Jag controllers

[kill_bill]

Hi everybody i recently bought a new jag controller and the d-pad feels much better and smoother on the new one, the old controller is stiff! The buttons are also gray instead of black, so is the d-pad supposed to be stiff on the black button one, is there something wrong? Thanks in advance?

[Rick Dangerous]

I have both grey and black three button controllers and have never really noticed a difference in the d-pad. Will have to check it out tonight and confirm.

[Clint Thompson]

Hi everybody i recently bought a new jag controller and the d-pad feels much better and smoother on the new one, the old controller is stiff! The buttons are also gray instead of black, so is the d-pad supposed to be stiff on the black button one, is there something wrong? Thanks in advance

 

They changed the internal design at some point and I believe added a middle plastic post behind the D-Pad to make it easier to control or it could be the other way around but somewhere along the line, they altered the design of the Jaguar controller so that would probably explain the stiffness vs. loose feeling.

[kill_bill]

Ok thanks,the loose one feels much better than the black one, the black one feels more sticky also, the serial no starts with a g on the gray one and there is no missing pins in the connector on the gray one vs missing pins on the black one!

[kill_bill]

Also noticed that the numbers on the numpad are different on the gray one, there is a circle around the number one the black one and only a number on the gray controller!

[Clancy Wiggum]

Meant to post a comment here a while back...

 

I've long had a fascination with the Jaguar, but only recently played one and got into collecting for it. Part of that fascination stems from when I saw a picture of the controller back in '94 or so and thought 'what the hell is that!?'.

 

Having played both the black and grey ones, yes there are definite differences, as you say Kill_Bill. In fact I was really struck by how much of a difference there was.

 

The Jaguar has it's faults, and the controller is often cited as a prime example, but, like many others, I was pleasantly surprised when I first held it. It was pretty comfortable. For it's time too, the '3D' moulding was a definite step up from the mostly flat SNES, Mega Drive, 3DO controllers too. I also think the flak for C B A ordering of the buttons is unfair: Nintendo had been doing it B then A for years and, to my knowledge, hadn't been criticised as much as Atari were for doing the same thing with the Jaguar controller. I also don't get the criticism regarding it being huge and chunky. It's actually quite light and is not dissimilar to other controllers both before and since other than they tend to have a gap between the two 'prongs' you put your fingers round, while the Jaguar uses that for the number pad.

 

Even though I was pleasantly surprised with the how the controller felt to hold, I have to say that the D-pad and the buttons were sources of disappointment. The D-pad was too small, too shallow, wasn't 'clicky' enough to really give feedback on how you'd moved it and the same criticism could be made for the C B A buttons. However, having played both the black and grey button versions I was taken aback with how different they feel with regard to these points. I can't remember off the top of my head which one was better (the black button one I think) but it made such a difference to the feel of playing the system as it basically resolved those issues for me.