Decided to do a lil’ disassembly and pictorial for you guys using my laptop’s webcam. It was rather tricky for me to get halfway decent angles. I had to flip my whole computer upside-down at one point and let me tell you, 17 inch Macbook Pros are heavy and hard to balance. If mine has a different color than yours Grechen, well that’s because they made them in two different flavors: Mine is “limited edition” black apparently.
First comes a profile shot so you guys can get a sense of the case’s height. A Namco PS1 Joystick and a Dualshock 2 are used for scaling purposes. You can see that the Blaze stick, on the left is just scarcely shorter than Namco’s case at its highest point. The Blaze stick is also flat across, while the Namco has a tapered down slant. While I’m thinking the slant might actually give the Namco an edge in utilizing the room to fit a stick, I think the Blaze might have a little more hight where the joystick is mounted to begin with. It’s hard to tell.
As for the width and button layout comparisons, here’s a picture of the joystick from the top down. As you can see, I had a bit more room to work with in this shot so I threw in my round one T.E. joystick as well. Sorry 'bout the tangled mess of cords. Oh, why is the Player 1 joystick missing? Well it wasn’t until just before I made this post that I found that little white piece on the player start button, which if you couldn’t tell is the spring cover. I mother invited somebody to stay over was rushed into ending my initial experimentations early and that’s the part of the joystick I couldn’t reassemble without it, so I had thrown everything into a plastic baggy. I had to retake this shot to fit in the PS2 controller so I thought I might as well throw it in there. Getting to the main point of this shot, you can see the T.E. is over half as wide, while the Namco stick is under that mark. Both sticks put together come rather too close to having one whole Blaze.
Here’s the bottom plate of the joystick, with most of the screws removed. It has four rubber feet that can’t really keep their grip on anything, probably due to their age. The dipped down holes are where the screws go in. Next to one of them is a sticker stamped Q.C. which I’m guessing stands for quality control. Interestingly enough, near the center there are two more holes in the bottom that seem to serve no purpose whatsoever. Using these, I guess perhaps a mounting board, like the one found on the Hori VLX could possibly be made for this panel. I’m not certain though, as I haven’t really looked into that much yet. It would certainly help the stability, by a fair amount.
This is how it looks once the bottom panel is removed. You can see the PCBs are arranged in a manner that almost mirror each other. You can also see that this case uses snap in buttons that’re annoyingly soldered directly upon the PCB. What you didn’t see is how the Player 2 joystick victoriously spilled the microswitchy guts of the Player 1 joystick and splayed them across the casing. I would’ve had to make this pictorial rated M for mature and everybody knows that the internet has to remain rated at least T for Teen at all times. That and the only way to play Mortal Kombat is on the S.N.E.S. 
Seriously though, I accidentally broke some wires not paying attention to how they were originally wrapped around the joystick housing the first time. Moving on, note that the mounting posts for the joysticks are rather long, while there appear to be additional mounting posts for absolutely no reason whatsoever. That shiny golden bit under the P2 joystick is part of a rumble motor. This joystick vibrates.
Seeing guts is perfectly acceptable for kids of all ages as part of a medical documentary though. Here we can take a look at the preparatory stages of a microswitch transplant surgery. Here you’ll notice how the microswitches pop out of their casing rather easily. They slide back in just as easily, it’s a somewhat tight fit but that’s what keeps them in place. I’m not prepared to actually do any real swapping yet but I’m working on that.
Here are some comparisons of a mostly disassembled consumer grade Blaze joystick next to a more industrial J.L.F. fully assembled, with the Blaze’s balltop on. Here you can see left to right the body of the joystick, being held up to size by the spring, the shaft, the actuator, the pivot, the E clip (on Sanwa’s dust cover) and the Blaze’s dust cover. The spring cover is omitted from this shot because, well, I didn’t know where it was when I took the picture. XD It’s noteworthy that the shaft is much shorter on Blaze’s joystick. (No, I don’t know all that by heart, I’m just looking at Lizardlick’s parts list.) There’s no silicone grease on the pivot of the joystick, which may in part account for the difference in smoothness. Here’s an overlay of the gates: Both are square gates but I think the Blaze has a farther throw. Well that might not be fully the right term, since I believe that’s supposed to also be a function of the shaft’s length if I’m recalling correctly, and that’s almost half as short as the JLF’s but I think you can see what I mean.
One last comparison shot here is meant to demonstrate two things as best I can under the current conditions, with that red glue having prevented me from removing the mounting plate to do anything better: The first is that the Omrons would appear to easily fit in the body of the original joystick if the PCB was removed, assuming they aren’t still too thick. The second is that without a mounting plate, the four screwholes for the original Blaze joystick mounts and the two farthest out screwholes on the top and bottom of the JLF’s body (left/right with the joystick as currently pictured) would appear to match up. One other thing I’m wondering is if the Sanwa S or the Seimitsu VF mounting plate would also match up. The holes seem to be in the right relative positions (center side as opposed to kitty-corners) but going by pictures only, I can’t really match up the measurements.
I’m debating whether I should just refurbish the smaller cheaper body to emulate a real stick as best as it possibly can or to modify the Blaze case to fit in a real arcade stick by cutting into plastic. Since the stick comes apart so easily, I’m assuming the former would be much, much easier and I could also never go back to stock configuration if I did the latter.
B.T.W, I’m aware there’d been one other mod project on this stick on these forums. There’s a thread referring to it here. However the link to the actual mod is broken, due to the forum upgrade I presume. I’m not sure how to hack the url to fix it so if somebody could help me out and show me what they’d done it’d be much appreciated.
I don’t know how stiff other springs are in comparison to this one so I can’t say if another japanese replacement spring would be any stiffer, nor did I get so far in the JLF disassembly as to compare their scale. I think I’ve just shown pretty well that the joystick part can be completely disassembled though so you could probably double them up, like in the Ultimate JLF mod if all else fails. If the secondary spring is too long it could probably be sniped down to size with wire cutters and made to match.
There’s a lot to be said about personal preference and there’s a lot to be said about budget, however there’s also a lot to be said about the design of one of your favorite games. If it makes any difference, if it’s for SF4 specifically, I’d say go with a Sanwa Denshi based stick with a vewlix layout since that’s what they used on the original SFIV cabinets in japan. The game was designed in part to be played with them. To show that most, here’s what the 20th anniversary certificate on the Round 1 T.E.'s box says, as closely as I can format it on a web forum:
This certificate or similar ones isn’t found on any of the other T.E.s, like the Marvel vs. Capcom ones I got some time later, so I’m disinclined to think it’s a blanket statement meant to attest for how a T.E. would perform on all games. Given that much it would seem that Capcom thinks it’s the way to play Street Fighter IV. Granted corporate opinion doesn’t necessarily guarantee customer satisfaction and nobody bats a perfect 1000, however they do have a certain air of authority to them that doesn’t quite match up to that of randomly picked fans.
I don’t think anybody was confused over that. Personally I just like to go in depth about anything I can, whenever possible. It’s worth saying that it’s a pretty good stick for what it is. With an M.S.R.P. of $50 and at one time going on clearance for as little as $15, it looks like a fairly respectable effort for a 2P setup. Probably one of the better budget sticks you could find. I think you’d have trouble finding an equivalent for a 1p setup at 12 quid considering it used real microswitches. Even Sega’s 6 button Power Stick for the Megadrive, solid as it felt, used contact membranes.
