About joy-stick.net
The Control Center, since 1999
joy-stick.net went online in 1998 as The Control Center, a one-person site that reviewed joysticks, gamepads, racing wheels and whatever else plugged into a gameport. It ran until about 2008, then sat idle for years while the hardware it covered went to landfill. The old reviews are back in the archive, unedited: the prices are from the year on the page, the links are dead, and the opinions belong to a stick you cannot buy any more.
The tester, since 2026
Controllers changed, the problem did not. Sticks still drift, deadzones still hide it, and the advice online is still “recalibrate” without saying what that fixes. So the site now does one thing well: it measures. The gamepad tester shows buttons, sticks and triggers as the browser sees them, the stick drift test turns a wobbling dot into a number you can compare next week, the deadzone test shows what a given setting hides, and the polling rate test counts how often the pad reports in. The guides say which fix matches which number.
How the drift number is made
The browser’s Gamepad API hands us each stick axis as a value from −1 to +1 on every frame. With your hands off, the test samples both axes for ten seconds and reports three things in percent of full travel: the average resting offset (drift), the largest excursion from centre (peak) and the spread of the samples (noise). Under 2 % we call normal, 2–5 % minor, 5–10 % noticeable, over 10 % severe. The bands are ours and the reasoning is on the stick drift page; no manufacturer publishes a tolerance for a worn stick, so we drew the lines from the deadzones games actually use.
We do not have a lab and we do not pretend to. Where a guide quotes a fact about a controller, it names the source: the maker’s own page, a repair guide, a datasheet. Where we measured something, it was in this browser tool, and it says so.
Nothing leaves your device
Every test runs in your browser. Controller readings, results and the history of your runs stay on your device and are never uploaded; close the tab and the only copy is the one your browser kept. We run our own analytics to count visits and see how the pages are used; that data sits on our server and is not shared with third parties. Details in the privacy note.
Get in touch
Found a controller the tester misreads, or an error in a guide? Write to info@joy-stick.net. We read everything; we cannot promise to answer everything.