The decisions, and what follows from them.

There is no second column on this page. We haven't measured anyone else's software and aren't going to describe it for them. 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's output lands within half a bit of the mathematically ideal value, verified across the entire input grid on every single build — not sampled, all of it.

   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. Tools that pass that through unchanged hand the game a diagonal that is faster than any cardinal direction. Coda projects onto the circle, so full deflection means the same thing whichever way you push.

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

3. 03

   Curves

   You draw the response, at 256 points

   Not linear, exponential and a slider. An actual curve you shape, with per-axis deadzone and antideadzone underneath it, saved per profile and swapped without leaving the game.

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

4. 04

   Timing

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

   There is no fixed poll loop and no rate limit of Coda's own. 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. Coda carries what your pad delivers, up to 8000 Hz.

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

5. 05

   Footprint

   It never touches the game

   No injection, no hooking, 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.

6. 06

   Evidence

   It tells you what it is doing while it does it

   Live telemetry from the hot path: frame intervals, submit and skip counts, 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.