERThat and, like, Mecha Salt and a couple of other things

51:16SPEAKERwere what you could play.

51:17SPEAKER- It was a few things.

51:18SPEAKERI was not that big into Halo.

51:19SPEAKERIt was, I guess, part of the reason I never got on there.

51:22SPEAKER- Well, so, it's worth mentioning that around this time,

51:24SPEAKERaround 2000, is when the original Xbox launched

51:27SPEAKERand Halo came out.

51:28SPEAKERAnd I guess we'd seen time splitters prior to that

51:30SPEAKERhad a dual-stick configuration that worked

51:34SPEAKERwith a little bit of aim assist and stuff like that.

51:37SPEAKERBut that's kind of the end of this era

51:41SPEAKERfor all intents and purposes.

51:42SPEAKER- Actually, if you look at this timeline

51:44SPEAKERwe have constructed here, the last device,

51:46SPEAKERwith a couple of exceptions, is 2001,

51:48SPEAKERwhich is the same year that Halo came out.

51:50SPEAKER- Yeah, so the 2001 was just a mouse with rumble.

51:53SPEAKER- Yeah.

51:54SPEAKER- It's the Logitech iFeel mouse.

51:55SPEAKERThey worked with Immersion Corp,

51:58SPEAKERwho had a patent on adding rumble

52:01SPEAKERto mouse and cube mouse devices from 1997.

52:06SPEAKERI reviewed these for Maximum PC.

52:08SPEAKERI absolutely, it's one of my all-time favorite mice.

52:11SPEAKERThe sensor was bad for games.

52:12SPEAKERIt was really low-res by today's standards.

52:14SPEAKER- Actually, I thought you were about to say

52:15SPEAKERit was one of your least favorite.

52:17SPEAKERThat's surprising.

52:18SPEAKER- Well, so they were very light mice, very small mice.

52:21SPEAKERBut the haptic stuff in Windows, surprisingly,

52:24SPEAKERwas really, really useful.

52:25SPEAKERSo you could feel the edges.

52:27SPEAKERIt gave you, you know how you have the haptic support

52:30SPEAKERon a modern Mac touch pad, where you feel the edges

52:32SPEAKERand you get bumps when you hit stuff and things like that.

52:34SPEAKERYou don't even notice it anymore.

52:35SPEAKER- Yeah.

52:36SPEAKER- But it's there.

52:37SPEAKER- Oh, man.

52:38SPEAKER- And having that haptic bump on input devices,

52:42SPEAKERit's incredibly useful.

52:44SPEAKER- Wow, actually.

52:44SPEAKERI'm just thinking now about ways you could use that

52:46SPEAKERas you're navigating graphical UI,

52:49SPEAKERlike crossing window borders or whatever.

52:52SPEAKER- Yeah, it was very subtle.

52:53SPEAKERIt wasn't the kind of thing that you'd notice

52:56SPEAKERafter 10 minutes, but it makes using Windows

52:58SPEAKERa little bit easier, especially as we were moving

52:59SPEAKERto higher resolution displays back then.

53:02SPEAKER- Man, that's a cool idea.

53:03SPEAKERI kind of wish they would maybe try to bring that back.

53:05SPEAKER- Well, the patent expired seven years ago,

53:06SPEAKERso maybe somebody'll do it.

53:08SPEAKERI mean, I assume that patent expired around the time

53:11SPEAKERthe haptic stuff started coming out on the MacBook,

53:13SPEAKERso maybe those two things are related.

53:16SPEAKERAnd those mice weren't crazy expensive mice either.

53:20SPEAKERI think Bellagitec did two generations of them.

53:22SPEAKERThey didn't sell well enough that they kept doing them.

53:23SPEAKERAnd not a lot of games supported the API stuff,

53:26SPEAKERso it was a little underwhelming on the game side.

53:29SPEAKER- Oh yeah, the basic one was $39.95.

53:32SPEAKERThat's pretty cheap.

53:33SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:35SPEAKER2007, the Novant Falcon came out.

53:38SPEAKERSo this spun off of military sim tech.

53:42SPEAKERIt was basically a robot that sat on your desk.

53:44SPEAKERIt weighed a ton.

53:46SPEAKERIt had three arms that were connected to actuators,

53:49SPEAKERand you snapped a controller into the end of the arms.

53:54SPEAKERSo there was a gun handle, like a pistol handle controller.

53:59SPEAKERThere was just a orb with some buttons on it.

54:01SPEAKERThere were a couple other things.

54:03SPEAKERAnd then there was a thriving aftermarket

54:06SPEAKERof community-created things that you could attach onto this.

54:10SPEAKERBut the neat thing about it was,

54:12SPEAKERthe arms were connected to actuators,

54:15SPEAKERand they would push back.

54:17SPEAKERSo they could control the positioning

54:19SPEAKERof the controller in space to a pretty wide range,

54:23SPEAKERand it could measure both the translational movement

54:25SPEAKERin and out, as well as hide to side and up and down.

54:30SPEAKERValve supported it with a bunch of their,

54:32SPEAKERlike TF2 and Half-Life 2, and I think Day One maybe,

54:36SPEAKERor Day Zero supported it.

54:38SPEAKERA bunch of different things supported it.

54:40SPEAKERAnd then eventually they released a driver

54:42SPEAKERthat let it work with every mouse and keyboard game,

54:44SPEAKERpretty much.

54:46SPEAKERIt was a weird thing.

54:47SPEAKERIt was, basically they took something

54:50SPEAKERthat cost $20,000, $15,000 or $20,000 in the sim

54:54SPEAKERand military market, and sold it for,

54:57SPEAKERI think, a few hundred maybe, was the--

55:00SPEAKER- This R story from 2008 says priced $175,000 to $240,000,

55:03SPEAKERwhich I guess is just retailer variation.

55:06SPEAKER- No, it's based on which attachments you got.

55:08SPEAKERSo whether you got the wand attachment

55:10SPEAKERor the gun attachment or the ball attachment.

55:12SPEAKER- Interesting.

55:13SPEAKER- You could get a pack with all of them, I think,

55:15SPEAKERwhich was up to $240,000.

55:18SPEAKER- Yeah, the header on this R story says,

55:20SPEAKER"Finally, the gold after all the garbage."

55:23SPEAKER- Yeah, well, but then also when you get down

55:26SPEAKERto the way they're talking about playing it

55:27SPEAKERwith actual games, the first thing,

55:30SPEAKERthe lead in the Half-Life 2 section is,

55:32SPEAKERyeah, it's harder to use this.

55:34SPEAKERI would never actually use it in multiplayer,

55:36SPEAKERbut it gives the game new life.

55:37SPEAKER- Sure.

55:38SPEAKER- For a game that was, let's see, 2007.

55:42SPEAKERI guess Half-Life 2 was new in 2007,

55:45SPEAKERso that's probably- - Ish.

55:46SPEAKER- Yeah. - Before it came out,

55:47SPEAKERso it was still pretty dominant.

55:49SPEAKER- That's an old game then.

55:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

55:51SPEAKER- You're playing that in multiplayer probably at that point.

55:52SPEAKER- Yeah, when you fire the shotgun,

55:54SPEAKERthe orb kicks in your hand.

55:56SPEAKER- Yeah. - It's kind of cool.

55:57SPEAKERI mean, that probably makes it, like he said,

55:59SPEAKERharder to play, but that's at least kind of neat.

56:01SPEAKER- Yeah, they released a mod.

56:04SPEAKERThey released some other stuff for it,

56:08SPEAKERand they released drivers.

56:09SPEAKERThey had multiple tiers of support

56:11SPEAKERbased on how the feedback worked.

56:12SPEAKERThey released a driver that let you use it with everything,

56:15SPEAKERand it became very popular in the community of people

56:18SPEAKERwho wanted to have intimate relations

56:21SPEAKERwith their computer, let's say.

56:23SPEAKER- Sure.

56:26SPEAKER- I had one of these and gave it away at some point,

56:27SPEAKER'cause I was like, I don't think I want to have

56:28SPEAKERone of these around my house.

56:29SPEAKERPeople think things.

56:31SPEAKER- I think there was one around GameSpot as well.

56:33SPEAKERI seem to remember being fairly bulky.

56:35SPEAKER- It was really big and really heavy,

56:37SPEAKERand the box for it, you had to put it in the box right

56:39SPEAKERor else you'd jack up the arms,

56:42SPEAKERor you had to leave it out and it was hard to dust.

56:45SPEAKERAnd also, like I said, there were some intimations

56:48SPEAKERif you had one sitting on your desktop.

56:53SPEAKERIt was sold for a really long time.

56:55SPEAKERPeople were making these.

56:56SPEAKERThey made these until like 2012 or 2013 or something.

56:59SPEAKER- Okay, seems like you can get them on eBay

57:01SPEAKERif you really need one.

57:02SPEAKER- They are available.

57:04SPEAKERThe last thing on our list.

57:07SPEAKER- Unless we're gonna talk about the dual N64 controller

57:09SPEAKERconfig for "GoldenEye" and "Perfect Dark," which is still-

57:12SPEAKER- I left it alone earlier when you implied

57:16SPEAKERthat the N64 controller was among the worst of all time.

57:18SPEAKERI'm not rendering an opinion here,

57:20SPEAKERbut some people are going to take notice of that comment.

57:23SPEAKER- I played a lot of "GoldenEye" with four controllers

57:28SPEAKERand two people playing the game.

57:30SPEAKERIt was the best way to play a first-person shooter

57:33SPEAKERon a console prior to two-stick shooters.

57:36SPEAKER- Wait, you were dual-handing?

57:37SPEAKERYou were dual-handing?

57:39SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a supported configuration

57:41SPEAKERfor the rare shooters.

57:42SPEAKERYou held the middle prongs of two controllers

57:45SPEAKERand you had basically you were giving up everything

57:49SPEAKERfor the ability to turn and shoot at the same time

57:51SPEAKER'cause it's hard to change guns, it was hard to jump,

57:54SPEAKERit was hard to do everything else,

57:56SPEAKERbut you could turn and shoot at the same

57:58SPEAKERand move at the same time.

58:01SPEAKERThe last thing on the list is the Steam controller,

58:06SPEAKERwhich came out in 2015.

58:08SPEAKERAnd it's on the list because it's the inverse

58:11SPEAKERof these other ones, where the other ones

58:12SPEAKERwere trying to get ways to play first-person shooters

58:15SPEAKERon the PC without using a mouse and keyboard.

58:18SPEAKERThis is a way to let people play mouse and keyboard games

58:21SPEAKERon the PC without using a mouse and keyboard.

58:27SPEAKERI don't know that I'm prepared to render judgment

58:30SPEAKERon the Steam controller.

58:32SPEAKERI was not a huge fan of it at the time.

58:34SPEAKEROver time, the software has gotten a lot better

58:36SPEAKERand the implementation of it that's on, say,

58:38SPEAKERa modern Steam Deck, I'd say pretty good.

58:41SPEAKERI play mouse and keyboard games with the touch pads

58:43SPEAKERon the Steam Deck more often than I would expect.

58:46SPEAKER- That's fair, that's fair.

58:48SPEAKERI bought a Steam controller, have never used it,

58:51SPEAKERother than to just hold it in my hands

58:53SPEAKERand click those touch pads and be like, this feels weird.

58:55SPEAKER- If you play in a living room, a lot of people,

59:02SPEAKERI've worked with people who use them regularly

59:06SPEAKERto stream games to the living room

59:07SPEAKERwith a Steam linker or something like that.

59:09SPEAKER- Some people swear by it.

59:11SPEAKER- So that's it.

59:13SPEAKERMy favorite thing in this whole thing

59:17SPEAKERwas when I was going through it and I found the note

59:19SPEAKERabout the space orb and boot that they have a picture of it

59:23SPEAKERand they have three things highlighted

59:24SPEAKERand one of them is DOS and Win95 programming interfaces.

59:28SPEAKERSix buttons can be programmed.

59:31SPEAKERAnd the third note, extremely comfortable rubber ball.

59:37SPEAKER- I'm gonna go and tell you 20, let's see, 25 years in.

59:40SPEAKERThis came out of '96, 27 years in, 28 years in now.

59:45SPEAKERBall's still comfortable.

59:46SPEAKER- You know, there's something to be said.

59:47SPEAKERI've got late model DualShock 4s,

59:50SPEAKERthe PlayStation 4 controller where the analog sticks

59:53SPEAKERhave gone tacky, sticky, nasty rubber.

59:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know what changed, man,

59:57SPEAKERbut everybody should make their stuff

59:58SPEAKERout of the space orb ball rubber and stuff.

1:00:00SPEAKERIt feels great.

1:00:02SPEAKER- We've lost so much.

1:00:03SPEAKERThey've taken so much from us.

1:00:05SPEAKER- Thanks, environment.

1:00:07SPEAKER- Man, I was pretty happy with products people love

1:00:09SPEAKERas an episode title, but extremely comfortable rubber ball.

1:00:13SPEAKER- Look, if you don't have an extremely comfortable

1:00:15SPEAKERrubber ball in your life, what are you even doing?

1:00:17SPEAKER- You're missing out.

1:00:18SPEAKER- Yeah, I wanna find somebody who can make the,

1:00:21SPEAKERI gotta figure out how to make one of those shields

1:00:23SPEAKERfor the Arduino to get this thing going again.

1:00:25SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:00:26SPEAKER- I wanna play some Fortnite with this bad boy.

1:00:27SPEAKER- That would be kinda cool.

1:00:29SPEAKERYou know what, I bet you would be the only person

1:00:30SPEAKERon all of Twitch.tv.

1:00:33SPEAKER- Playing Fortnite with the space orb.

1:00:34SPEAKER- Playing Fortnite with the space orb 360.

1:00:36SPEAKER- Are there enough buttons?

1:00:37SPEAKERI could change guns, probably.

1:00:38SPEAKERI think I could probably make that work.

1:00:40SPEAKERI wouldn't be able to build, but that's fine

1:00:41SPEAKER'cause I'm old and I don't build.

1:00:44SPEAKERI think that'll do it for us this week, Brad.

1:00:45SPEAKER- Yeah, that was a fun little retrospective.

1:00:49SPEAKER- Yeah, this was one of my favorite times in games.

1:00:54SPEAKERJust to be clear, there's a bunch of weird stuff

1:00:55SPEAKERthat people did that wasn't a specific product.

1:00:57SPEAKERPeople were playing first person shooters

1:00:58SPEAKERwith fight sticks and throttles and rudders

1:01:02SPEAKERand all that stuff.

1:01:03SPEAKERPeople did some buck wild stuff

1:01:04SPEAKERin the early first person shooter days,

1:01:07SPEAKERlike play Quake with just a track pad, track ball.

1:01:10SPEAKER- Yes.

1:01:12SPEAKER- I knew a guy who worked in the Linux lab

1:01:15SPEAKERat the university and he would play with the nub.

1:01:19SPEAKERHe had a standalone ThinkPad nub that he just bought

1:01:23SPEAKERand was on his desk and he would use that to aim.

1:01:27SPEAKERPeople were all over the place.

1:01:29SPEAKER- Whatever floated your boat back then.

1:01:31SPEAKER- But you know who's not all over the place?

1:01:33SPEAKER- Who's that?

1:01:34SPEAKER- Our patrons.

1:01:35SPEAKER- Our patrons, yeah, that's right.

1:01:37SPEAKERThey've got it together.

1:01:38SPEAKER- I mean, I guess they are technically all over the place.

1:01:40SPEAKER- Geographically all over the place,

1:01:41SPEAKERbut united in their love of extremely nerdy stuff.

1:01:45SPEAKER- Yeah, and as always, we say this every week,

1:01:48SPEAKERbut the TechPod is a listener supported show.

1:01:49SPEAKERWe don't take ads, we don't take sponsorships really.

1:01:53SPEAKERWe just read the people who like to support us

1:01:56SPEAKERon Patreon every week and we thank them all.

1:01:59SPEAKERIf you wanna find out how to support the show,

1:02:00SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod.

1:02:03SPEAKERAgain, it's patreon.com/techpod.

1:02:07SPEAKERAnd for five bucks a month, you get access to the Discord,

1:02:09SPEAKERwhich is full of people who like nerdy stuff

1:02:11SPEAKERlike old first person shooter controllers from the '90s

1:02:16SPEAKERand building Arduino shields to bring them back to life

1:02:19SPEAKERand all sorts of other stuff like that.

1:02:22SPEAKERBut a very special thank you goes out

1:02:25SPEAKERto our executive producer tier patrons,

1:02:27SPEAKERincluding Paddle Creek Games, Makers of Fractured Veil,

1:02:30SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunnyfiend, The,

1:02:34SPEAKERJust Wedge, Joel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie,

1:02:37SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Kamik, and Pantheon,

1:02:41SPEAKERMakers of the HS3 High Speed 3D Printer.

1:02:43SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.

1:02:44SPEAKER- Yes, thank you, thank you.

1:02:45SPEAKERAnd I'll remind people again,

1:02:48SPEAKERif you wanna see pictures of all the stuff

1:02:49SPEAKERwe've been talking about,

1:02:50SPEAKERthe Google Doc link will be on the show notes.

1:02:52SPEAKER- Yeah, and I'll go through and put pictures

1:02:54SPEAKERof everything in here so that they don't have to go

1:02:55SPEAKERto the links if they don't want to.

1:02:56SPEAKERBut the links are interesting.

1:02:58SPEAKERSome of these reviews, finding a review from a site

1:03:01SPEAKERthat existed before Google on Google was really lovely

1:03:04SPEAKER'cause you get a glimpse back into the 1997 internet,

1:03:08SPEAKER1998 internet.

1:03:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I was pretty delighted to see

1:03:12SPEAKERsome of these original page designs are still up

1:03:15SPEAKERfor these reviews from like 2001.

1:03:17SPEAKER- Yeah, I can't remember.

1:03:17SPEAKERMaybe it's the, it might be the Neo-in.

1:03:21SPEAKERNo, it's the, I can't remember which one it was.

1:03:24SPEAKEROne of them had one of the old Amazon badges,

1:03:26SPEAKERthe Eden Waith, I think, page has one of the old

1:03:29SPEAKERAmazon badges on it.

1:03:30SPEAKER- Oh, wow. - No, that's not it.

1:03:31SPEAKERYeah, it has one of the old Amazon badges on the side

1:03:33SPEAKERthat's like, "Amazon, we sell everything!"

1:03:35SPEAKERAnd they're just talking about books at the time

1:03:37SPEAKER'cause it's, you know, 100 years ago.

1:03:40SPEAKERBut that'll do it for us this week.

1:03:42SPEAKERThanks for listening, everybody.

1:03:43SPEAKERHave a lovely, lovely week, and we will see you next time.

1:03:47SPEAKERBye!

1:03:48SPEAKER(upbeat music)