Turning a Dreamcast arcade stick into a 360 stick

[foleykoontz]

I've got the official Dreamcast stick lying around my house and was thinking about taking out the encoder and putting in a hacked 360 controller to make a cheap stick with good arcade parts (I believe they are the same as the ones going in the SFIV sticks? The buttons look the same at least). Now I've never soldered or hacked a controller before and was wondering what the best solution would be and which controller I should use? I'd much rather use a wired controller and I'm willing to learn how to solder and hack one myself as long as it's not too hard.

[HaRuMaN]

If you are going to use a wired controller, try the Madcatz Xbox 360 pad as it has a common ground and is relatively easy to solder (compared to the official Microsoft pad, anyway).

[foleykoontz]

What is the button layout usually for 360 controllers for the 6-button layout?
Is it:

X Y Rb
A B Lb

The madcatz controller seems pretty easy to do so I might give it a chance after I get my arcade more finished.

[versapak]

There isn't really a standard layout for 360 sticks, and pretty much every game you would want to use the stick for lets you remap the buttons.

The Hori sticks have a weird layout of:

B X Y
A L R


I'm not sure of the SF IV stick layout on 360, but it is 8 button, so regardless of placement the main buttons are all there.
I'm pretty sure it is as follows though, which would be similar the the PS3 version:

X Y L Lb
A B R Rb


I rearranged the buttons in my DOA 4 Hori stick (Not a job for people afraid of a soldering iron) to the more standard layout of:

X Y L
A B R

And I made a custom stick with an 8 button layout:

L X Y Lb
R A B Rb

[JamesV77]

The newer 360 wireless controllers are also common ground.  I realized that after the mod job......
Great fun mod to do.....It becomes multi platform sorta if you get the microsoft windows receiver so you can use it with MAME on a PC..... Heres some pics of mine......

[HaRuMaN]

The newer 360 wireless controllers are also common ground.

Not quite.  LT & RT are on their own ground for the new wireless M$ pad.