Did you know that there was an analog controller for the original Playstation before the Dual Shock? It's true! The Dual Analog Controller as it was called may not be the most exciting factoid out there, but we still think this little curiosity deserves some love.
The differences are at first glance not huge, however with further inspection you might notice the concave analog sticks, the shoulder button ridges as well as the elongated grip. I actually prefer these longer grips a bit more, so it's too bad they didn't stick with them as they moved over to the Dual Shock.
A more hidden difference is the flight stick mode indicated by a green LED. This mode simply emulates Sony's Analog Joystick controller, which was a pretty bulky dual flight stick device mainly used for flying and racing games. It's pretty cool too, hopefully we can get our hands on one in the future and show you.
The Dual Analog Controller doesn't have a rumble feature in Europe and America, while the Japanese one had a single motor attached within. Supposedly the motor could malfunction and fry your entire system or something, but we can't confirm or deny this – so take it as a funky rumour.
It is not hard to see why the Dual Analog Controller fell into obscurity though. It was only available for about a year before the much more common Dual Shock controller was introduced. It was overshadowed by its fancier new brother and quickly forgotten. But we remember, and now you do too! And that's lovely.
I can read out the A and B buttons. It was quite easy to do despite having little experience with electronics. (But C programming experience.)
The board here is an Arduino UNO R4 Wifi. It can act as a USB HID (human interface device) so I could write code to actually use it as a game controller on my computer. Also, it has a fancy little LED display as you can see, and it does 5V digital logic, so I don't need a logic-level converter. (E.g., if you directly connect this controller to a Raspberry Pi, it can destroy the GPIO pins.)