Most notably, it's an all-new design which is arguably superior to the original Sega controllers it takes inspiration from. Now, not only could a player see the game and hear the sound, but a player could now feel force feedback from the game as well. If you have a controller with a "Home" button, pressing the "Home" button will also cause one column to switch from off to on.

History of Video Game Controllers - Nerdist A Brief History of Video Game Controllers - Nerdist

You lose the Genesis Mini compatibility, but you get wireless convenience and multiple connection options. This question kind of blew my mind, because BITD that was just "the joystick port", and one had a right to expect any consumer controller that plugged into it to work. For a good controller, this mapping must be able to be made by a game in a manner that is intuitive and natural, at least for people who are familiar with video games. Not to mention it essentially has the 6 button layout of the mega drive controller everyone is mad about and acts as a good extra controller for Mario Kart or Smash Bros as long as they improve the joystick. never mind the fact the platformers were the most popular gaming genre of that era and the SNES d-pad was just better suited to and superior for those types of games.Fortunately, the individual Genesis games themselves played perfectly with the controllers, and felt authentic once I finished wrestling with the game list. As a result, what good the Arcade Power Stick 6B might bring to a fighting game is more or less squashed by its shoddy material. While not the first console or controller, Atari laid the groundwork for all successful controllers that came after with the Atari 2600. This makes it appear as a much more universally supported Xbox 360 gamepad to Windows PCs (without analog sticks, of course).

8BitDo

The Genesis gamepad is slightly tweaked, however; the USB version functions as an eight-button controller, adding shoulder buttons that weren't on the original.The following diagrams are for the 3 most common controllers: Super Nintendo, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Though the D-pad’s design looked at first like a four-directional interface, players quickly realized that diagonal movement was possible by pressing two adjacent directions at once. Rather, the big contributions to controllers in this generation came, once more, from Nintendo's entry. I have no idea why some people seem to hate it, but I always loved it, there is just something about the shape of it and the way you hold it that always felt uniquely appealing, especially with that Z button. The gamepad’s elongated grips formed the iconic shape of all future PlayStation controllers, and four new symbols replaced the lettered buttons of the past.

Controller Configuration - RetroPie Docs Controller Configuration - RetroPie Docs

Besides, one could argue that diagonals are hard to pull on joypads, but more and more games get a "second button for jump" option now (through whdload) so it's less a concern now for platformers (and with some training, diagonals are pretty doable). I have a SGFighter quickshot for sega, and only 2 buttons work(ed), but not the trigger button (too bad for a quickshot) (I know of a routine which is able to read more buttons from a sega controller but of course it's not used in games, so it's of little interest. You can run jstest (joystick test) in the terminal by selecting Quit EmulationStation (a keyboard will be required for the following steps). Follow the onscreen instructions to configure your gamepad- if you run out of buttons just hold down a button to skip each unused button. It had a new approach to what a game controller should look like: instead of something awkward like a bulky joystick, it was held comfortably in two hands while the thumbs did everything.

I've previously used the NES30 Pro, but it looks like this will be much better suited - no separate analogue stick board to mess with, USB C, more buttons for menus, and even the 6 face buttons lend themselves better to fight stick layouts. Rather, that title is reserved for the direct successor to the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.