Seventeen Handhelds Have Six Face Buttons. The Saturn-Shaped Pair Is Not the Best at Saturn.

The Sega Saturn pad is the only controller in this industry whose face layout was designed around a single genre, and the genre was the fighting game: six buttons on the face, three punches and three kicks, with a disc-shaped d-pad that rolls under the thumb for a quarter-circle. Reviewers still argue it is one of the best pads ever bundled with a console. The one who spent six months with Anbernic's copy of it gives the reason directly — the six-button layout "is perfect for Capcom's dazzling range of fighting game series".

This catalogue carries 593 handhelds. Four hundred and fifteen publish four face buttons. Seventeen publish six. And of those seventeen, the two shaped like a Saturn pad — the RG ARC-S at $78 and the RG ARC-D at $98 — grade C on the Saturn. The two six-button devices that grade A on the Saturn are a vertical handheld and a $699 Android machine, and neither of them looks like a Saturn at all.

That is not a knock on Anbernic. It is what the numbers say about where the six-button layout came from, and what it is actually for.

How these counts are built

The source is the same database that renders every console page on this site, read on 14 November 2026: 593 rows in the consoles table, 445 of which carry at least one emulation grade. The face-button field is free text and it is imperfect in the way spreadsheets are imperfect.

So "seventeen" means fifteen devices that publish six buttons plus two that publish a switchable four-or-six layout: the Retroid Pocket Classic and the AYANEO 3. All seventeen were re-read on their live pages before publication, and every price below is the figure the catalogue prints today rather than a launch tier. The 149 rows with no button data are largely the same rows that carry no grades — 135 of them sit in both lists.

That leaves a blunt ratio. Of the 444 devices that document a face layout at all, 3.8 per cent have six buttons. Of the whole catalogue, 2.9 per cent.

Why six buttons exist, and why four won anyway

Street Fighter II shipped in 1991 with six attack buttons — light, medium and heavy punches and kicks — and the arrangement became the Capcom house style for a decade. Wikipedia's account of the game lists the "six-button configuration" among the things it introduced, alongside the combo system and the special-move input. Every Capcom fighter that followed inherited it: Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstalkers, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Capcom vs. SNK.

The rest of the industry did not follow. SNK's arcade cabinet and its home joystick used the same four-button layout. Virtua Fighter asks for three: punch, kick, guard. Tekken, Soulcalibur and Dead or Alive are four-button games. Mortal Kombat went its own way with five — two punches, two kicks and a dedicated block button.

Name matching against those families finds 223 titles in six-button series in this catalogue (Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Capcom vs. SNK, X-Men, Darkstalkers, Vampire Savior, JoJo, Killer Instinct, Mortal Kombat) and 206 in four-button series (Tekken, King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, Real Bout, Garou, Samurai Shodown, Last Blade, Art of Fighting, World Heroes, Virtua Fighter, Soulcalibur, Soul Blade, Dead or Alive, Fighting Vipers, Fighters Megamix). Roughly a coin flip, which is the first surprising thing here: the six-button requirement is not a niche inside fighting games, it is half of them.

The four-button diamond won the hardware war anyway, because a diamond plus two shoulders can play almost everything and because most games are not fighting games. What the shoulders cannot do is give you six attacks under one thumb. Pressing a trigger is not the same motion as pressing a face button, and in a game that expects three punches and three kicks to sit side by side, the compromise is felt every round.

What a four-button pad does with these games

It plays them. The mapping is not mysterious: two of the six attacks move to the shoulder buttons, so four attacks live on the face and two on the shoulders. Capcom's Super Nintendo ports assumed exactly that — the SNES pad has "A, B, X, and Y face buttons in a diamond arrangement, and two shoulder buttons", and that is where the heavy attacks went. On the Genesis the industry went the other way entirely: in 1993 Sega released a pad with three additional face buttons, "similar to the design of buttons on arcade fighting games such as Street Fighter II", and games including Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition were adapted to require it.

What it costs, precisely:

• One motion, two zones. A six-button attack that wants three punches at once becomes a face button plus two shoulder buttons, pressed by three different parts of the hand.
• The Saturn roll is gone. The disc pad exists so that a half-circle ends where it started; a cross d-pad on a four-button shell is a different instrument, and this catalogue's cheapest devices have crosses.
• Nothing else changes. Every four-button fighting series — the 206 titles above — was designed for this layout and needs no workaround.

Which is why the seventeen matter for some libraries and not others, and why the grade table is the only honest way to choose between them.

The seventeen

Sorted by price, with the grades this site publishes for the four platforms that carry the six-button canon. "Disc" is a Saturn-style rolling pad, "cross" is a conventional plus.

Read down the columns and the pattern is almost embarrassing in its consistency.

• PS1 is a solved problem on this hardware. Fourteen of the sixteen graded devices grade A. The two exceptions are the Gopher pair.
• Genesis is solved everywhere. Sixteen of sixteen grade A.
• SNES is solved everywhere but the Gophers. Fourteen of sixteen grade A.
• Dreamcast splits. Two A, seven B, four C, three F.
• Saturn splits badly. Two A, seven C, four D, three F.
• PS2 is a wall. One A, one B, two D−, twelve F.

If you want the six-button Capcom catalogue — the 1991-to-2000 run, Street Fighter II through Marvel vs. Capcom 2 — the cheapest correct answer here is $78, and it is a Genesis, SNES and PS1 machine that happens to run Dreamcast at B.

The platform you are actually buying

A grade is per system, so the useful comparison is library against library rather than device against device. Across all 445 graded handhelds:

The six-button canon sits on exactly the three platforms that are easiest to emulate — Genesis, SNES, PS1 — plus two of the hardest, Saturn and PS2. That is not a coincidence. Capcom's fighters were built for 2D hardware with simple architectures; the Saturn is a two-CPU machine whose later conversions leaned on cartridge memory, and the PS2 is a decade of bespoke silicon that an emulator has to schedule in software.

The Saturn paradox

The RG ARC-S and RG ARC-D are the only devices in this catalogue with both a six-button face and a disc d-pad. They are also two of the worst Saturn performers among the six-button devices: a C, against an A from a $114 vertical handheld and an A from a $699 Android machine.

Both statements are true because they measure different things. The shape is a copy of a controller. The grade is a measurement of an emulator that has to reproduce a machine nobody has ever described as easy.

The Saturn's problem in this genre was not its controller, it was its memory. The conversions that made the platform famous among fighting-game players ran on Capcom's RAM cartridges: X-Men vs. Street Fighter was "the first game announced to support the Saturn's 4MB RAM cartridge" and shipped with the cartridge in the box to reach what Wikipedia calls an "arcade-perfect conversion"; Marvel Super Heroes used the 1 MB cartridge; Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter and the Japan-only Vampire Savior needed the 4 MB one. Emulating those titles means emulating the cartridge as well as the console, which is a second moving part on hardware that already had two processors and a bus nobody enjoys.

Reviewers who have put real hours on the RG ARC land on the same shape of conclusion the grade column does. RetroResolve's ARC-D review calls Saturn support "surprisingly well" for a $98 RK3566 device and then notes "there are drops to be felt". Time Extension, returning to the same hardware six months after its first review, found that the rolling disc d-pad — the exact feature the Saturn pad is loved for — "would periodically become 'stuck' in a random direction", while noting that many other owners report no problem at all.

That is what a C means. Not broken, not clean.

If Saturn software is the actual goal, the catalogue points somewhere else. Of the seventeen, exactly two grade A on Saturn: the Retroid Pocket Classic at $114, whose six-button face is one of two layouts the device publishes, and the AYANEO 3, which starts at $699 and grades A on every platform in the table, PS2 included. Six times the price of an ARC-S buys the Saturn library; twelve times buys the Saturn and PS2 libraries and the six-button face in a shell that is not pretending to be a 1994 controller.

What to buy

For the 1991 to 1999 Capcom library, buy the RG ARC-S at $78. It is the cheapest device with six buttons that grades A on Genesis, SNES and PS1, with Dreamcast at B. The $20 step to the ARC-D buys 2 GB of RAM instead of 1 GB, a touchscreen instead of a plain IPS panel and 32 GB of internal storage; the grade table is identical, so if the purchase is for fighters rather than for reading visual novels, the cheaper one is the correct one. Whether the disc pad holds up is the open question, and it is the one component on this device you cannot replace.

For Saturn software, buy the Retroid Pocket Classic at $114 — or accept a C. There is no cheap six-button Saturn machine, and the Saturn-shaped handhelds are specifically not it. The RG ARC-D vs RG ARC-S comparison is the place to see how little separates the two Anbernics.

Do not buy a six-button device for PS2 fighters. Twelve of the sixteen graded devices fail that platform outright, and the two that pass cost $114 and $699.

If six buttons is not the point, ignore this article. The 206 four-button titles need four buttons and one good d-pad, and the catalogue has devices that do that for $40. Yesterday's Dead or Alive 2 piece is the same method applied to a four-button fighting game.

What this does not say

A grade is per system, not per title. Nobody here has benchmarked each of the 223 six-button games on 593 handhelds. A C for Saturn says the Saturn library usually runs with compromises on that device; it does not promise a particular game at a particular speed, and X-Men vs. Street Fighter — the one that needed a 4 MB cartridge on real hardware — is a harder target than the average Saturn title.

The 223 and 206 counts are name matching, not a genre field. There is no genre column in this catalogue. Titles were matched on franchise names, which will miss a fighter whose name contains none of them and will occasionally catch something that is not a fighter at all — the Mortal Kombat family, for instance, includes two action spin-offs. The per-platform counts are distinct titles, not releases or regional variants.

The button column is free text and 149 rows are empty. The 3.8 per cent figure is a share of the 444 devices that document a layout, not of all 593. A device that publishes no buttons may still have six, and three rows spell "buttons" wrong badly enough to be counted separately.

Prices are maker's store prices for the entry configuration, as printed on the live console pages on 14 November 2026. Most of those stores ship from outside the European Union, so import VAT and duty are charged on delivery and can add a fifth or more. The price basis is published rather than folded into a footnote.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Street Fighter II: the "six-button configuration" and the six attack buttons: en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia — Neo Geo: the home joystick's "same four-button layout as the arcade MVS cabinet": en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia — Virtua Fighter: "three buttons (Punch, Kick, Guard)": en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia — Mortal Kombat (1992 video game): the five-button layout and the dedicated block button: en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia — X-Men vs. Street Fighter: the 4 MB RAM cartridge and the "arcade-perfect conversion": en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia — Marvel Super Heroes (video game): the 1 MB RAM expansion cartridge: en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia — Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter: the 4 MB cartridge, and the round format swap on the Saturn port: en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia — Vampire Savior: the Japan-only Saturn version and its 4 MB cartridge requirement: en.wikipedia.org
• Time Extension — Anbernic RG ARC Six Months On: The Dream Becomes a Nightmare, on the six-button layout and the sticking disc pad: timeextension.com
• RetroResolve — Anbernic ARC-D Review: Great for Emulation, But…, on Saturn performance and its drops: retroresolve.com
• Notebookcheck — Anbernic RG ARC detailed as new Sega Saturn-inspired gaming handheld, six front-facing buttons on a Saturn-shaped shell: notebookcheck.net
• Lost In Consoles — the graded catalogue this piece is derived from, downloadable as CSV: capability index and dataset.csv
• Lost In Consoles — the grade scale used for every letter above: how to read emulation grades
• Lost In Consoles — the price basis for every dollar figure here: price index
• Lost In Consoles — the two Anbernic shells side by side: RG ARC-D vs RG ARC-S