Wireless StrikerDC Controller

[lozz]

I did a brief post on this for the DCJY. Retro Fighters claimed that the triggers have been redesigned so they are no longer prone to breaking. Proof will be in the pudding I suppose! https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/ ... unced.html

[Ian Micheal]

I did a brief post on this for the DCJY. Retro Fighters claimed that the triggers have been redesigned so they are no longer prone to breaking. Proof will be in the pudding I suppose! https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/ ... unced.html

Yeah, if you have one that did not break, you might get a rev past that because, as I can tell you, they broke very easily. Not sure how you would break the OGDC version. Maybe if you used it as a hammer or murdered someone with it.. as I have dropped them, thrown them, abused them, never had one break ever.. taken them from Australia to the USA, had kids throwing them, moved house, bashed about for years, never one fail..


PS: The plastic used in the striker DC is easy to notice, very low quality, and very cheap, compared to the OG Dreamcast controller.

going to do a review on this which you can map games to 2nd analog stick i will update all my ports and provide the map
there are number of games that support it with this we can remap and use any Bluetooth controller cheap $15 to $20

Gives you can have proper wireless 4 player action lol.. Course you need to put real controller on a vmu and some games only support vmu on port 1

[dubcity]

I did a brief post on this for the DCJY. Retro Fighters claimed that the triggers have been redesigned so they are no longer prone to breaking. Proof will be in the pudding I suppose! https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/ ... unced.html

Just read your write up. If the triggers are fixed and build quality is good I might get two. I currently have arcade joysticks and buttons connected to my DC using brook wingman SD in ports 1 & 2. The controller would be nice for ports 3 & 4. Would really like some light guns that work on modern tvs.

[fraggle200]

Yeah, if you have one that did not break, you might get a rev past that because, as I can tell you, they broke very easily. Not sure how you would break the OGDC version. Maybe if you used it as a hammer or murdered someone with it.. as I have dropped them, thrown them, abused them, never had one break ever.. taken them from Australia to the USA, had kids throwing them, moved house, bashed about for years, never one fail..

Have a feeling you may have meant to reply to me on this. My OGDC triggers broke just through hundreds of hours of play. nothing more, nothing less. When it happened back in '02/03 I rem scooting about the internet for answers and there were a few other folk who also had JPN launch controllers that it happened on. Good chance that Sega beefed up the manufacturing on the triggers at somepoint to stop it happening. Seemed like there was a genuine need for replacement triggers to the point I rem seeing 3rd party ones on LikSang for sale ( http://web.archive.org/web/200311040355 ... 088fcfffd5 ). Never bought them as I wasn't going to risk ordering from there at the time. Wish I had as they had some great stuff.

[ateam]

The reason they have it wired is that the protocol used by the DC has timing that is too strict to do reliably over standard wireless hardware. The DC expects the VMU to respond in a certain time frame, and won't wait long. A dongle can respond quick enough, but it's difficult to get the wireless round-trip latency low enough to make the DC happy.

There are ways to work around this, but I guess it was either too difficult/expensive or didn't occur to them. (For example, they could have the controller send the entire contents of the VMU to the dongle on boot up or when a VMU is inserted, so the dongle can respond to read requests fast enough; writes are buffered on the dongle and sent to the real VMU at whatever speed is possible. The dongle would have to report that there's no VMU inserted until it's finished reading the entire VMU, so it would take longer a VMU become visible to the DC when swapping VMUs.)

This is 100% correct. So few people understand this. Chris Daioglou (of DreamMods.net) spent years of R&D with the MAPLE bus to arrive at his DreamConn solution (and he's still improving it to this very day). He does some clever stuff with caching, where save data is stored on the receiver end before being slowly transmitted back to the controller, and then written to the VMU itself. A visual indicator on the VMU screen lets players know this is occurring so that they don't power off or remove VMU.

He also limits VMU LCD refresh based on things like streaming of data to/from VMU, and even button presses from the user. All of this is in an attempt to adhere to those strict timing requirements.

It's not impossible for someone to do it better than him, but I'd be very, VERY surprised if Retro Fighters, Retro Bit, or any other company would bother even trying once they learned how difficult it is. Chris' projects are fueled by passion for the Dreamcast, first and foremost.

[fafadou]

I didn't know about all of that, thank you very much.

And the VMU2 will be shipping soon, sorry for the off topic.

[Sonic1994DC]

Here it is in action

[OatBob]

I did a brief post on this for the DCJY. Retro Fighters claimed that the triggers have been redesigned so they are no longer prone to breaking. Proof will be in the pudding I suppose! https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/ ... unced.html

That's fantastic that the company is responding to feedback on their existing products. The price is good and real VMU support is a major plus. Because they are trying to correct, I will give them a chance.

Preorder placed.

[fraggle200]

It's not impossible for someone to do it better than him, but I'd be very, VERY surprised if Retro Fighters, Retro Bit, or any other company would bother even trying once they learned how difficult it is. Chris' projects are fueled by passion for the Dreamcast, first and foremost.

this was my thinking. not a great deal of upside from their point of view for all the R&D needed to get it over the line. they've very well chose the "good is good enough" path and there's nothing wrong with that at all. Yeah we'd all have loved a true wireless controller from them but it's not a passion project like Chris' is so there's always going to be concessions.

[Snake79]

I am a bit disappointed in that review as it doesn't go into detail about how the analogue stick and triggers compare to the OEM controller or even the wired StrikerDC. Is it better or the same? It does look like there is a bit of a dead zone on the triggers as they don't register an input on the first couple of mm of travel. How does the rumble compare to the OEM vibration pack? These are important to know if you are considering a purchase.