New device letters

[Chilly Willy]

There might have been another suit over the connector, but I couldn't find anything on it if there was. Yes, Atari was in a rough place at that time and desperate for money.

The Saturn manuals detail how to do direct access to the controllers from the SH2, but I don't see why you'd want to waste valuable cpu time if you have a coprocessor that can handle them for you. So it's easy to see why Sega didn't want people directly accessing the controllers.

But there's nothing to prevent you from directly accessing them in your own homebrew.

As to the controller support line in the rom header, how about putting "rings" around the Saturn values?

MJ6<MKJ8>

Anything inside <> would be interpreted as Saturn, so you could reuse letters.

[Sik]

That sounds like needlessly unpractical from a parsing viewpoint.

Honestly the only problem with lowercase is that it looks "ugly", which is probably a petty complaint :​P

[Miquel]

Why it seems ugly if it's a byte value? Well, perhaps because it's meant to be read?
In lowercase seems just you forget to push shift. Also some parsers could ignore to upper/lower-case.

But you are the father of the creature after all, do what you think is right.

[Chilly Willy]

But it's not meant to be read. In the normal course of things, no one knows about the fields of the rom header but the programmers. It's certainly not displayed anywhere with real hardware. Because Sega used letters for a few things instead of binary values, emulators and loaders sometimes will show the values, but it's certainly not something Sega intended. It would be just as valid to use binary values in the field as to use lower case letters or anything else.

And parsing text strings is trivial, regardless of the format.

[8bitwizard]

After reading the first message, I paused to think of ways to do it. In about five seconds I came up with "lower case". I seem to be in the majority.

[Sik]

So I was looking at the Saturn standards doc for unrelated reasons and:





Turns out they do call it the 8-button pad (or at least they did it here). Go figure. I'd say to still stick to "j" for consistency though.

Also something that hits me is that the Saturn mouse seems to use the same protocol as the Mega Mouse (probably reused the microcontroller as-is), so if an adapter is involved, technically a game that supports mouses will work with both kinds of mouse. Go figure. I guess that if your game supports both the mouse and happens to also support other Saturn peripherals through an adapter, you could claim to support both "M" and "m", technically…