Watching Arcus today, he was having trouble with one of his controller, finding that it can do everything except mash well. While he also has a 2nd controller that mashes well, but doesn't do everything else well. And brought up the question of would it be allowed to swap out controllers in the run?
I too have had this issue and was considering doing it. But figured it might be a good time to ask the community.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with it. It's not like you're switching out to a turbo controller or something, which doesn't work on NG anyhow. It's really hard to find a controller where everything works well on without spending hundreds of dollars and going through dozens of controllers. I've personally spent well over $100 in the past month trying to find 1 working controller and am as close as I'm going to get without spending a lot more.
So thoughts? Should this be allowed or not?
I would think this would be allowed. In the SM64 community, people will commonly switch controllers out to do Bowser throws, so I don’t see why not.
My beliefs are pretty simple on this one.
If the controllers are valid and allowed (non-turbo, not modified, ect), and you can pull this off during a run, then you've earned it. This is something you simply can't do on an emulator, and doing so during a live run on real hardware is a risk all to itself. Tug or push to hard and you'll "crash" the game, among other hazards.
So if you can pull it off, and your controllers aren't cheap, then you've earned it, brother/sister. I'll never have a problem with it unless swapping controllers produces something absurd as a result.
I do not see the problem with it as long as it is a official Nintendo licensed controller without turbo. Switching controllers itself seems to be hard as well, because I tried to plug in a second controller in the second port and it doesn't work. So you have to be very fast at swapping controllers. So if that goes wrong you might even lose time.
Yep, it's not easy. But it sure beats trying to mash with a controller that doesn't mash well.
I figured there wouldn't be any issue with it. But just wanted to verify it with the community before ever doing it in a run. I think the controller I have now, thanks to Chambers, is more than good enough I don't have to resort to swapping. But some day in the future, who knows.
Anyhow, thanks for the responses, everyone.
Don't really have an opinion on the allowed/whether you should try this part, but just wanted to add that it's probably possible on emu @SchmidttyGames especially with FCEUX being this community's preferred emulator.
FCEUX is one of the few emulators that allows you to map multiple inputs to one button press, so you can just plug in 2 controllers before opening the emulator, then map the buttons and you're done. It would be even safe as opposed to trying this on a console, because you wouldn't need to swap a controller, they're both plugged in. Here's my start button mapped to my Right Shift(keyboard layout), JS1's start(cheap NES knockoff USB controller) and JS0's start(my NES30): 
Also just tried it and it works. Did a run where I swapped between keyboard, cheap controller and nes30 on every stage and it worked just fine. Didn't even feel a big difference in my mashing, outside the cheap controller being loud in comparison.
I've been using NNNesterJ until recently. The Contra rules pushed me to FCEUX and I'm still learning its functionality. This is good to know, as I have two knockoff SNES controllers myself that do one thing better than the other. But here is where the line gets blurry for us Emulator guys. I'm all about fair. If I can't do it with the core hardware, I won't do it with the emulator in any run I actually post for time. For Fun and Games, I'll have a blast with some of this, I'm certain. :D
Thanks for the tips. There are a few games I've wanted to try some janky stuff with. :D
Not sure what the requirements are for Contra, but I use the Mesen emulator for all NES stuff now. It is by far, the best and most accurate NES emulator out there. Give it a go. It's way better than FCEUX.
I am a long time user of Nestopia. Mesen is almost like playing on real hardware. Still some slight lag, but way-way reduced compared to FCEUX and Nestopia. Best of luck!
