"Ambidexterizing think-tank service"

[tripletopper]

As I said various places throughout my web life, I've come to terms that if I were to make money on my inventions, the money itself might actually be a nuisance because I would have to reprove disability and my insurance is worth a lot to me, therefore the fact that I can't gain without risk is your gain if you want to use my knowledge, as limited as it may be, to help design ambidextrous controllers.

 

I see the retrogameboyz.com Intellistick as well as this new pad I found for the Intellivision happened to choose the exact same layout for the three buttons, a triangle that is  mirror symmetrical.

 

Both of those are fairly easy to 180. 

 

If you think having a joystick that is user-serviceable to be easily ambidexterized is a better feature than what you give up contourwise by having hand dedicated features.  (like for example having the d-pad and the buttons offset like an Xbox joystick) I could come up with some ideas that are worth at least what you pay for them (which is $0 and whatever time you invest in listening to them) and have a user switchable Lefty/I righty controller.

 

I agree the vertical layout of most second generation controllers caused arm asymmetry usually causes more pain than the more horizontal layout pioneered by the NES and Nintendo. 

 

The only problem is that the baby of ambidexterity got thrown out with the bathwater of vertical layouts. 

 

The easiest thing to do is to make the layout vertically mirror symmetrical so that rotating the joystick 180° gives you an inverse layout that works just as perfectly on the opposite side as it does on the original side. 

 

The triangle layout is ripe to do that for the Intellivision layout. 

 

And if you have an easy switch that can easily switch around those three buttons then you can accommodate all layouts of the three buttons, even the same person having different layouts for different games just by redefining the buttons.

 

Some games like Tutankham Side Arms have a hard left and rights concept in their control scheme whereas most games have a main and auxiliary function between the index and middle finger buttons.  Use your switchable buttons for all three of those buttons would be perfect for all people in all cases.  You just have to slide the switch over to whichever one you want. 

 

Just offering my services for what they're worth.