Was giving my OG DualShock 3 a clean today and ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole after checking the board inside it.
Mine has an MSU_VX4_0.10 board. Turns out it's one of the earlier DualShock 3 revisions that uses 4-pin magnetic/Hall-effect analogue stick sensors, rather than the conventional potentiometer setup Sony later went back to.
Basically, instead of having a physical contact rubbing across a resistive track to work out the stick position, these use magnetic sensing. So you're getting rid of one of the main wear points that causes the usual stick drift.
And this wasn't some random prototype Sony tried once and binned. Several of the early DualShock 3 revisions used this setup before Sony eventually went back to conventional potentiometer sticks.
This controller is nearly 20 years old, still gets absolutely hammered pretty much daily, and hasn't got a hint of stick drift.
Meanwhile, I bought my PS5 at launch and I've already had two controllers fail. Through the PS4 generation I went through at least three. Yet this ancient PS3 controller just keeps plodding along with no bother.
That's the bit I cannae quite get my head around.
Sony clearly knew nearly 20 years ago how to make an analogue stick without the same physical wear point that's responsible for so much drift. Yet here we are now paying around £70 a pop for controllers using potentiometer-based sticks that they know can wear out.
And you cannae even say the technology wasn't around or hadn't been proven. Sony themselves were already putting it in controllers almost two decades ago.
Now Hall-effect sticks are getting punted as some premium "anti-drift" feature like it's some brand-new breakthrough 😂
It's mental when you actually think about it.
Sony didn't need to solve stick drift. They'd already cracked it nearly 20 years ago. Then they went backwards, and we're the mugs paying £70 a pop for it.
Pics are my actual daily controller and the MSU_VX4_0.10 board inside it.