New to Arcade Sticks: Modding ?'s

hey all,

  so I've had my tournament edition stick for a month or so now, and my step brother just decided to karate kick it and now I think I need to replace some buttons.  I have a few questions first.
  1. When I swap out the buttons, does the wire placement matter? From what I have gathered one of the wires is ground, is there a marker on the button itself that designates which of the metal slots is for the ground wire (or is it like a resistor where placement doesnt matter)?

  2. I have the Tournament edition so it has the normal stick, but I’m used to american arcades with the ball top and what not. If I replace with a bat top will the bat top still spin as the ball top does?

  3. Is there a place, a video, or something that shows how to switch to the octagonal gate? And, I always see 4 & 8-Way Adjustable on the sticks, does this mean the restictor gate is adjustable or that the stick itself has 4 or 8 points of contact?

thanks for the help, I’m sure I will have some follow-up questions.

-nabokovfan87

  1. no it doesnt matter. just hook both wires the microswitch prongs and it’ll work

  2. the part that spins is the entire shaft, so switching out the ball for a bat top will not prevent it from spinning. also as a note: the american style happ (or iL) parts also spin.

  3. the octagonal gate is 8 way, period. the square gate can be either 4 OR 8 way. as far as swaping them goes. there are just 4 tabs holding the gate in place, work the gate off, and snap a new one on, its not hard at all. (maybe someone can produce a video for you)

thanks for the reply,

  for your #2 response, the happ parts might spin, but in american arcades, i have never seen a ball top or bat top spin like that.  maybe the shafts themselves are different or were different several years ago.  

for #3, does that mean swapping to the ocragonal plate would essential be the same as switching from 4 way square gate to 8 way?

http://www.slagcoin.com/joystick/restrictors.html

No, it would be not the same. The octagonal gate has equal throws for all directions whereas the stock gate does not.

so basically its these 2 examples from that page?

any ideas on what the circle gate p/n (i found gt-0) would be for the jlf stick in the tournament edition fightstick?

Yes, those are the examples.

As far as I know, there isn’t a circular gate for the JLF. The JLW and the LS-32 have circular gates.

“American” sticks spin but there is more resistance to it. The JLF can be modded with a compression spring from Home Depot to make it about at tight as a iL competition. Most likely you will never get the spinning out of the stick. Some people have tried with glue and stuff, but just ended up ruining the stick. Just get used to it.

(side note, Happ is an american stick. when happ was a company worth supporting, they had iL manufacture their sticks for the in the 90’s and early 2000. This was the Happ competition. They then started to manufacture their own clones of the iL in china and the quality went down. If you want the a quality “American Stick” you should get an iL Eurostick also known as iL Competition, which is actually Spanish. Not that it matters because you cannot put a Competition stick in a TE without majorly changing the case anyway.)

Answer to question 3 is no.
an Octagon gate is 8 way only. Shaft of the stick hits the edges of a hole that look like a stop sign turned 22.5 degrees. It is a seperate piece of plastic.

The gate that comes with your TE is the square gate. It is 4 way or 8 way. Even though it is square it can move in all 8 directions. When you pull the gate out and turn the gate 45 degrees, it becomes a 4 way. The gate turns from square to diamond. It is supposed to make you not be able to hit the diagonals, but if you ride the gate you can actually activate the diagonals so it is not a very good 4 way restrictor.

i think i get it, so the 4-way vs. 8-way is simply:

up down left right = 4-way
up down left right upleft upright downleft downright = 8 way

??

and yeah, the circle one is for the jlw stick so it wouldnt fit.

As it specifically says in the item description, that only fits with the JLW.

yeah i saw that after, my bad.

that gate only works for the JLW as it says

and to switch to an octogonal gate: http://www.screwattack.com/Random/ArcadeStickMod

From what i heard, a Ls-56-01 with a bat top and octognal gate is the closest to American stick you can get without major modifications to your TE.

thanks for the vid. helps a lot.

to be clear, im not trying to americanize my stick, im just trying to make it easier for me to play with. im getting used to the spinning and even the square gate, but i am just looking into swapping this stuff just to test it out. all i really am planning on doing is swapping out the buttons that arent working for new ones.

I think that the JLW-UM (Bat Top only) with a round gate, Home Depot Compression spring, is the recipe for getting a Happ like stick in the TE.

I myself would reccomend the JLW-TM. The shaft is thinner so it can accept ball tops or bat tops with adaptor, but the shaft is thin so it wont feel as close to the happ. Check out Lizardlick.com or slagcoin.com for more info on that.

Some dude really liked JLWs since it was closer to Happ.
http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=205899

Also when your brother karate kicked your stick, did you break his arm? Minus points for you if you didn’t or unless you enjoy being a door mat. You got to let him know it is not cool to kick something worth $150. He better be paying for your stick repair.

Also are you sure the damage is to the buttons and not the pcb? You would need to get OSBF-30’s. You should open your stick to make sure no wires are disconnected. There should be a terminal block labeled with matching color pairs of wires for each button on the TE. Swap the wires of a non working button for a known working button. If it still doesn’t work, then it is the PCB and not the button.

lol, well. see… the thing is, he isnt the smartest of all people (remedial classes and such), but he is a good kid.

and i dont think the 12 strait woopings in mvc2 helped him at all. it was more of a “stupid stick” reaction then trying to break it.

so far nothing too serious, just one of the buttons might not be working. havent had a chance to make sure of the issues or check for serious damage yet (nothing from what i saw at a quick glance).

also, it only cost me 100.

will have to try, good idea.

The closest thing you’ll get to an American feel out of Japanese parts is to get a Seimitsu LS-56-01 stick, get a Seimitsu octogate, an MS mounting plate (so the stick can actually be mounted in the Madcatz), and a bat top.

ok so i have 2 new questions.

  1. what is the difference between seimetsu and sanwa buttons? does one have a shorter distance to push down or is it just cosmetic?

  2. what is the difference between the jlf stick and the seimetsu ls-56-01 stick? is one less sensitive or something?

Someone else can go more in detail about question 2 but…

semitsu buttons have a stiffer spring which makes it less sensitive than sanwa buttons, but more sensitive than american buttons. Semitsu buttons are nice because, for some of them, you can put art work in the caps which looks like this: http://forums.shoryuken.com/showpost.php?p=7509675&postcount=1655
Not my stick.

i see. im guessing more sensitive in terms of buttons means it takes less pressure to get the button to work?

anyone else ever wonder why sanwa and semitsu dont make concave buttons? is it possible to swap out the caps to concave ones?

To answer 2 the JLF has a lighter spring, making it feel looser. The LS-56-01 has a tighter harder spring, smaller throw and smaller dead zone, and if you get the optional octagonal gate it has a shorter throw than the JLF octagonal gate. You need an MS mounting plate to put it in a TE. You can get the JLF have high resistance with a Home Depot Spring. The JLW has the hardest default spring and is the closest to happ, based off the above link. Never had a JLW myself though.

Fwirth should have shown a different stick since the red one with the red KN buttons have the red plunger swapped from a clear PS-14-GNC. The see through colored PS 14 KNs centers are tinted. So the stick below, swapping parts from 16 buttons where used to make that stick.

No Japanese concaves. Concaves are not liked by many people, and it costs money to sell buttons that don’t sell well. If you wanted an American style stick, you should consider getting/making a custom. Start reading slagcoin.com. It is probably going to cost as much but probably more than a TE.

oh no wonder it looks different than regular red plungers. I couldn’t put my finger on it but it just looked different