Does anyone know where I can find the exact size of the Cthulhu MC? I’ve been searching these forums for days now. Any diagram will be appreciated. I’m drawing a design for a stick and I want to know where i can put the PCB and what the absolute minimum space is.
@gahrling: Thanx… How could i’ve missed that!! akihabarashop alway has the answers!! Really strange that i missed that one…
MC Cthulu is a very low profile PCB… Should fit just about any joystick case from Hori made in the past 20 years plus most Ascii joystick cases. (The Agetec Dreamcast Joystick is also an Ascii product.) This includes the joysticks made for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation 1. Amazing piece of circuitry…
… Just wish you didn’t have to solder the Ethernet cable for the RJ-45 but I understand more screw terminals would mean higher cost to buy for the end user!
You don’t have to solder anything if you have upgraded your Cthulhu board with header pins. For the piggyback holes you can then use an 18way IDC ribbon header plug (though 20way seem much more commonly available), and for the RJ45 row you can simply crimp some female pin headers.
It’s how I’m upgrading all my own Cthulhu and MC Cthulhu boards now as standard.
Really? I’m suprised there’s room for a IDC connector like that.
You should show me. I hope to be in London in about 5 weeks.
^ Yep, I tried it out myself on a hunch a few weeks back for a customer’s project. I’ll post up a pic, and it seemed to be all working last time I heard from the guy:
The guy didn’t want an IMP board so I put in a DPDT for him, as well as moving the ‘guide’ button as he wanted a full plexi panel installed with no Turbo panel cut out. That’s why it looks slightly messy…
Because there’s only 17 points on the piggyback, you simply remove the unnecessary ribbon cable wires that won’t be needed (or just make a note not to use them). And it’s very simply to use single row header pins (0.1 pitch) - you need 1 x 9 row + 1 x 8 row.
Give me a shout when you’re around London - I’m sure there will be plenty of people interested to know. You down for business or pleasure?
That’s a neat way of wiring a Cthulhu. Imma have to try that on the next stick I build.
That came out looking beautiful. Nicely done.
Hmmm…
Interesting RJ-45 mod with that ribbon!
You have to pardon my lack of technical knowledge. I’m not an electrician and most of my technical knowledge is high-school level or self-taught at best. Wouldn’t know a header-pin from a whatzit unless I look up it and can see a picture of it.
I have seen ribbons like that for hard drives. IDE harness? Had an extra one of those until I threw out my last computer… (No worries… It went to a recycling bin. I don’t have the heart to throw out hardware like that with the regular trash. It has precious metals that can be reused.)
(I wonder how much IDE harnesses cost now… I know with old computer RAM, that stuff only gets more expensive the older it gets!)
If at all possible, could someone kindly take pictures of this mod, preferrably step-by-step so that the rest of us could see?
UPDATE:
Looked on e-Bay and now know what the IDC cable is… 10 mini-wire harness, SCSI connection. Gotcha! I now see WHY they would be good for the front-end connection of the Cthulu board!
Still curious as to what’s being used for the 8 slots the Ethernet/RJ-45 cabling goes into. IDC or another type of cabling? I kinda see how the female header pins can be used – clever, only the ends of an 8-piece pin have to be soldered! – but am wondering what those “jumpers” are in the upper left of the picture provided by gahrling. Still using an Ethernet cable, or will something else work just as well?
Again, please understand for a lot us we’re not electricians and are just trying to save some money or learn new skills… (For most, both is happening along they way as the mods hopefully get a bit easier to do…!)
This is interesting to me since I want to reduce labor and avoid solder burns in the near-future. I lucked out this past weekend with the damage I did to myself!
Ignore the upper left of the pic - it’s just a DPDT switch which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about here.
I’ve taken another pic of a modified MC Cthulhu showing the header pins. The female header pins have been left on ‘column 1’ to show that there are no space conflicts.
If using the ribbon cable method, then you need to be looking for 20 way AWG28 gauge, which is commonly found off places like eBay by the meter or bulk. You’ll also need an IDC plug - the one I’m using above is 20 way, but if you can find an 18 way then cool. It’s very easy to crimp the ribbon cable to the plug and all you need is a vice to do so (or a bit of patience with some chunky pliers).
For the RJ45 ‘column 1’, just use a single strip of 8 header pins and connect it with a strip of 8 female header pins. Simple.
Don’t quite understand… what is being connected to the 8-header pins in the RJ-45 column 1? Ethernet cable or IDC cable?
I’ve never used header pins before and wasn’t sure if wiring got soldered inside of them (wouldn’t make sense – that would melt the plastic! Doesn’t look like hi-temp plastic to me at all!) or you used a tool for wire attachment to the header. Would you crimp with the same tool used to crimp Female Quick Disconnnects to wiring or another tool? In a pinch I could use something else to crimp but know it’s generally advised to use the right tool instead of a substitute.
Attachment of the header to the PCB board is also another area of question. I was looking and saw some of these header pin boards being attached with soldering at the extreme ends (on some electronics discussion boards) but what you’re saying is no soldering is needed here at all for any attachment…?
My poor fingers are going to help me if I can avoid some future pain for sure so that’s why I’m asking all these questions.
They usually come up for some other people, too.
Tons of people will NOT touch PCB’s and have other people do mods because they’re afraid of the soldering tools…
P.S. – I know the other non-Cthulu PCB in your previous post ISN’T an Agetec PCB, but it sure does resemble one in some respects.
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I’m using ethernet cable (Cat5e stranded) as it’s much easier to work with when it comes to RJ45 mods.
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It depends on what style header pins you get. Some need to be crimped, others soldered. If crimping, then you can either get the dedicated tool or carefully use some needle nose pliers.
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No soldering is needed for the header pins if the person you purchase a board off is willing to put these header pins on for you (for a small extra charge to cover the cost of doing so depending on the supplier). As said above, I will offer this option myself to any potential customers because it makes installation that little bit easier. You will still need to solder the ribbon cable to the 360 motherboard if you want to dual mod it, but if you just intend on having a MC Cthulhu and nothing else, then yes - solderless.
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The PCB connected to the MC Cthulhu in the above pic is a Mad Catz 360 Fightstick motherboard. It’s all done inside a TE case.
I used header pins on a MC Cthulhu for a project box, and it worked great. I always tell people wire up their projects in a matter that disassembly would be possible/ easy.
Thanks for your patience with me, gahrling…
I can do the soldering in a pinch (my finger burns say otherwise right now), and crimping I can definitely handle. I’m based in the US and am broke like most people in the world now… 
:crybaby: :crybaby:
If it’s not much extra – a part or tool to make life easier I could definitely spend $5-$7 on --, I’ll try the crimping option.
Not planning on dual mods. MS’s machine is not in my forseeable future. Unless I get crazy about the online business…
After asking in the wrong thread about this ---- darn re-directs plus a website down weekend screwed my memory up! ----, what are the specs for the female header pins and the crimps?
I ask because I looked for the parts online over the weekend and just got confused. I feel like this is situation like the metric screws (easy for some to destroy or lose on BOTH the Hori and Mad Catz joysticks for some, it seems) where we need some basic specification parameters/measurements and names for the parts so that the wrong parts aren’t bought.
I’m still not clear on how the female header pins were secured. Some tutorials say that in a short row – 8-10 – they can be secured by bending and soldering just the end pins onto the PCB. Other online tutorials would seem to indicate no soldering is required but that you need to buy a male part to secure the female header pins onto the PCB???
As for the crimps, I’m not sure which ones are being discussed. They have DB-25 crimps and others… I know for DB-25 connections, crimps aren’t recommended. Directions pointed at the proper crimping tool – other than the stand-by pliers – would be appreciated, too!
I don’t know about anyone else, but I was having massive troubles making up RJ45 connectors. I just couldn’t get the wires to go into the connector at all! I’d heard about sanding the insulation, but that sounded a bit faffy and to be honest I wasn’t confident it’d make it much easier. Plus, I always tend to look for the cop-out route 
So I did some searching, and found out about Cat6 two-piece RJ45 connectors! They are AWESOME. they consist of two parts: a tiny wire guide that you slot the wires into, then you insert that into the connector body, and crimp just like normal.
It made the job far, far easier. Even though the wires are thicker than network cable, they still push in pretty easily, and no more fiddly poking wires into the right channels using pins or paperclips!
Here is a pic showing the wire guide all ready made up for a PS cable - getting all 7 of these wires into a normal RJ45 connector was a total non-starter for me, took a few mins at most with the two-piece connector!
PS connector crimped up:
Dreamcast cable guide:
I figure many of you already know about these connectors, but honestly for a n00b like me they were such a boon, I thought you might want to consider adding some info about them to the tutorial. In the UK, you can get them cheaply from Maplin, and their product page has some great info on them. (I just bought some from eBay, as I wanted them delivered.)
If you are only wiring up a Cthulhu to work with consoles that have cords using 5 wires or less on the cable, is it possible to hack the controller cables to go to a USB jack instead of a RJ-45 jack, for those of us who don’t want to add another hole to our cases for an RJ-45? I don’t really know all that much about multimodding, and I was hoping someone could shed some light on the topic. This guy seems to have had success in hacking a Dreamcast cord to go to USB, using a different PCB (though I haven’t really read the article thoroughly enough to quite understand his process for making it all work).
Basically, I want to multi-mod my stick, and it already has a USB mini jack on the case, and I want to know if it’s possible to multimod it for sytems beyond just the PS3 and Xbox 360 without having to use anything other than the USB mini port that’s already there, and some hacked game controller cords that have a USB mini on one end. How doable is this? Should I not bother with anything other than PS3/360 dual modding if I don’t want to mess with installing a RJ-45 port and threading ethernet cables?
Is the colour issue of the PS2 the same for Gamecube? Since I don’t know which colour corresponds to which pinout.
It’s on one of the official black controllers if that’s any help whatsoever and the wire colours are:
White
Yellow
Red
Blue
Green
It’s a european controller too.
If anyone has the colour to pinout then that would be awesome.
No.
No.