in looking up NES controller references on Wikimedia Commons i found this incredible joke. i saw this and burst out laughing like who made this and why, could you imagine trying to play with this, i don’t wait it’s for video game musicians. like this shows up at the bottom of every Wikipedia stub article about a video game musician. e.g. this one. i
alright hold on you’re going with me through the rabbit hole i fell down this morning. i decided to try and see if anyone had actually made a controller like this, even if just as a joke. i mostly found either MIDI controllers or that Rock Band 3 keyboard (which apparently also had MIDI‽). but then i ended up here.
what the fruity juicy fuck is this “controller”? is this a controller? is it actually a fucked up theremin? why are there no images on this page showing it in use by human hands? where am i? i am so lost.
TASOLLER comes for touch-type games, with 32 touch keys, 6 sets of infrared sensors and 96 RGB LED lights.
what. what does this mean. this isn’t a PC keyboard right. is it a keyboard? how could you possibly type on this. why does it say there are 2 times as many keys as there are?
Based on the DAOdesign team’s pursuit of the ultimate design concept,
the respongding speed of touch key and infrared sensors, all achieve the ultimate in the industry.
The stability of TASOLLER design passed the 6 months verification.
what does literally a single word of this mean
anyway doing a YouTube search for this to try and see how a human would use it landed me here:
what the fuck. why would you pay ¥100 per play (or USD $329 for the TASOLLER) to give yourself RSI. why aren’t rhythm game players okay
i proceeded to look for other obscure rhythm game controllers to be baffled by. unfortunately they didn’t get any weirder than this, most of them are just “some buttons or rotary encoders in a specific configuration / dimensions for a specific game”, aside from the one that’s a DK Bongo, or regular‐ass drawing tablets for that one game you’ve probably heard of. but there are also some tragic‐yet‐real devices on the same level as the Rock Band 3 keyboard, weird only insofar as “why would anyone bother”:
behold, a USD $349 incomplete MIDI keyboard with RGB lights, called the “NOSTROLLER”. why? why. just buy a keyboard? on that note,
just buy a keyboard. like you can easily get a full‐size keyboard for the USD $149 price tag this one has. why are rhythm game players pointlessly reinventing keyboards. this is a fairly well‐solved problem. okay i will concede that better solutions are possible but those are not it. one such solution was already found by high‐level rhythm game players it feels like by accident!
Wooting keyboards have always interested me as someone who likes alternative input devices, but sadly they don’t sell any keyboards with ergonomic layouts. these are the keyboards that have Hall effect analogue switches and use them well, which still seems to be fairly unique within the industry. at high‐level, osu! players started taking advantages of one of their features only possible on a keyboard with analogue switches. Wooting calls this “rapid trigger”, but it’s just changing the key’s state based purely on whether it was last moving down or up, rather than how far it’s travelled. this technically enables maximally‐rapid key presses, just in case you wanted to give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome even faster.
…and then after realizing that osu! players were buying up their keyboards, Wooting proceeded to crowdfund for a new, impeded product specifically for these rhythm game players:
it’s fucking called the “Wooting UwU”. i will not dwell on this any longer than has been required to share this cursed knowledge with you so i’m moving on now.
anyway, where Hall effect switches are the superior‐yet‐unpopular solution to PC keyboards, there’s an equivalent for piano keyboards, which this whole mess has gotten me thinking about again. i am a classically‐trained pianist so i feel qualified to say that piano keyboards kinda suck actually. they’re needlessly limiting, and do not jive with my intuitive and mathematical understandings of music. instead, i think i would enjoy using a Jankó keyboard much more.
(i’ve written about these briefly before.) it’s basically just a logical, sensible design for a piano keyboard that doesn’t have any inherent bias to any particular scales. in fact, each scale is played with exactly the same motions, as opposed to them all being different. some people say they dislike it (or that it’s outright inferior) because they lose place of where they are on the keyboard more easily, but that sounds like a skill issue to me. (“it’s harder to learn” is definitely a skill issue.)
as much as i want one of these though, i can’t really get one. i mean i could get a real‐ass piano with modified keys, but i prefer electronic instruments for having lower cost, maintenance, and size, among other things. there’s One Guy trying to make MIDI keyboards with this layout, but AFAIK various setbacks have impeded scalable manufacturing and so only a few prototypes exist right now.
what would be even better, i think, is a device that combines both the Jankó layout and analogue Hall effect switches. unfortunately nobody makes this input device that i want. in theory it’d be possible to DIY this right now: get 264+ of Wooting’s Hall effect switches; make some custom keycaps, a PCB, and a case; and program firmware that lets it act like a proper MIDI keyboard, and probably at least also a regular PC keyboard. and also do a bunch of other stuff necessary to realize this into a functional device. unfortunately i do not have the maker skillsets necessary to realize this, and commissioning such a ridiculous device would end up being ludicrously expensive i’m sure. so this is also not achievable for me.
i just don’t get why nobody’s making a device like what i want and yet the NOSTROLLER and all these other pointless things are somehow allowed to exist.
