DC controller redesigns

[dark]

In the Atari Jaguar community there was a fan who successfully contracted with a factory in China to recreate the ultra rare Atari Jaguar 6 button controller. The Chinese factory had to create new plastic molds for the case and buttons (very expensive) as well as recreating the PCB. He was successful, but just to give an estimate on costs, it was well over $10,000 of his own money to get a run of controllers made, and the minimum amount was sizeable, like a couple thousand controllers I think. This was also done before the COVID pandemic, so it would probably be more expensive now. Just throwing some numbers out there for people who are thinking of having a run of their own dreamcast controllers made. I can imagine that having support for the VMU and maple bus protocol would make dreamcast controllers even more expensive to recreate than the Jaguar controller, which has no special features other than an insane amount of buttons.

[fafadou]

I guess you to do a kickstarter first. Those jaguar controller are fantastic.

[DCGX]

That doesn't seem worth the money.

[dark]

There's definitely a lot of effort and money involved. Even if your schematics or prototype is perfect off the bat, there's the risk the Chinese factory will make something that is not up to the standard that you wanted. That happened with the jaguar controller and the guy project managing that project had to go back and forth with the factory a few times about quality control.

It would suck to pay like 20K for dreamcast controllers and then no one likes them because the dpad and buttons are substandard to those on the original DC controllers.

[Ryo_Hazuki]

I can't imagine the cost of replicating the Dreamcast's analog pad.

[spinksy]

I made a pad with working 2nd analogue stick a fair few years back - basically same as ones posted here (second stick is below buttons and is wired from the buttons directly. It works fine but obviously the buttons themselves do not work. I'll try dig it out and get some pics/vids).

[1337]

It would be nice to have a gyro chip added.

[dark]

I misremembered, it was over $30,000 to have the jaguar controllers made by a Chinese factory, not $10,000.