I'm only tangentally interested in Smashbox vs The b0xx but jesus that article into hax rebuttle punish combo is looking pretty fucked.
TBH, as someone who is friends with a guy who has a SmashBox for data gathering / tournament testing via having players use it and give their thoughts, the only difference between the SmashBox and the B0XX is the layout of the buttons.
Which is odd that it's turning into a quasi patent / legal thing because I've never ever heard of anyone patenting a button layout.
I'll care about the boxes when someone makes one with an analog joystick.
Honestly there was a custom one a friend of mine saw at Genesis this year that was half Gamecube with an analog stick and the other half was a hitbox with all the buttons.
Which I thought was clever but not ideal. I would think a joystick would be more comfortable than having weight imbalances and such between each side of the frankenbox.
But in reality anyone can make them. It's just no one's cared to until now for some odd reason.
Seems like a bunch of squabbling for something that's gonna be banned anyway. Banning it even brought Westballz and Leffen together. The community seems united.
I honestly don't see why people think to ban it. There's the argument that having digital inputs for the analog sticks and its impact on DI, but the tradeoff is a lot of other things that seem simpler on a controller feel complicated on the arcade stick.
Basically it's like you becoming an analog computer that in theory could have TAS level execution because all of your inputs are mapped digitally and laid out for you, but you're still a human and the conversion of controller inputs and timings to arcade stick inputs and timings is different enough to make that a challenge in and of itself.
As long as each input on the box is directly correlated to a single output in game, I don't see any real arguments against it.
A Marvel player got in trouble for having Up + Left and Up + Right on his stick mapped to single buttons at a tournament, for example.
However, I feel Hitbox felt that they hadn't seen an arcade stick for Melee made yet and thought, why not make one? Then Hax$ said the layout should be different, Hitbox doesn't want to give him money or revise their product so close to launch, Hax$ makes his own variant, and the pissing match starts.
It's like if someone got mad at Hori for making an arcade stick with a different layout than Qanba did. At the end of the day they serve the exact same purpose.