Everything about Directional Pad totally explained
A
D-pad (short for
directional pad) is a tetradirectional (4-direction) control found on nearly all modern
video game console gamepads,
game controllers and on the
remote control units of some
television and
DVD players, with one button on each point. Like early video game
joysticks, the vast majority of D-pads are
digital; in other words, only the directions provided on the D-pad buttons can be used, with no intermediate values. However, combinations of two directions (up and left, for example) do provide diagonals.
Although digital D-pads offer less flexibility than
analog sticks, they can easily be manipulated (requiring little movement of the thumb) with very high accuracy. In recent years, D-pads have been developed which can measure different levels of pressure, giving a degree of analog control.
D-pads have appeared on other kinds of electronic equipment, including A/V
remote controls (especially since the appearance of
DVD players, which are heavily menu driven),
calculators,
PDAs,
smartphones, and car stereos such as the
Autopc.
History
A precursor to the standard D-pad was used by the
Intellivision console, which was released by
Mattel Electronics in 1980. The Intellivision's unique controller featured the first alternative to a joystick on a home console, a circular pad that allowed for 16 directions of movement by pressing it with the thumb. A precursor to the D-pad also appeared on Entex's short lived "Select A Game" cartridge based handheld system; it featured non-connected raised left, right, up and down buttons aligned to the left of a row of action buttons. Similar directional buttons were also used on the Atari Game Brain, the unreleased precursor to the Atari 2600.
The first "connected" (pad) style D-pad appeared in 1981 on a handheld game system: "Cosmic Hunter" on
Milton Bradley's
Microvision. The pad was operated the same way today's D-pads are, using the thumb to manipulate the onscreen "hero" character in any of four directions.
In
1982,
Nintendo's
Gunpei Yokoi updated this idea, shrinking it and altering the points into the familiar modern "cross" design for their
Donkey Kong handheld game. The design proved to be popular for subsequent
Game & Watch titles, although the previously introduced non-connected D-pad style was still utilized on various later
Game & Watch titles, including the
Super Mario Brothers handheld game. This particular design was patented.
In
1984, the Japanese company "Epoch" created a handheld game system called the "
Epoch Game Pocket Computer". It featured a D-pad, but it wasn't popular for its time and soon faded.
Initially intended to be a compact controller for the
Game & Watch handheld games alongside the prior non-connected style pad, Nintendo realized that Gunpei's updated design would also be appropriate for regular consoles, and Nintendo made the D-pad the standard directional control for the hugely successful
Famicom/
Nintendo Entertainment System under the name "+Control Pad". All major video game consoles since have had a D-pad of some shape on their controllers. Arcade games, however, have largely continued using joysticks.
A recent trend in modern consoles, beginning with the
Nintendo 64, has been to provide both a D-pad and a compact thumb-operated analog stick; depending on the game, one type of control may be more appropriate than the other. In many cases with games that use a thumbstick, the D-pad is used as a set of extra buttons, all four usually centered around a kind of task, such as giving commands to friendly non-player characters.
D-pads are a standard part of the keyboard design for many
graphing calculators and are thus used as input devices for both navigating the calculator's interface as well as more specialized uses such as
calculator gaming.
The actual term "D-pad" was coined by
Sega. The company used the term when describing the controllers for the
Genesis system in instruction manuals and other literature.
Consoles with D-pads
Consoles with separate controllers
Handheld consoles
1979 - Microvision
1984 - Epoch Game Pocket Computer
1989 - Game Boy line
1989 - Atari Lynx
1990 - Sega Game Gear
1995 - Sega Nomad
2004 - Nintendo DS
2004 - PlayStation Portable
2006 - Nintendo DS Lite
2007 - PlayStation Portable Slim and Lite
Car Stereos with D-pads
1990 - Autopc
Patents
(expired in 2005) - Nintendo's multi-directional switch
Footnotes
Further Information
Get more info on 'Directional Pad'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://d-pad.totallyexplained.com">D-pad Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
