The decisions, and what follows from them.

There is no second column on this page. We haven't measured anyone else's software; where our guides set Coda beside another tool, they quote what that tool documents about itself, with the source. What follows is what Coda does, why it was built that way, and what that buys you — all of it checkable against the product.

1. 01

   Resolution

   The whole 16-bit range, and the arithmetic to prove it

   A stick position has to survive deadzone, curve and scaling before it reaches the game, and each of those steps is a chance to lose a bit of it. The cheap way is to truncate; the honest way is to round, and then to check. Coda rounds, and a test checks the result against the mathematically ideal value for every 8-bit input and a sample of 16-bit ones. On the Xbox 360 output — the default for PlayStation controllers — all sixteen bits reach the game.

   Half a bit is not something you will feel on a flick. It is what decides whether the smallest deliberate movement you can make with your thumb reaches the game as a movement at all.

2. 02

   Geometry

   A circle, not the square your hardware reports

   Sticks report inside a square. Push one to a corner and its raw magnitude is about 1.41 times what the same push gives you straight up. Passed through unchanged, that hands the game a diagonal faster than any cardinal direction. Switch on Force circular output and Coda projects onto the circle, so full deflection means the same thing whichever way you push. It is a switch per stick, off by default; the Aim preset turns it on.

   Your turn speed stops depending on which direction you happen to be turning.

3. 03

   Curves

   You shape the response, point by point

   Not linear, exponential and a slider. Up to ten points you place yourself, joined smoothly without overshooting between them or with straight lines, and calculated on every sample rather than looked up in a table. You feel each change on the pad while you make it. Per-axis deadzone and antideadzone sit underneath, the whole curve is saved per profile, and a second curve can take over while you aim down sights.

   The shape near centre is where aim is won, and it is different for every player and every sensitivity. Three presets cannot hold that.

   How response curves work →
4. 04

   Timing

   It submits when your input changes, not when a clock says so

   PlayStation controllers are read report by report, with no poll loop and no rate limit of Coda's own. Xbox controllers have to be asked, so Coda polls them at the rate you set, up to 8000 Hz. Either way, a changed input goes out when it changes; an identical frame is not re-sent, because sending the same state twice adds nothing but work.

   The ceiling is your hardware. Whatever the number turns out to be on your setup, Coda is not the thing capping it.

   What polling rates mean →
5. 05

   Footprint

   It never touches the game

   No injection into the game, no hooks in it, no kernel driver of ours. Coda reads your controller, does its work, and presents a virtual pad through ViGEmBus — a Microsoft-signed driver used by a great deal of software that has nothing to do with us. To the game it is a controller.

   We still won't promise you an outcome we don't control, and the Ban FAQ says exactly where that line sits. What we can tell you is what the software does and doesn't do, which is the part that is ours to know.

   What ViGEmBus is →
6. 06

   Evidence

   It tells you what it is doing while it does it

   Live telemetry from the hot path: frame intervals, polling and submit rates, stall detection, and the app's own garbage-collection counters. Most of that exists because it was needed to build the thing, and there was no good reason to hide it afterwards.

   You do not have to believe any of the above. You can open the panel and watch it.