Dualshock 4 stick drift

Story time!

I bought a Playstation 4 just one week before the Devil May Cry 5 launch. My sin is to be a Devil May Cry junkie since my first random encounter with Devil May Cry 3.

Yes. I still have PTSD from Vergil’s “SCUM!“s. The memories…

Coming from the split-screen era (AKA anything before Playstation 4 and Xbox One) I also bought a second controller. A red one! Just to confortably play as Dante throughout the whole game.

What I wasn’t expecting was the whole modern-era controller drift saga…

This controller is a spicy one! (pun intended)

No drift please

These days, some people like Louis Rossmann or Steve talk a lot about the right to repair and the general enshittification of anything that is powered by electricity.

I do currently have more-than-a-decade-old OG Xbox controllers that don’t have any kind of drift… Luckily, not the whole world is literally the devil (not the good kind like Dante).

Enter GuliKit’s products:

For less than 15€, I can try to save my poor controller. You could also rephrase that to “I can fix my overpriced piece of junk that some megacorp created.”

These little guys are TMR (Tunnel Magnetoresistance) stick replacements for my Dualshock 4 controller. They don’t use cheap resistors to translate movements into analog signals, but instead, they use magnets, removing the problem of “wearing out” the resistor and thus creating drift.

To the laboratory!

The job

Opening a Dualshock 4 is less fun than you think. Resembles the Xbox 360 Phat infamous clips near the power port (those were a nightmare to open).

Let’s see what we have here…

Get the flux. Warm the iron. Insult big corps. Lower the chair. Big breath. Let’s go.

Grab a glass of water. (beer when the job is done)

Yes! After some easy reassembly, I can finally take a look at the culprit of this devilish story:

Because of these little suckers, I almost threw away an otherwise perfectly fine DualShock 4 controller.

I’m looking at you, Sony…

The good end

I’m happy to report that I have successfully prevented a tiny piece of electronic garbage from ending up somewhere in the ocean or in other countries. I can finally rest on the couch while playing Devil May Cry 5.

:D

You cannot kill me! I am Omega! You cannot kill me! I am Subhuman!