Hi! New to the boards... just joined. I have a rather unusual SNES controller question that I would like to pose to the tech-savvy members here. In fact, I pretty much joined just to ask this question.
As I understand it, a "standard' SNES Controller sends a 16-bit signal to the console on every cycle. Of course, since the standard SNES controller only has 12 buttons, only 12 of those 16 bits are used (the other 4 unused bits are always "high," as no "buttons" exist to ground them).
Well... I was just thinking to myself, were I a game designer, what would stop me from actually assigning "secret" uses to those bits should they ever actually be activated? I mean, were I a game designer I may assign uses to those signals specificly for debugging or playtesting purposes (confident they would never see use outside the design environment, as the controller was physically incapable of activating them).
So, my question is this: Has anyone in this forum ever costom-built a SNES controller to make use of those 4 inputs (that is, included 4 extra buttons)? If so, have any SNES titles been tested with such a controller to see if there actually are any obscure uses associated with these signals?
I just wondering if there may be little "easter eggs" in those SNES games that just haven't been unearthed.
Yeah, I know. Strange question.