Voiding Warranties: Modding the Tekken 6 Fightstick, Part 1

I picked up Super Street Fighter IV on sale at Kmart for $20. I was curious about the title, since it had ushered in something of a renaissance for the fighting game genre. Marvel vs. Capcom 3, a revamped Mortal Kombat, and SoulCalibur V all followed within a couple years, not to mention a slew 2D fighters both new and old. They're even making two separate Street Fighter/Tekken crossover games, just because they can.

Truth be told, I'm not much of a "fighting game guy." The last one I played with any regularity was Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance during my college days (on the GameCube, of all things), and before that it was Tekken 3 on the original PlayStation. This lack of practice was immediately apparent as soon as the disk hit the tray, as I proceeded to get my ass handed to me ten ways from Sunday. And I don't even mean by the 10-year-olds I usually face in Halo; I expect them to destroy me. No, here was the computer was kicking my ass. Even on normal difficulty, I couldn't even get past the third fight.



PWND. (That's me on the right.)

Naturally, I blamed it on the hardware, instead my own lack of skill. Fighting games are one of the last relics of the arcade, and the console controller I know and love just isn't a natural fit for the kind of precision inputs needed for pulling off hadoukens and sonic booms. I thought if I could find a decent arcade stick, I might do a little better. After some research, I settled on the Tekken 6 Limited Edition Wireless Fight Stick Bundle, which had both the game and a Hori stick at the super-low price of $60.



By far the best deal for a beginner stick.

But even with the new arcade stick, I still wasn't faring much better in the ring. So of course I blamed the hardware, again. The stick was loose and imprecise, and the buttons felt sluggish. Fortunately, there's a subculture of fighting game fans who make a hobby of modding their home sticks, and you can find tons of information online about how to replace your generic parts with the real arcade hardware. I found lots and lots of good info and guidance on the Shoryuken.com forums. They led me to Lizard Lick Amusements, who stock tons and tons of arcade parts for the modder and DIY crowds.

We'll start with the stick, which was a relatively simple job. Replacing the entire stick assembly would have required extensive modifications to the casing, so I opted for the simpler option of replacing a few key parts to improve the existing stick. My main goal was to make the stick feel tighter and more responsive, so I ordered a new spring and pivot cylinder.

Square vs. Octagonal restrictor gates

But I also wanted to replace the restrictor gate, which is a piece of plastic that limits the range of the joystick to keep it from moving too far in any one direction. Japanese sticks typically use restrictor gates with a square-shaped hole, but these make certain special moves more difficult. Think about the inputs for Ryu's classic Hadouken: ↓, ↘, →, Punch. Basically a quarter-circle, from "south" to "east," and then a punch button. Doing this motion in a square gate, it's easy for the stick to get caught in one of the corners, interrupting the flow of the movement. But replace it with an octagonal-shaped gate, and circular movements become much easier.

So with all that in mind, I ordered the following parts from Lizard Lick:

          Sanwa GT-Y Octagonal Restrictor Gate
          Sanwa JLF-P-4 Pivot Cylinder
          Seimitsu LS-32 Spring
          Seimitsu LB-39 Bubble Top, Red
          Tek-Innovations Arrow Dustwasher

(The bubble top and the dustwasher are just there to look pretty.)

With all the parts on hand, it was time to open up the casing and do some surgery. The screws holding the bottom plate in place required some kind of weird tri-shaped screwdriver, but I was able to jury rig it with a small flat-head. Here's what the inside looks like:

It was at this point that I began to rethink the entire exercise.

Okay. A little scary, but I though, "I can still handle this." The white square over on the right is the bottom of the stick assembly-- you can see the end of the stick poking through the square restrictor gate. You can also see that I already removed a few screws. Once all of the screws were removed, the restrictor gate simply popped out with a little aid from a screwdriver, revealing the switches underneath.

The switches were only held in place by some posts sticking through the holes in the corners, and easily lifted out. With the switches gone, I was actually able to remove the entire stick assembly by simply unscrewing the ball top.

The stick assembly lifts right out.

Stick assembly, disassembled.

From here, it was a simple matter of replacing the parts with the higher-quality ones I got from Lizard Lick and putting the whole thing back together again.

A new pivot cylinder to make the stick a little more stable.

A new spring to keep movements tighter and more precise.

Pop the top back on...

...and voilà!

Once this was done, it was a simple matter of replacing the stick assembly and switches.

The restrictor gate was a little more complicated. It's a Sanwa part going into a Hori product, so it didn't fit the way it was intended to. Specifically, the screw holes in the Sanwa gate are not in the right place, which leaves the octagon tilted at an odd angle. Making it fit required creating some new holes, but fortunately, there are indents in the plastic in the exact right locations, which made drilling a whole lot easier.

Drill, baby, drill.

Fully (re)assembled.

The final step was to replace the dustwasher and ball top.

Preeeettttttyyyyy.......

I'm really happy with the bubble top. It's hard to tell from this picture, but it looks awesome in real life. All in all, modding the stick was a very simple job. The only complicating factor was drilling the new holes in the restrictor gate, but that was an easy modification.

Okay, my original aim was to write about the entire modification, but this post has become super long and I haven't even gotten to the buttons yet. And the buttons were a much more complex (and mistake-prone) process, so I'm going to save those for another post. I hope this helps anyone who is trying to mod their own stick-- feel free to shoot me any questions!

Edit: Part 2 is up!