Arcade Stick Project

I picked up Street Fighter IV a couple of months ago and played the heck out of it. But I eventually got to the point where the XBox 360 controller just wasn't cutting it anymore. Some of the combos required some button presses that I was finding impossible to do. So I decided to buy an arcade stick.

I did a bit of shopping around at local stores and came up empty. Even online, there weren't a lot of options at the time. The commercial sticks were either really expensive, out of stock (not the only SFIV player apparently), not available yet, or received mediocre reviews. However, during my searching I also found a lot of photos of custom made arcade sticks built by various people in the console mod community. Some of these were really spectacular. Especially this one. I'm a sucker for LED backlit things. I was intrigued by the idea building a controller for myself and learning some new skills. Hopefully, mad skills.

I stopped searching for controllers to buy and started researching how to build one from scratch. How to tear apart a controller, where to wire buttons and joysticks to, even how to add LEDs to arcade buttons. I eventually cobbled together enough info to have a vague idea of the components I needed, and after a bit more quality time with Google I found an online dealer. Lizard Lick Amusements.

I placed an order for the arcade parts I was going to need:

• 1 Happ 8-Way competition joystick
• 6 Seimitsu 30mm Pushbuttons
• 3 Seimitsu 24mm Pushbuttons

I wanted the Happ stick because I like the bat shape, rather than the big ball top used by the Japanese style sticks. This seemed like an obvious choice to me at the time, but having done even more research after I placed the order I might have been a bit hasty. The biggest drawback to this stick is that they're not typically gated. This means that they don't have a plate that restricts the range of motion. Instead, it's just a full circular range of motion. It might make it difficult to find the corner positions, but we'll see how it works out.

I went with the Seimitsu buttons because they were highly regarded by the mod community. They also have a convex plunger top. For the 30mm buttons I went with have translucent bodies and plungers with an opaque white interior piece. Once these have LEDs in them, they'll have bright ring of light around the button. I ordered an assortment of colors to match the 360 controller color scheme. Red, Green, Orange, Blue, and two White. I plan to use these in a 6 button layout, so they'll function as the X, Y, B, A, and Left/Right Shoulder buttons.

The 24mm buttons are all slightly different from each other. Two are opaque with black bodies. One has a white plunger and the other black. I picked black and white as a throwback to the original XBox buttons. These will function as my Back and Start buttons.
The final button is similar to the 30mm buttons. Translucent body and plunger, with an opaque white interior. I plan to use this one as the XBox button. I'm kind of regretting the choice to do non matching buttons for the back and start now, but it would be easy enough to replace them later on.

I submitted the order and less than 10 minutes later received an email from PayPal letting me know the funds had been transferred. I patiently waited for my parts to arrive.

One week, went by.

Then two.

Still no parts. I checked Lizard Licks website and they had a large red message saying that their orders were backed up by about 3 weeks due to SFIV. (It's still up if you go look at it today)

Three weeks...four weeks.

Now I was starting to get a bit nervous. PayPal has a 45 day policy about contesting payments and as this was my first foray into homemade arcade making and first dealings with Lizard Lick, I was beginning to wonder if I'd fallen victim to some fly-by-night scam. So I sent a polite email to Lizard Lick, just to make sure they'd gotten my order and had all of the information they needed to ship it.

I had a response by the very next day saying that they did have my order, everything was fine, they were just backed up.