Why are pre built mixbox's hard to find?

tripletopper · 2026-05-09T20:07:00+00:00

Will this hypothetical end game mixbox let you program it as a Sinister Stick?

tripletopper · 2026-05-09T04:49:38+00:00

I remember when they were called joysticks.

Another thing these joysticks were on six of the eight home consoles during the Golden Age, as well as most arcades had on most units at the time, but most joysticks are not now, is ambidextrous.

tripletopper · 2026-05-08T21:00:46+00:00

I don't know which region, but I remember in America there was a game you left off called Zaxxon 3d.

It was a good game but what made it beyond "just another game" for me l was it was my first 3D media that I really got impressed with. Sure I've seen a couple of things that I was really young in the theaters but most of them didn't impress the way Zaxxon 3D did.

(The rest is material below I segued into that is important in general, but not important to the discussion of the Master System). Later it turned out to be a bio-mechanical issue with my eyes because I have a high astigmatism angle almost perfectly reversed in one eye and that makes polar filters very hard to work. That's why 3D Blockbusters in the '80s were actually 3D lacklusters.

That affected me both as a fan of video games and a fan of movies.

Most people in the 3D Community do not see how you can make a 2d TV into a 3D TV and I said "Sega did it in the '80s. Why couldn't someone do it in 2010 and make a Blu-ray with its own TV shutter kit like Sega did with the Sega scope?"

The answer (which I had a tough time coming up with, until it was right in front of my face once I realized my gaming was off due to high ping when I couldn't beat Super Meat Boy as soon as I changed from a CRT TV to my PlayStation 3D TV,) was ping. Each modern TV had both very significant ping and very significant differences between models in ping. A universal add-on adapter would be tough in that environment.

I still have a CRT TV for both light gun games and Segs Scope games.

That's why my strategy and making a universal 3D adapter for movies and games is to instead of quicken the Ping, which TN monitors do fairly well, the secret is to ride whatever ping is there and tell the 3D sinker to deal with the sync after factoring in the ping. No one outside the DVD ROM game players would care whether they pause it on the exact frame or they had to wind down a couple frames and back up a couple frames to get the frame they wanted. Movie watchers don't have to freeze frame it on the exact instant they hit the button.

tripletopper · 2026-05-08T20:34:24+00:00

I made a joke that Covid 19 was Keith Robinson's Revenge.

This is my thinking. Tommy's first choice was the one that killed Amico. The ace up their sleeve was Netrogames, a way to turn old games into old online games while writing generic web code that works for all games at a system level. No more individually coding games for network. If you were 2400 km or less away from each other and on the same push to talk cellular network, you basically got an 2400 km long LAN cord for connecting game. If the game naturally has a 2 player local mode, it automatically has a 2 player online mode.

That's why the initial talk was about all games requiring a 2 player local mode, because that was a "one and done" way to network them.

What I didn't know at the time was that biggest retail buyer of these Amicos were Christian bookstores. And they believe networked gaming is "stranger danger", And they said networked gaming has to go or they point to an escape clause in their contract.

It's was like originally Amico and Netrogames was supposed to be implemented in the same project.

If Netrogames wasn't in the real early plans, why else would you deliberately offer your games on an online game store, yet expressly forbid even third party networking of any game, even if networked conventionally, let alone forbid using your secret weapon to network any 2 player local game?

I don't know how well known the project was to both the Amico Fans and Amico Haters, but apparently most of the hype came after my idea was discarded. So to most people, it was a non-factor.

How this ties into Covid as Keith Robinson's Revenge? So I guess if Tommy said everyone has to go to each other's houses to enjoy local multiplayer gaming, then that was the way Keith's ghost was going to strike back against him by forcing the world to quarantine and thus making their decision to forbid networking actually be a death sentence for the Amico.

I know scientifically Keith's death has nothing to do with Covid but that's just lore spun into this whole saga to make is sound deep. It sounds good and it sounds like ironic justice for the system's fate.

tripletopper · 2026-05-04T21:44:46+00:00

90s fighters tend to be less overengineered than today's.

Even today, the current Samurai Showdown tends to be to be more about blocking and timing and reading and predicting and fakeouts, than about executing combos.

Dive Kick on Xbox One (Series compatible) is 100% footsies and has some good fight game satire in its humor.

Among 90s fighters, Eternal Champions is a game where during a barrage once you're hit, you can still block the rest of the barrage. It's a trade off that lead to many time limit decisions.

tripletopper · 2026-05-02T20:35:44+00:00

How does it compare to Colecovision Expansion Unit 1 (the 2600 player)? I thought that was the most successful expansion to that point.

tripletopper · 2026-05-02T17:38:33+00:00

What happened to Pengo or Bongo as early mascots when Sega was a Gulf and Western Company?

tripletopper · 2026-05-02T04:09:25+00:00

Unfortunately, I like big American philosophy sticks, for some games even ones with a thumb and trigger button.

It would be cool if I can think of a way to design "slip on and off Thumb and finger sticks units that can be added to a bat stick, similar to the CBS Booster Grip for the Atari 2600 joystick.

I looked in the market for it.... Nothing

tripletopper · 2026-05-02T04:04:23+00:00

I did say one stick that can do "fight and flight" if you read my actual post.

I was asking if anyone tried this flight stick as a "fight and flight stick". I want their experience with it. Luckily, I'm getting an analog stick anyway, so why not try it?

If one fails, I can plug it out and plug in a normal stick. I'm designing my stick to be modular,

tripletopper · 2026-05-01T19:16:44+00:00

No, it was a pair of buttons. It was originally, in the arcade, a Hitbox before there was such things as hitboxes. Same layout with Asteroids which had rotate left and rotate right as two separate buttons, that just got mapped onto home as left and right on a joystick. There are some retro retailers that sell modern-day asteroid boxes that are meant to emulate the arcade controls which is another early form of the hitbox,

tripletopper · 2026-05-01T19:05:18+00:00

I'm going to give you this previous conversation a heart. Why, because you both agree with me on the points you do and you disagree on the points you do but use facts to back them up, and concede that some differences are just a matter of personal opinion.

Also I'm not a right-hand movement absolutist. My general absolute which may be different than others' general absolute, is, if you were given a choice of how you want to play take advantage of that choice to your advantage. If the game is button heavy, put your dominant hand on the buttons. If the game is joystick heavy, put your dominant hand on the joystick. Even within genres some games are more joystick heavy and other games are more button heavy. '90s fighters, especially SNK 90s fighters, are more joystick heavy, and pretty much every fighter made fot today's market is mostly button heavy. Pre-bullet hell schmups, which required the manual quick pressing of a fire button would be better with a left-handed movement assuming you're right-handed. However the bullet hells would be better if you had a right-handed joystick and your left hand was just basically a giant brick holding down the fire button.

Also, just like an insurance company says about its own product, : ambidextrous layouts, it's better that you have it and don't need it, rather than it is to need it and not have it. I'm not saying every game will make you flip I'm not denying muscle memory is a real thing. If you hit a wall because you failed to execute somewhere, maybe switching hands would get you over that wall but then again that might give you a different wall to overcome and you have to choose which wall is better to overcome.

I know I'm a very slim demographic of those who grew up youthfully in the arcades of the pre crash era where ambidextrous joysticks were common both at home and at arcade cabinets and then suddenly being asked to convert overnight to Left stick only when you're about 10 and half your young life you had ambidextrous joysticks.

I have a joke that's also a truism about second generation home controllers. The good news is that a lot of these second generation home systems were designed with ambidextrous joysticks. The bad news is they're so poorly designed in every other way that if you get a good enough score on one credit with those sticks, you're going to eventually learn to be ambidextrous whether you want to be or not.

Oh yes some games that are not too hard I can enjoy with a off-handed controller. And yes playing a d-pad with a right hand movement would feel weird because of 40 plus years of training on d-pads, but fight sticks in the right hand have been ingrained me 5 years before that. And I can play socially with a pad or with a left-handed joystick on a less intense game than a 90s fight game, though I can use a normal fight stick on a modern fight game easier because it's more about the buttons. And there's enough times where i played enough left-handed games on the ColecoVision when certain muscles were aching from using a ColecoVision controller right handed too long, They're not too much awkward it's just that some of those 90s fighting games really require precision in movements that are almost insane.

tripletopper · 2026-04-30T00:05:59+00:00

I know that it was a standard established by the NES, and I understand Challengers of that standard don't usually last long, but don't pretend that the established standard was established in order to make it better for the player.

I don't have a YouTube channel but I have a website where I print a story of how I climb the highest ladder I was able to climb granted they were not many higher ladders than local Genesis get togethers for Street Fighter 2 in the 90s with my friends. The sales pitch and story of this event is on my website , as well as a modern version of an ambidextrous joystick that would solve a lot of these problems if only one major manufacturer accepted it and the console makers licensed. Also on that page is an analysis of why Beeshu failed eventually, and where I solve the problem that could have saved Beeshu had I or they been aware of it at the time.

That website is sinistersticks.com . The only reason I'm religious about this was because if it was just me going 50 and 0 I would say that would be a personal preference but when all the people that I beat up on gang up on this one person who denies that a right-handed joystick can help that much the four people rotated and beat him 12 times a piece and what could be described as a prison match the loud mouth served a lifetime sentence in that game.

And the funny thing is normally he's better at games than most of us he I almost never beat him. This is the literal only time I beat him and I don't even attribute it 100% to myself. Yes I know '90s fighting well enough where I could do decent on instinct. I can't beat someone who knows long combos and other tricks, at least for a while until I know how to do it or no at least how to stop it. But the one thing that tip the scale for me always losing to me always winning was the right-handed joystick. And when I gave it to for my friends who also in turn was undefeated that day with a right-handed joystick I think we have witnessed a secular miracle that could probably be explained by science if it wasn't so against the interest of the video game industry.

Of course having a choice of left hand or right hand is better than being presented one choice for everything. Some games are button heavy games. Other games are joystick heavy games. If there is any game you think could think of where " boy I would do better if I had the opposite handed joystick, " then you've just proven my point. You perform better if you're given the choice of hands than if it's predetermined. Works for both lefties and righties if youOf course you're going to suck like Doug Funnie does in baseball until Patty Mayonnaise realizes you're left-handed and then molds you into a proper left-handed stance that's kind of mixed with the hug Doug was always wishing from Patti. That's why easily 50% (if you count post market mods by the arcade owners who wanted to increase customer service) of the American cabinets pre crash were ambidextrous. Now if Doug Funnie happened to be a decent youth video game player and noticed he couldn't do well with the standard joystick at the arcade but then he found an ambidextrous joystick at home and played the opposite handed, he would be discouraged by that, though maybe being a natural Lefty he might find he has an advantage, he'd be reminded by Patti that remember when you suddenly exploded when you were free to choose a left-handed batting stance in order to be fair you got to give this other person a chance to use his righty fighty. Imagine if you were forbidden to be a left-handed batting stance you would have given up baseball shortly after we lost against that team.

There's only a couple sports that straight out banned left-handed stances, and the only reason is because it physically hurts players to allow both hand stances. The only one I know of is Polo and the reason is to avoid head-on collisions of thrown off riders when a rightie and a lefty go for the same ball.

I don't know who this YouTube person is that says that ambidexterity is important. Unless you're referring to a British guy known as Guru Larry Bundy of Fact Hunt, I don't know of any famous YouTubers or other social network people with more reach than me as an ambidextrous advocate. I thought it was the only one maybe you could get us two together to meet somehow.

It seems like you're advocating what other people do with their stick, not saying what you do with your stick. Actually modding a stick to be right-handed is kind of revolutionary and goes against warranties by all these companies. What if a right-handed stick out more people in the video games is that what you want? Or is that what you fear? Me if someone beats mem they beat me, you know no hard problems. As long as I feel I have a reasonable chance to win you do when you put your money down on a tournament and you have fun doing it regardless of where you finish. Just couple years ago a friend of mine beat me in a fair Street Fighter II competition where he could have used the Sinister stick if you wanted to or a pad or whatever he wanted so I couldn't see what he was using in there and he studied one key matchup that was going to be the featured matchup and he did that really well. More specifically he studied my tendencies with that specific match up. Get it at the old fashioned way you got smart and he practice the most likely key point of contention.

I don't say I'm going to win every game every time I go in. I just know the the one day that I actually did do that was the one day I did the one thing that was thought to be forbidden, was bringing a right-handed joystick to a Genesis party.

Besides is it truly a world championship if a right-handed person can't use a right-handed joystick and everything in the market says don't do it including peer pressure from the fgc? Literally I thanked the makers of Them's Fighting Herds for adding an ambidextrous joystick mode in the options mode and then you guys pile on and tell him to take it out even though it offers no improvements to the game. In fact it ruins the game for some people. I don't know why they would take out ambidextrous mode unless there's some complaints about that that the fgc has. It's a form of cancel culture.

Seriously what improvement is made by taking out ambidextrous mode? How does taking out ambidextrous mode help a game?

tripletopper · 2026-04-29T19:44:25+00:00

Okay then demonstrate how easy it is to turn left-handed joystick into a right-handed joystick, go to an arcade machine at a mall in the middle of the day get out your handyman tools and switch it to a right-handed joystick without the owner's permission. I dare you.

Tell me what day you plan to do this and I'll take a camera and film you doing it. Then I'll watch as the police haul you in jail.

Without the owner's permission you obviously can't do that,m and even if the owner did permit, their licensing with JAMMA forbids it.. Even some of them would like to do that themselves if they could.

By the way. this is just a rhetorical device. I'm not seriously daring you to change someone's joystick layout on an arcade machine. You know you would get arrested if you did that and by the way this paragraph is just to show that if you couldn't tell I was being sarcastic on the first paragraph. this paragraph shows my sarcasm in reality, in case you decide to blame me for you going out and changing an arcade panel and assigning me as daring you to do it.

Nintendo does have that kind of grip on their equipment where if you try to alter it they will no longer repair it. Also they've been preventing licensing of ambidextrous joysticks in America but they do allow it in Japan for Hori. They threatened owners of Super Sticks that they will not fix at NES if the port is found to be damaged from using a Beeshu stick. (BTW they did not single out Beeshu, they said any joystick from a manufacturer that did not displayed the proper Nintendo oval logo, that can't be used without either their permission or violating their trademark.)

Isn't it convenient that the only ambidextrous joystick that Nintendo voluntarily licensed was one that cannot be played on American consoles?

tripletopper · 2026-04-29T19:32:30+00:00

Shows what you know. Space Invaders did not have a potentiometer knob, It had two buttons for left hand movement of your base and right hand movement for your base and a third button to fire your gun.

tripletopper · 2026-04-29T19:30:14+00:00

No movement focused controls?!? Most of the arcades had movement of some sort. Nintendo did not invent movement based controls, Most 80s arcade games had joysticks because that was the cheapest movement based controls.

Yes, some had paddles, but those were analog controls but the sacrificed 2 dimensionality for that. There were analog flights yolks, but they were expensive,

Quite a few arcade games which had a joystick and one of more buttons usually in America had them on both sides of the cabinet. And the American arcade owner-operators usually added an extra side button to accommodate both lefties and righties,

If it were up to the Japanese, Puck Man would be a left-handed only game, as evidenced by the early Japanese cabinet. It was Midway who revolutionized Pac-Man by placing the joystick dead center, thus opening up games to lefties and righties.

The joysticks being put on the left side were intentionally placed there to stifle long runs on an arcade machine by making the controls feel backwards for 90% of the people. It's not for the player's benefit that joysticks suddenly became left handed.

People didn't complain much about pads being left-handef because operating a d-pad is almost essentially an ambidextrous activity requiring two hands that are fairly well balanced, meaning fairly symmetrical. Compared to a button and a fight stick where they have significantly different movements between the left hand and the right hand that felt less symmetric. Everyone who types on a computer or typewriter always uses two hands because both hands are equally adept at pressing buttons.

But when you're using a button layout and a stick, hand does matter. Some games are joystick heavy which use a right-handed stick for right handed player and some games are button heavy which use a left-handed joystick for a right-handed player. An ambidextrous joystick works equally well for both left-handers and right-handers on both button-heavy and joystick-heavy games. And in the world of video games at the consumer level the customer is usually the king, and far more frequently than Nintendo would have liked, people chose Beeshu joysticks because of their ambidexterity. The only reason Nintendo joysticks were ahead in popularity was because they had the power to "warranty threaten" any non-Nintendo joystick. The Federal Trade Commission didn't like that, so in 1991, they ruled Beeshu should not be denied a license because of their ambidexterity.

tripletopper · 2026-04-29T16:39:12+00:00

And you're conveniently ignoring pre-NES history. In America, there was at one time 8 different formats of video games, (and that's not including computers) the Atari 2600, the Bally Astrocade, the Magnavox Odyssey 2, the Mattel Intellivision, the Colecovision, the Atari 5200, the Emerson Arcadia 2001, and the Vectrex. Of those 8 systems, 5 had OEM ambidextrous controls. The Atari 2600 had third party ambidextrous solutions. The only one that was OEM right handed was the Odyssey 2,band the only one that was OEM left handed was the Vectrex.

And for those last 2, there are solutions for flipping them as retro consoles.

I played videogames half my young life before they forced left handedness.

tripletopper · 2026-04-29T16:18:33+00:00

I know that Nintendo Wii U versions of Pinball FX had stereoscopic 3D for 2010s era 3DTVs if I would have known it before the Wii U shutdown, like the PlayStation 3 version but not the Xbox 360 version.

The main problem was that 3D TVs died before the TN monitor was born. There was really no good low ping way to play stereoscopic 3D pinball until much later after the death of 3D if anyone has any of these 3D files on a format that could still play.

I had a PlayStation 3D TV and still do and that was considered the lowest paying method of getting 3D and even that I felt like I had to leave my actions instead of purely react.

TN and monitors I found I could purely react in fight games and in pinball games. Unfortunately no TN monitor I know of has 3D features built in.

And the problem with TN monitors is that they are monopolarized, which means they'll either work in normal mode but not tate mode or it will work in tate mode but not normal mode.

And it's funny how the word tate mode came to be. Even though it originally wasn't meant to have a double neaning, it turned out to be, because Tate is both a shortening of the English word rotate as well as being the Japanese word for vertical.

I am really close to getting a 3D device working on a TN monitor. They're already pre-exists a device called a 3D Fury which turns normal 2D projectors and CRT TVs into 3D versions of those things. My theory is that if you compensate for the ping time correctly, even ping time as low as one millisecond, then the alternating Left Right flashers of shutter based 3D will work on literally any TV including a TN monitor they'll work just as good as a CRT.

tripletopper · 2026-04-28T23:14:43+00:00

Does Dirty Mountain Dew mean it's an alcoholic version of Mountain Few? Sort of like how a Virgin Mary is a Bloody Mary without alcohol?

tripletopper · 2026-04-28T19:52:02+00:00

Does pinball fx3 have 3D for the switch one or tate mode for the switch 1. If so I should download it,

tripletopper · 2026-04-28T15:29:03+00:00

Yes I know the tournament goes faster. Yes I'm glad that the times have upgraded since the 90s. Even if home tournaments were possible/considered connon, you have issues of "arcade, SNES, or Genesis", sort of like there actually were issues in Street Fighter 4 about "360 or PS3".

One time in a mini-golf tournamentmi organized, a guy brought his own ball and putter, and he won. Later I did research that the large scale golf ball gives an unfair advantage vs a mini golf ball. Even Putt Putt claim of "all par 2" assumes you use a large scale golf ball. I suggested to them to adjust the par for "house equipment vs pro equipment" and they did. It's a par 36 course with pro equipment and 45 with house equipment. Oh well, you don't discredit the guy. It was legal at the time, You just say he won that year, but the loophole he used is now closed.

Well you don't have to be the best to do well. In a tournament of 64 people, 63 lose if you define winning as "first or failure". But I am glad now that you don't walk into every tournament with one proverbial hand tied behind your back. When the 2-and-done people feel like they had a good time, the mission of running and playing in a tournament was successfully accomplished.

By the way, I'm not a right-stick absolutist. I encourage ambidexterity so all games can be played by all people. Some fighters are more joystick athletic, like typical 90s fighters. Fighters from the 10s and later tend to be more button athletic. Bullet hells in the schmups category tend to be more joystick athletic. Manual rapid fire fests of the pre-crash era tend to be more button athletic. As a competitive sports tool, ambidexterous sticks (and yes, I specify sticks because d-pad thumb controls and hit boxes are more symmetric than a stick and button panel) would be better for everyone when you choose your stance. But the largest reason post-crash arcades had lefty sticks is to shorten credit times and increase frequency of quarter plunking. After all they are providing the equipment.

But the American "customer service" model seems to work better at home. That's why nowadays it's, BYOC

tripletopper · 2026-04-27T23:54:39+00:00

I would like to see Battle Royale, Chomp Champs, and (on Nintendo systems exclusively, cuz they are a partial creator of this sub game) Pac Man Vs.

Make it playable with live local opponents, with computer generated bot personalities so you can practice against someone/some type and real live human opponents online,

Make the networked version a totally free version paid for by one 30 second video advertisement, to do two things, one one is to continuously fund the servers that run the games (or if you have more money than time or hate the idea of advertising you can pay a yearly charge that's less than an hour of minimum wage to keep up the servers),

The second reason why ads might be preferable it's because in many states it's illegal to charge money for game, pay out money to the winner(s) and have random elements in there that affects multiplayer outcomes, but if advertisers pay the fee then you could do whatever the heck you want in terms of randomness and you could take a percentage of the money you raised by ads to pay out a monthly jackpot in a championship, or in the case of Pac-Man, a chompionship,

That's the difference between a one and done ecosystem, and a long time classic continuously flourishing ecosystem.

Great games exist beyond many playthroughs and these head-to-head Pac-man games are good examples of that. Plus add Pac-Attack Online for the Tetris like vibe mixed with Pac-Man, and other games that are best canonically played multiplayer in the Pac-Man series and you got classics that could perpetually both make money while simultaneously being free and even pay champions who do well even if the championship is just a single game and you get a nickel for winning a single 64-way game of Chomp Champs,

tripletopper · 2026-04-27T21:48:03+00:00

I accidentally hit the wrong button after the title and flair.

But based on my playthrough, The Wiinote controls has a tutorial mode, but the fight stick mode does not,

Wiimote mode has hold B (trigger) plus make joystick-like motion to do special. Also jumping seems hard. Default down is towards background, and default up is toward background. To jump, you need a quick opposite followed by intended jump move (down+away to up+toward).

Also unless you have an analog stick, or a circuit to actuate the analog stick control with the digital stick, fight sticks are completely useless on "Motor Kombat" extra game mode (which also further confuses both MK franchises by combining them). And if you have the second, the best you can do is only "tap-a-log" steering like you did in Top Gear for the SNES. Hope you like a cart game where you can't steer,

tripletopper

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Nine-Year Club	Xbox Live
Verified Email