Adventures in Joystick Modding: Round 2

Though I cut my teeth on the various iterations of Street Fighter II and the early Mortal Kombats, the first fighting game that really drew me in was Soul Edge.

I remember my first encounter with the game fairly well. The mall close to where I live had an Aladdin's Castle arcade in it which featured a big screen TV for whatever the hottest game was at the time. At this point it was Tekken 2, which had recently been ported to the original Playstation. I didn't yet own a Playstation, but I became curious about the game after seeing a Playstation commercial that showed Marshall Law's funky back flip throw thing.

For some reason I was hesitant to try the game, but eventually just went for it. I tried out Law, since I recognized him from the commercial, and ended up really liking both him and the game. I played quite a bit over the next few weeks. It was fun, but my only distinct memory of that time is when a guy in army fatigues came up and challenged me. He had to have been at least 6' 7 and looked like Jack-2. Sure enough, he picked Jack-2 and beat me cold.

One evening, maybe a week after that, I was playing, when a tiny Korean walked in. She went right up to the Soul Edge machine they'd recently moved from the a back of the arcade, and next to Tekken 2. I'd looked at that thing a couple times, but the whole side stepping in a 3D environment thing seemed a bit intimidating to me. She picked Seung Mina and played for a bit before eventually losing and going on her way.

Having lost at Tekken, I decided to give Soul Edge a shot. I picked Seung Mina as well, since I'd seen what the girl did, and the reach seemed like a good idea. I think I did pretty decent for a newbie, and in one of my fights I faced Siegfried. I thought he was really cool looking, so when I eventually lost, I started over and gave him a shot. I totally fell in love with the game at that point.

During mid-terms week at my high school, you were allowed to leave campus once you were done with your tests for the day. One day, I was done at 9:45am. The mall opened at 10, so I got in my car and headed over. I ended up playing Soul Edge until about noon. I actually didn't spend much money, as I was getting the hang of things and doing well. This lead to me heading to the arcade whenever I had free time.

Flash forward a few months. A particular day in either late April or early May (its been so long, I forget specifically) was the traditional Senior Skip Day. A girl I kinda liked had propositioned me, so I was rather looking forward to that.

I have to be honest, I was not at all surprised when she blew me off. I was I think understandably annoyed, and now I had nothing to do. At this point I had an after school job to give me some disposable income, and I knew that Soul Edge was now out on the Playstation. This would end up being the first time a single game pretty much sold me on a system. I withdrew $200 from my main bank account. I had an account with another, small, bank which had just gotten ATM cards so I decided to test that by withdrawing the money to cover the game. Cash in pocket, I headed to the EBX just down the hall from Aladdin's Castle and bought my Playstation and a memory card. They were out of stock for Soul Edge, which I learned was retitled Soul Blade for the home release. With that done, I headed to the Toys R Us about a quarter mile away to get the game.

I was really happy with Soul Blade. It was just as good as the arcade version! Arcade-perfect ports were still kind of a new thing at the time. Even the SNES ports of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II, while fun, weren't quite as good as the real thing. Still, the control pad just wasn't quite doing it for me. The instruction manual for the game had made reference to the “Namco Stick”, so after a few days I decided to see if I could find some sort of Playstation joystick.

I headed back to that same EBX, a place I'd end up becoming a regular at. That particular location isn't there anymore, but I remember it had glass doors, and as you entered, the Playstation games were on a shelf to the left. You had to walk past a column to get to them. The side of that column facing the center of the store had a TV in it. I think it played some of their hype stuff, and also had demo units attached sometimes.

Tangent: I ended up meeting a guy who had a Japanese PS1 that he'd bring to the store on Saturday nights to hook up to that TV, so he could show off import games. Its the way I first saw Bloody Roar, Final Fantasy VII, and Dead or Alive. With DOA, I thought it hilarious that “Bouncing Breast” was a option screen toggle and the lone thing in English.

That column also had some shelves on it. When I entered that day, for some reason I looked at the games first, just to see if anything would catch my eye. Then I decided to look for a joystick and turned around. In one of the odder coincidences in my life, upon simply turning 180° I ended up face to face with the box of a Namco Stick on one of those column shelves. I think it was $40, which I gladly paid.

I had no idea at the time that the Namco Stick would go down as one of the legendary home joysticks for its time. The idea of scratch builds was pretty much unheard of at the time (and where would you get the parts, anyway? The internet wasn't really a big thing yet), and the Namco Stick became known for its high quality build and great responsiveness. It was gray, with yellow buttons and balltop.

That thing served me well for many years. With it, I was able to get the arcade experience at home with Soul Blade, the Tekkens and, once I got to college, Street Fighter Alpha 1 and 2. I'd play a lot of Tekken 2 with people from around the hall in my dorm, and when it wasn't my turn, there were sometimes arguments over who'd get to use the stick. I think I was a little feared with that thing, particularly because I learned how to do King's multi-throw on it very reliably. I still have the input memorized. Typing this, I remember that both I and one of the others took a strong liking to Baek Doo San, and would often have 'Baek-offs' when nobody else was around.

The only annoying thing about that stick was that sometimes the ball unscrewed from the shaft. It happened often enough that I ultimately used some super glue to keep it in place. I used a lot of glue, something I'd regret down the line. These days I know you can just remove the bottom plate and hold the shaft in place to tighten things firmly.

Years later, sometime around the early days of the PS2, the square button started to become rather iffy. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. With some regret, I put the stick to the side, and it gathered dust for several years. There really weren't any good PS2 era joysticks until much later in the system's life cycle. I remember picking up this one called a Shadowblade, which looked cool but was a giant piece of junk. It was a total waste of money. I still have it around, and wonder if there is anything worth salvaging from it. Probably not.

More years pass. I start getting involved in the fighting game community on RPG.net. Posts from a guy calling himself Chikahiro (who is now my buddy Sam) inspired me to dig out the Namco Stick and see if I can fix it.

So, I got the bottom plate off and discovered a couple things: The first was dust, which I cleaned up as best I can. Second: The electronics within this thing were simply beyond me. I put the bottom plate back on and tested it out. The square button was now a little more responsive, but still not very good.

Six months to a year later, Chikahiro sold off his PS2 stuff in favor of an Xbox 360 and offered to send me a spare joystick he didn't need. I accepted, and a few weeks later I end up with another PS1 era stick called the Hori Fightstick PS. Its was contemporary of the Namco Stick, which used Hori parts, but has slightly different guts. It works great and caused me to abandon my attempts to repair the Namco Stick. As an aside, ironically, now one of the buttons on the Hori has developed a response issue, and I'm not sure how to fix it.

Now the PS3 era was upon us. I wanted to get a new system, but was still split between PS3 and 360. As mentioned in my last post, my decision was made when I ended up snagging the PS3 version of the Standard Edition Madcatz Street Fighter IV arcade Fightstick off of Amazon for $40.

After modding that SE earlier this year, my attention returned to the Namco Stick. With what I now knew, I thought I could at least attempt a repair.

What makes the Namco Stick more complicated then the Street Fighter stick is the way the buttons connected to the PCB. With the Street Fighter stick there are some simple wire connections. The Namco Stick has the button leads directly soldered to the PCB. Still, since I now have my PS3 stick, this will just be a fun project to learn from. If I screw things up, no biggie, right?

With that attitude, I removed the problem button and tried soldering in one of the Fightstick's original buttons, which I had leftover after the mod. This ended up being a bit of a pain because I'd glued the ball on all those years ago, and this hindered dismantling the stick. I had to remove the entire shaft assembly, which was tricky at first. In addition, I had to modify the leads coming off the new button, as the Namco buttons have a narrower layout.

From left to right: Namco button. Stock Madcatz button. Modified Madcatz button.

Still, the mod ended up working great. I also tried swapping in the shaft and balltop leftover from my Madcatz mod, but it fit a little too loose. I figured that I'd one day mod the stick further, using some Sanwa buttons and some paint on the balltop.

However, not long after this, I had a conversation with Kelly, my long distance girlfriend, that made the project a priority. See, she broke her wrist several years ago and while we were talking, she mentioned the old injury was feeling sore. As best she could tell, it was because she'd played some Soul Calibur 3 against her roommate recently, and some of the motions from using a Dualshock 2 must have aggravated the old injury. She lamented that she'd just have to stop playing.

Well, no girlfriend of mine is going to turn her back on fighters, so my thoughts immediately turned to trying to find a good PS2 stick for her. Her birthday was coming up, so it would make a perfect gift. A complication reared its head just a few days later: Kelly is a bit of a contradiction at times. She hates it when people spend money on her, but she does enjoy receiving gifts. So, we're talking on the phone and out of nowhere she maked me promise not to buy her a birthday gift this year. She wouldn't take no for an answer, so I had to make the promise.

Well, that threw a wrench in the whole joystick gift plan, huh? I thought about it for a bit and realized its not quite as bad as I'd thought. She said no buying things, nothing about building things. If I played my cards right, I could build her a stick using the Namco as a base, and some spare parts. It just hinged on a phone call.

Something important to note. Kelly's favorite colors are purple and black. Now, as I mentioned in the last update, my buddy Mark had picked up a WWE Brawlstick he was going to mod it. I've read, but not confirmed, that although the Brawlstick is pretty much the same thing as the SFIV SE Fightstick, its buttons are of slightly better build quality. Sure, they're not authentic Sanwas, but hey. Plus, they're all black while the Fightstick has only 2 black buttons.

I gave Mark a call and asked him if he has anything in mind for the old buttons. He didn't, and said he'd be happy to give them to me the next time we saw each other. Great! I'm in business.

Now, what to do about the top plate? Years of use had seen the paint wear away from where my hand commonly rubbed against it. I could simply repaint it with purple paint, but I wanted something that will wear better then the old paint had. I'd removed the balltop/shaft combo when I did the test button, so now I removed the top plate entirely. At this point I sprayed the balltop and shaft black, and use an absurd number of clear coat layers to make it look nice. I also soaked the top plate in acetone so I could totally strip it of paint

During my research for my Madcatz SE mod, I read a lot about replacing artwork. For sticks that don't have an acrylic top plate, the thing to do is design your art using an appropriate template, go to a FedEx/Kinkos (now FedEx Office) and have them print and LamiLabel it. Googling for a template, I found that the guys at Tek Innovations had one

So, now that I had a template, I started fooling around with GIMP. Initially I was planning on doing a solid purple panel, with a single horizontal black racing strip near the bottom, and Kelly's handle “Lornadoom” just below that. After a bit more reading, I learned that solid blocks of color don't always print well, so its best to break it up somehow. I considered adding scan lines, but didn't like the result. After a bit more reading, I learned how to do a fractal pattern that looked kind of neat. After a few adjustments, I ended up with something I was pretty sure she'd like. All that was left to do was add in some button labels.

A bit of Googling found me a font for the various Playstation button symbols, but I wasn't fond of the L and R included. I ended up finding a cool font called DiamondGothic which served that purpose, as well as for her name.

Now is the part where I cheated a little bit. I'd promised not to spend money on her gift, but I did end up dropping $5.71 on getting the artwork printed. That particular FedEx Office had a self-serve lamination machine, but it was easy enough to figure out and the results were great. Now I just had to apply it.

With the pattern I'd made, I didn't have to be too accurate in terms of lining things up. So long as the button labels were in the right spots, it was all good. Just to be safe, I had two copies of the art printed. I ended up nailing it on the first try. To make sure things went on smoothly, I used a squeegee intended for cleaning showers. It worked great and, after cutting out the holes, the artwork was all set.

Now all that was left was to connect the buttons. As noted, the buttons needed some modification, so I did that and then tried a test connection with the PCB. It went quite well, but I noticed that the brawlstick buttons fit just slightly loose in the Namco plate, so I used a bit of Green Stuff modeling putty from my Warhammer 40,000 supplies to keep them secure. After that it was a simple matter to solder the connections.

That ended up being easier then I expected. Once it was done, I reattached the balltop and shaft, and tested the stick out. It worked great.  A couple of aesthetic notes: I left the two L buttons yellow, as a nod to the stick's past. I was tempted to use the old, gray, dust washer but it didn't fit the color scheme. In addition to the clash, the paint on the shaft caused the gray dust washer to fit too tight, so I swapped in a black one leftover from the Madcatz mod. Now all I had to do was wrap the stick up and ship it.

I had the prefect setup for the surprise. Kelly likes Wonder Woman and the TV show Charmed, so I've been snagging her the comic books for both. It had been a while since I mailed her any, so I told her that since she wouldn't let me buy her a gift, I was at least going to send the batch of comics out to her. She was fine with that, and I exaggerated how thick the stack was. I wrapped everything up, fit it into a flat rate USPS box, and sent it on its way.

 

Kelly gave me a call on her birthday, mainly just to say hi, because she hadn't opened her gifts yet. She knew I'd just sent comics, so no rush, right? About 45 minutes after we finish, she called me back. I said “Hello?” and she said “I love you.”

So yeah, I got points for an original birthday present. She was thrilled that it was purple and had her name on it. Later, she fought her roommate in Soul Calibur 3 again, and had no wrist pain. Mission accomplished. As an aside, I love that I first bought that stick for Soul Blade, and she's using it for Soul Calibur 3. She also recently told me that her roommate thinks her game has improved since she started using it. Woohoo!