Main > Main Forum

Thinking about building something similar to the X-arcade Tankstick

Pages: << < (5/5)

Falkentyne:

I remember those old fighting game joysticks.  My friend had one for the Genesis.  Back in the early 90's, those things absolutely **RULED** for fighting games.   MAME was in its infancy and the build your own controls setup was more based on things like sneskey, hacking gamepads or getting custom encoders.  (Datel made one for the Genesis to PC called the "Revenger"; I still have it and it works, but having to use flaky (and cheap) AT to PS2 convertors and I think having the adapter connection keep unplugging, caused my ps/2 port to eventually die on my Pentium 4 rig (not good if I want to use a ps/2 xarcade or ipac, etc...), so I'm not using it on my newer computer. 

Xarcade buttons have far too much travel distance for street fighter.   Happs Competition buttons are much better,  even though they're concave, the travel distance on a Happs competition button is half that of the Xarcade buttons, so theyre good if you like concave buttons.

You can remove the buttons and the joystick from the xarcade and replace them with a japanese style or Happs competition joystick.  The only problem is the fit of the housing; the xarcade has the wood routed to fit its "Super" joystick clone perfectly, so putting a Happs Competition stick in there will be a *LOT* of work to squeeze it in.

The encoder is another problem; my tankstick may be an older pcb but it only supports 6 button inputs simultaneously in USB mode, when it's supposed to support 12.  It's as if the endpoint 1 and ep2 interrupts arent functioning even though theyre installed...

I'll probably just put an I-pac in there and mod the wires to fit in that.

But still, as long as you have a PCB that is correctly allowing 12 inputs simultaneously, and you ditch the crappy Super joysticks (I HATED--HATED street fighter 2 machines that had those in the early 90's!) and put in some better joysticks (which xgaming can do for you anyway), it's a decent buy.  If you have the i-pac and know how to splice wires, just buy the xarcade without the encoder and you have a good unit for street fighter (you will want to replace the buttons eventually).

Pages: << < (5/5)

Go to full version