I know, I know what you're thinking -- I already have an arcade stick on its way. It's easily modifiable to top-of-the-line Japanese parts, looks slick, and is compact. But even the impending arrival of that couldn't stop me...stop me from making my own arcade stick.
I can make an excuse like yeah, it'll be good to have two arcade sticks around the house, for all those WILD Street Fighter parties I never have in my basement - but really it's more of a guy thing. Countless middle-age men pick up a long-running hobby like working on a piece of junk in their garage or something. This is sort of like that I guess.
So I definitely didn't want those spaceship curves all over my stick, either. So my plan was to use my circular saw to cut it into a neat rectangle, leaving a bit overhang for a grabbale lip or something. Well, after I found out that all of our tools pretty much "vanished," I was forced to use a hack saw and give it my best shot. After two days of that and sanding out the rough edges by hand, I got the sides relatively straight.
If you run your finger across the edges, you'd be able to feel the slight waves of my sloppy job. But I plan on covering this up with a rubber lining of sorts, so when it's complete you won't be able to tell. For now, electrical tape would have to do. So yeah, I'm definitely not going to leave it in its particle board finish, as I plan to get a couple sheets of aluminum for both the top and bottom. Luckily I still have my metal sheers which should make cutting it to size relatively simple, but I'm going to have to get a drill to put holes in the sheet. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the sides, the only real idea I have is getting more aluminum and plating the side walls as well. Maybe a cool tread plate or something, make it nice and textured, I don't know. If you have any ideas feel free to throw them out there.
So as for hardware, I plan to use my sort-of broken Xbox 360 controller to wire everything together. That'll be the fun part, much much later. But as for buttons and things, I'm going for a sort of east meets west vibe. Happ competition pushbuttons (convex) and a Sanwa JL-8 joystick with a bat top -- all black hardware. It'll look pretty nice against the simple aluminum finish. It'll also be good to have a choice between two different feeling sticks (since I plan to replace the SFIV fightstick with all sanwa parts). But yeah, parts are below, have any suggestions, let me know what you think.
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