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Nintendo patent explains Switch 2 Joy-Cons’ “mouse operation” mode
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Every time Nintendo adds a weird gimmick to a new system, I say, "no one will use that," and every time, I am wrong.
The NES had an expansion port on the bottom.
The SNES also had an expansion port.
The virtual boy......existed.
The N64 had an expansion port, a ram upgrade, and a controller memory pack.
The gamecube had an expansion port, and a handle.
The Wiimote has a speaker inside, that only 1 game ever used (that I played).
The WiiU had the WiiU gamepad.
The Switch had the IR sensor, and HD rumble.
You must've only played 1 wii game because pretty much every game used that speaker
I'm wondering if a lot used it in minor ways so you forget easily. I remember Brawl would use it when you selected a character, but I may only be remembering because it was a meme on TikTok for a bit. I remember one microgame in Warioware using it when you answered a phone which was funny.
I remember hearing that red steel had a multiplayer mode where your objective was played out of the Wiimote's speaker to keep it secret from other players
Three ports, actually. One for network, one for the GBA player, and one that wasn't used as far as I can recall.
Not totally useless!
The ports were all on the same bus! You can send signals meant for any of the three of them into any of the three of them and it'll work.
Well, the memory card slots and Serial Ports 1 and 2 anyway. The Game Boy Player connects via the parallel port.
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/gamecube/
The Famicom had a modem with online shopping and horse race gambling. It also had a floppy disk module with a ram adapter that also added an extra audio channel. Zelda 1 and 2 debuted on this. It also had 3D goggles, the predecessor to the Virtual Boy. It also had an entire keyboard that plugged in, and a cartridge packed with sprites, tiles, sound effects, and example code you could hack up and save to another add-on: a cassette tape recorder that saved your game projects encoded in audio.
The Super Famicom had a radio receiver that clicked onto the bottom that downloaded new games from space.
The Game Boy had an entire cartridge pin for audio passthrough so future tech built into cartridges could preprocess sound and send it straight to output.
The N64 also had a floppy-disk loading module.
The GameCube had a module that plays DMG, GBC, and GBA games (but more importantly turns the GameCube into an actual cube).
wow that is interesting as hell. would be fun to play with all that stuff!
There's still time!
Crusty wiimote sounds are a staple
Don't forget the rumble packs. N64 had one, not sure if there were others.
Logitech had a rumble mouse. The only game I know used it was black & white
I loved Black & White! Always tried to play benevolently, but with enough frustration I ended up razing everything
That's your biggest takeaway from the Switch, not the fact that it's a portable console with detachable controllers that can expand to your TV!? Or is that too integral and less of a gimmick...?
The things listed were the gimmicks announced but never used.
I used the N64 expansion port.
Rogue Squadron bundled it in, improved graphics and load time.
Made other games run faster too if I recall.
Splatoon is about to get real sweaty when M&K is an option
RTS or any predominantly mouse driven game on the switch would be interesting.
Trying to play those sorts of games even on the steam deck is a bit of a penance.
I cannot adequately describe how mildly interested I am. But I guess we'll see...