Voiding Warranties: Modding the Tekken 6 Fightstick, Part 2

Ohhh what have I done...

Replacing the buttons was a wee bit trickier, as it involved a lot of circuit boards, solder, burnt flesh, and a minor demonic summoning.


The buttons are under that top circuitboard; but before I could get to them, I was going to have to remove some of those wires. Fortunately they popped right out with the aid of a small screwdriver.

Next, I was going to have to remove the circuitboard to get to the buttons. Unfortunately the buttons are soldered directly onto the circuitboard itself, so it was time to break out the ol' soldering gun. Which I have never used before, ever. The first thing anyone with experience told me was that any time you're soldering, you're going to get burned; and since this was my first time, I expected to get burned a lot more than usual.

I was startlingly right. I may be the Kwisatz Haderach.

Anyways, a little flux and a little hot, hot iron and the solder melted easily. The problem was that I had sixteen connections to de-solder before I could lift the whole board off, but the solder would cool too quickly for me to get them all. So I had to do a few at a time and wiggle the board a bit at a time until it was ready to come off. Tedious, but it worked eventually.

The board.

The exposed buttons.

The buttons popped out easily at this point, but then I discovered a new problem. The original Hori buttons had grooves in the sides that were held in place by tabs in the stick casing, but the new Sanwa buttons lacked these grooves. The only solution was to remove the tabs, but that plate is solid metal. So I took a trip to the hardware store to pick up some Dremel heads, and ground them down until the Sanwa buttons fit.

Stupid tabs.

That was a pretty minor problem compared to what came next. The Sanwa buttons did not fit the Hori circuit board, even a little bit. The Sanwa connectors were shaped completely differently-- wide, flat heads instead of little pins-- and they were too far apart to boot.

New Sanwa on the left, old Hori on the right.

Yeah, no way that's gonna fit. (...That's what she said.)

The whole operation nearly fell apart at this point. But by now I had come too far-- and spent too much money-- to have a heap of worthless plastic, so to the Internetz I went! Shoryuken.com had a few solutions. Many people cut the prongs down to fit the holes in the circuit board, and then bend them to fit the width. Others did away with the circuit board entirely and wired the buttons directly to the processor. I was nervous about breaking the prongs if I tried to bend them, and I definitely don't have the DIY chops to do my own rewiring, so I came up with a different solution.

First, I cut down the prongs to give myself a little more room to work with.

Then, I wound some copper wire around the tips, bent the wire into place so it would fit into the holes in the circuit board, and soldered the wire into place.

Sorry for the blur. Close-up shots are hard!

The new makeshift prongs, sticking through the circuitboard.

I had to wrestle with the board a bit to get the board into place, since my improvised new prongs didn't fit exactly, but eventually I forced it into place. Then I just applied some new solder to complete the connections and the Sanwa buttons were ready to go.

Ugly, but functional.

Piece of cake, right? Eventually I got used to the smell of burning human skin. I had to resolder a few of the buttons that didn't work at first, but it all came together in the end.

The completed fightstick! Yes I color-coded the buttons, shut up.

So, how does the new stick perform? A lot better. The buttons feel nice and responsive. The stick still has a noticeable dead zone in the center, but still feels worlds better.

Unfortunately my performance hasn't improved much. I still lose most of the time, because apparently I'm just bad at fighting games. But at least I can pull off the special moves I intend to pull of the majority of the time. Guess I can't blame the hardware anymore-- I need to go practice.