Hello everyone, I have a doubt. I had read the rules on Warpless 8-4 on Super Mario (1985) and the part of "left+right/up+down are banned." Got me a little confused, I know up+down is another thing, but just asked myself if it can be banned usin analogic sticks on this or another game with an original gamepad that doesn't have it, like Sega Genesis/SNES, etc. Greetings and good health to you all.
Any controller that lets you do things not possible on a regular first party controller are usually always banned (I’m not sure I’ve ever found a case where it’s allowed).
You could easily bind left/right to keys on a keyboard and play an emulator and get weird results. But that would be banned because you can’t do left/right on a normal controller. Same thing would go for any controller you use on a console.
Questions like this should go directly to the game's community in future btw :)
As it so happens, this was recently discussed - https://www.speedrun.com/smb1/thread/2nmas
You can use any controller you want so long as you don't use L+R or U+D so for instance, yes you can use analogue sticks, but no you cannot hold left on d-pad and right on analogue stick to break the rules.
I would suggest if you are concerned about future PBs/WRs getting rejected, perhaps take extra steps such as having a camera pointing at your controller to help persuade the verifiers that you aren't cheating. This is just a personal suggestion though, you would be better asking the SMB1 community directly through their own forum / Discord / mod team.
I personally would not play NES games with analog sticks simply because that's not how OG hardware was designed around the controller. Just because you may choose to be an emulator runner (such as myself), it does not mean you get complete freedom to do how you please simply because you're on emulator. Imagine re-binding buttons for NES Metroid so select mashing becomes easier.
It should be as close to OG hardware as possible if you ask me.
It's a good thing the Metroid rules already state that the use of turbo functions etc are banned.
If using an analogue stick helps preserve people's thumbs etc over thousands of hours of gameplay, I welcome it. As Laxxus says, you're probably at a minor disadvantage doing so, but I think in 2021 we should be considering runners health as well within our rule sets. NES controllers were not designed for being used hours per day ever single day. In my opinion.
But opinions aside, the SMB community say analogue controllers are fine, and the Metroid community say turbo functions are banned.
@xenkaroshi There was at least one controller with a joystick officially designed for the NES, called the NES advantage. I never liked it, but I did have one when I was young.
The turbo/slow-mo functions should be banned, of course.
I'm aware of the NES Advantege, I didn't get the feeling like that's what OG poster was leaning towards though. Considering the broad question is analog sticks (plural) for retro gaming generally.
My point still being that it should be close to OG hardware release. If there's a 2-stick controller for this retro system he's thinking about then I see no issue with it of course.