I&#x27;m biased since I&#x27;m an EE, but to me the real magic in game controllers is the mechanical&#x2F;materials&#x2F;manufacturing engineering that goes into making the buttons feel right and have consistent responsiveness. This is what most third-party controller manufacturers seem to get wrong, even (or perhaps especially) when they clone the basic shape and layout of a well-known controller.<p>That said, one of the cool things about how they designed the NES and SNES pads electrically&#x2F;logically is that an SNES pad will actually work with an NES if you make an adapter for the different connectors, since it&#x27;s the same protocol with a different number of data bits clocked. But the best part is that they didn&#x27;t simply add X, Y, L, and R at the end of the bit stream for the SNES pad; instead they transposed it so that SNES Y is NES B and SNES B is NES A, which translates the common idioms used in action games on the two systems.