This is a rather obscure arcade stick that is mainly offered to people who retrogame with stuff like MAME. It has a PC Ps/2 connector (keyboard). If you have a Playstation 3 you can use it to play HD Remix and presumably SF4 (and any other fighters on the PS2 or PS3, actually.
You will need to buy about $25 - $30 in additional adapter hardware to make it work. Also, if you don’t have an “older” style ps/2 computer keyboard and mouse, you’ll need to get those as well. Since my friend and I are computer guys, we just fished these things out of the junk parts bins… Oh, and no, you can’t use a USB KB with an adapter, that is, unless it’s one of the more advanced “intelligent adapters” like Belkin makes.
You may be able to find one of these HotRod sticks cheap on the auction boards. If you can find one for $50, then the total cost would be $75 - $80 for a nice arcade setup. That’s about half the cost of any other “true arcade” stick I’ve seen, and would make it worth the pain of the setup.
Since my friend already had a HotRod and it’s a very authentic arcade stick (it uses Happ controls), I wanted to see if I could get it hooked up to his Playstation 3 for some HDRemix action before we plunked down on something new and likely more expensive.
It took awhile, but we did it!
Here’s the stick:
http://www.hanaho.com/Products/HotRodJoystick.php
A note about this: even though this is a 2-player stick, only one side will work for controls. This is because the PS3 to PS2 adapter sees the whole HotRod stick as a single controller, not 2. So no head to head with this stick (not a problem for us because we prefer the online comp anyway).
To connect it to the PS3 you need a Playstation 3 to Playstation 2 controller adapter. They are about $7 on amazon. You also need a Smartjoy Frag, which is a Playstation 2 adapter which lets you connect a keyboard and mouse, and costs $15 - 25.
You connect it all up like in this video:
[media=youtube]MKwDUhtVqbU[/media]
Even though you don’t use a mouse in SF, the smartjoy won’t work without one plugged in. Go figure.
Next, you need to program the smartjoy. The Hot Rod’s imputs are all keyboard commands. For example, Left on the HotRod is the R key. But on the smartjoy, it’s the S key. So you need to reprogram S to R. How do you do this? Well, you unplug the HotRod and plug in a PC keyboard (with the old style ps/2 connector).
The smartjoy comes with it’s layout in the box and the HotRod layout can be found here:
http://hotrod.mameworld.net/technical.html
At this point, things get tricky. You need to program the smartjoy frag to use the hotrod’s layout, like I said, but there are two things to doing this: 1) You need to use the “blank” (f11) slot on the smartjoy. The smartjoy can store 8 control layouts which you access by pressing F1 - F8. They come out of the box programmed for some popular PS2 games. F11, however, is “blank”. You program the blank template and save it over one of the others.
and 2) the order you program the keys is tricky. In fact, it’s even difficult to explain why, so I’ll just leave it at that. If anyone seriously wants to try this I can type up the order of programming the keys.
Last but not least, you need to program the “deadzone” for the joystick. This is kind of cool since you can fine-tune the smartjoy from 0 - 99. You can dial in exactly how sensitive you want your arcade stick! Friggin cool. We ended up setting ours at 60.
EDIT: I think I might be wrong about the deadzone adjustment. It doesn’t really seem to affect the feel. I think that might have been in our heads. 
Well, as you can see, not the easiest thing in the world. But since my friend already had a HotRod SE, we figured we would spend $25 on the adapters and give it a shot rather than $150+ on a whole new controller. Took about 1.5 hours to get it all going but was followed by five hours of super fun HDRemix online play. :wgrin:
