With DS sales continuing their
astronomical climb and people still snagging Wii consoles off of shelves faster than you can say: "Your princess is in another castle," Nintendo's doing pretty well for itself in these difficult economic times. It's doing even better today on news that the lawsuit filed against it
two years ago by Fenner Investments has been dismissed. The suit alleged that Nintendo inappropriately infringed on a 1998 patent relating to the monitoring of the position of analog joysticks in the Wii and GameCube. Since the company has been using analog sticks at least since 1996's N64, we didn't think this one would go far, and we don't think the proceedings against MS or Sony regarding the same patent will go any further. So, big N can now go back to focusing on
other lawsuits and dreaming up
new ways to take our hard earned cash.
posted Mar 17th 2009 8:43AM
I miss my N64...
I miss the Famicom...
AHAHAH!!
Sweet, Paper Mario... I did what your see there.
...........what?
I clicked at the engadget article from two years ago and its amazing how the maturity in the comments were back then.
the trolls had not migrated to this site at the time I guess.
am not a troll!
Wouldn't you think they would have researched the analog stick a bit more before they took Nintendo to court?
@Jarrod
Calm down and read his post again.
Does this mean I can buy a wavebird for less than $75 now?
NO! NO WAVEBIRD FOR YOU!
It still prints money!
Ok so who's still buying these Wii's?? I only know one familey with a Wii and their kids dont even touch it. Sold mine after 2 months as it was so boring. (Puts on flame suit)
People just need to learn, don't sue the big N!
IP = money...
You should have used a Ground Pound (a.k.a "Butt Stomp") image for Mario. http://www.mariowiki.com/Ground_Pound
:)
N64 controller = best controller ever
I hate patent trolls. Unfortunately there is no fix. If you go and make the loosing side pay the lawyers of the winner, it would scare away the trolls.... but it would make it more difficult for smaller firms to rightfully defend their patents. It sucks either way.
I'm going to have to claim my nerd creds here and inform Engadget that the actual mechanism used for the N64 joystick is different than GameCube or Wii controllers. The way it works is somewhat similar to how a trackball mouse monitors the motion of the ball with photodiodes, whereas a GameCube joystick uses a couple of potentiometers.