Ok, so I know everyone does mods for the 360 and PS3 and stuff these days, so I hope you don't mind me posting about a recent conversion job I did for something a bit different.
May as well say from the start that I'm not that great with this type of thing, as I'm all thumbs with a soldering iron, and have little patience and perseverance.
Anyways. I modded a DC arcade stick to make it work on my neo geo, supergun and a CPS2 copy of SFZ3 that I just bought.
I previously wired up a standard DC stick many years ago and didn't do a great job, this time I decided to replace the buttons and stick with decent sanwa gubbins.
This is wired for the Neo Geo and Supergun (including CPS2 functionality) only, so, at present there is no DC compatibility. This is because in my previous attempt I decided to not bother using this on the DC as I have a second DC stick that I am keeping stock. WIth hindsight I would have kept the functionality, - I hardly play my DC anyways, so it's no biggie (I may revisit this if I get really bored as I still have the important bits and pieces, more on that later).
Ok, so mounting the sanwa stick wasn't so hard, except for when I rounded over a screw head trying to take the top plate off the sanwa stick - you have to take the mount plate off to get it fitting flush.
I used a dremel to smooth off the mounting surface (there were plastic mount posts that needed to be snapped off so that the stick would fit nicely), drilling out the holes for the sanwa was no probs and fixing with screws and nuts was a cinch, because the top of the stick is in a recessed area (how convenient).
The next part was wiring it up. As I wanted to play some street fighter games, I had to plumb in the kick harness, and whilst I could do this via wiring in the kick loom into my SIGMA Jamma harness, I didn't fancy my shitty soldering skills on the fingerboard.
This would mean that my arcade stick would need two input / outputs for CPS2 stuff and just the normal connector for my neo or the rest of my arcade games.
Not only that, but I would then have to sort out the 4th button wiring to work when using the neo etc. I solved this by adding a switch to re-route connections on one of the 'kick' buttons.
Here is the wiring half done;
All that remained (apart from tidying up), was to fit the new buttons - which don't fit through the face plate that goes on the top of the stick.
I had to file out the holes to make them fit and it didn't take that long to do it by hand (was quicker than using the dremel) but it was a bit hard going and my hands were a bit roughed up afterwards.
And here is the finished deal, it still needs some tidying up - and in that photo the switch hadn't been fitted hence the loose wires taped up.
The yellow button is coin and the 'old' smaller green button is start.
I need to flush fit the switch and plug for the CPS2 harness, and will probably replace the small green button with a square button that I got (which is just too small to fit in the VMU slot, so I'll have to fanny around with that.
It's by no means flashy, a bit half arsed and amateur, but it works and I'm happy. Having a proper stick is amazing compared to what I was using before!
In the future, I may replace the stick and buttons on my current 'stock' DC, keep the DC functionality and just add compatibility to my neo and supergun ... Possibly I may also get one of those PS3 boards and go the whole hog.
