In something like the dual shock 2 why not replace the right joystick with a trackball? You could use it in two modes. First you make any movement in the ball translate to movement on the screen. So you move the ball, the character moves. You don’t move it, he stops. But the other mode seems more useful, you could make it so that there’s some immaginary center and the further you roll the ball to one side, the the more extreme the movement gets on screen till it maxes out. Then click another button to center again and it stops.
I’ve been hearing a lot of people complain about playing FPS on a controller and wishing for a mouse. It seems like that would be a good way to do it in the first mode. Move with the joystick, aim with the trackball and shoot with the trigger buttons.
I find it much easier for me to control my trackball then a little joysticks you get on a dual shock 2. For instance going from 45 degree to 75 is very difficult for me. I have a whole lot of control with my trackball. It’s really good at fine movement and slow movement as well as flinging the pointer across the screen. Remember playing Marble Maddness in the arcades? Like that.
I imagine it would also be good in flight and driving sims for steering. And it seems like it would be easy to adjust the sensitivity too. For instance you could set it so that full left to full right is only one roll for sensitive of 4 rolls for insensitive. I easily imagine me controlling a car with my thumb. Making the best angle I could and not having to fight the spring that wants to pull the joystick back to center.
It seems like it should fit pretty easily in the controller. The only thing really necessary is to make it so that you could pop the ball out fairly easily to clean the detectors. And there’s a marketing ploy too. People could specialize there balls.
It would make the thumb buttons harder to press since you’d be using it for something else but couldn’t you easily up the shoulder buttons to 4 on each side with each finger controlling two, dropping the face buttons if necessary? It did take me a little while to get used to mine when I first got it, I kept over shooting where I wanted to go, but once I got the hang of it I found it much nicer then a mouse.
Does it sound like a good idea?