Street Fighter 1 on 30th Aninversary collection: a separate joystick is needed? which version? remixed?

Tech Talk
1

I don’t know how good Stet Fighter 1 would be on the 30th anniversary collection. The problem is it needs a separate joystick with two 2-bit analog buttons. Either that or it’s going to have the “Fighting Street compromise” of telegraphing heavy punches.

Will someone make an AMBIDEXTORUS joystick with an 8 way stick, and either 2 or 3
2-bit analog buttons (depending on whether they want a curve/angle (3)or a straight horizontal line or vertical line (2) ) for the Xbox One, PS4 and Switch? If I remember right, Street Fighter all through at least Street Fighter 2 had “leftie vs rightie” arcade cabinets.So there is precedent for selling an ambidextrous fighting joystick. And why not an ambidextrous 6 or 8 button joystick too?

Here’s a suggestion, make it a “neutral” Joystick packed with one modern system’s hookup for that console, and sell just the hookups for the other consoles at the price of the licensing fees. So if Nintendo charges Capcom, say, $5 a joystick as the license license, the Nintendo Joystick adapter would cost $5, and it all goes to Nintendo. Same with Xbox, Same with Playstation. Also older versions of those systems and makers of other obsolete systems, (Sega, Atari, Coleco, Intellivision, Bally, Panasonic, Vectrex, SNK, Philips/Magnavox, Fairchild, NEC/Hudson/Konami whoever among them owns the TG-16) . Pay for the licenses you do want, don’t pay for the ones you don’t want, but don’t pay over and over for joysticks that are functionally and mechanically the same.

I don’t know whether it’s the original arcade, whether it’s the Home TG-16CD version or whether it’s the Wii Virtual Console version, but I know the moves of Ryu and Ken, quarter circle down to from + punch for Fireball, Z forward + Punch equals Dragon Punch and Quarter circle down to back+ Kick is hurricane Kick. I tried doing it on a Hori Fighting Stick Wii for the Wii in the wiimote nunchuk port, and I literally did one move once when not trying, and outside of that, the only way I could get specials to work was to play a mock 2 player game, run up the score, and type in the cheat code which makes Select + forward = Fireball, Select + down = dragon Punch and select + back = hurricane kick.

My the way, did Ryu and Ken say “Psycho Fire” “Dragon Punch” and “Hurricane Kick”, like the did in the Arcade, on the TG-16CD or the Wii VC conversion for the TG-16CD. Wil Ryu and Ken speak English in the 30th anniversary edition of SF1?

Finally will SF1 be a literal translation, where you can only pay as Ryu or Ken, or will it be a 1.5 with all characters selectable and playable? If so will the game be more balanced when a human as other characters uses their moves against each other as well as against a human Ruy/Ken and a CPU Ryu/Ken? And will Ryu and Ken be literal carbon copies of each other gameplay-wise, or will there be differences?

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So let me get this right. You want a Ambidextrous style layout? I suppose you can make some type of layout with 2 joysticks and straight button layout in between the two. Then have some type of switch to choose which one you want. If I didn’t get what you were saying in your post I am sorry.

3

Sounds like there’s a lot that you’re misunderstanding or overlooking in this statement.

  1. Capcom themselves doesn’t make arcade sticks or peripherals (at least, not anymore).

  2. If licensing fees were done on a per-unit basis and cost $5 per unit, you can be sure as hell that the end-product peripheral/adapter would cost way more than $5; you’re totally overlooking R&D, materials, and manufacturing costs. Look at Brook converters: there’s no licencing fee for them to pay, and they run about $40 each.

  3. I really wouldn’t count on modern companies (MS, Sony, Nintendo) providing licenses to any manufacturer to include functionality on older/obsolete platforms.

Based on your descriptions, sounds like you want one of two things here:

  1. A stick with Project Boxes, but no regular company (Hori, Mad Catz, etc) is going to make a project box arcade stick, because none of the console companies (MS, Sony, Nintendo) would ever license a peripheral that has the easy possibility of being swapped over to a competitor’s platform.

  2. A stick that works on one platform with adapters for other platforms, and this is already done with all the Brooks converters.

4

This HAS happened in the past. The Player 1 Konami Justifiers were made specifically for SNES or Genesis/Sega CD, but the second PINK justifier had a telephone jack that plugged into EITHER the Genesis/Sega CD version OR the SNES version.

Also I say “say, $5” meaning that was an example. I don’;t know what the actual price of just the icensing is, and the cost may be more to get the console-specific parts, but that can reduce the baseline cost of a neutral Joystick. Whoever can make the joystick can make either a fairly accepted universal standard, or a proprietary one, and then sell the connectors to each system, both then, now, and forever. Maybe they can be kept in families, like the PS family, the Xbox family, and the Nintnedo family, and then Atari, Sega, and others either make their own family, or piggyback off an existing family. But aren’t fight sticks pretty much the same except for the art and button spacing differences, and component parts? The parts are not speciifc to an Xbox One, PS4 or Switch. The only thing specifically in that part is the stuff to make it work for that console. That’s why adapters work. They’re just shuffling joystick encoding languages. It’s just in the days of the NES, Nintendo made you feel like a criminal for buying Tengen games or using right-handed/ambidextrous Beeshu joysticks. I guess I can use Beeshu sticks, because no one has factory-authroized repairs for NESes anyway now.

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That connector is usb.

6

That’s exactly what I’m saying.

I’ve got a design or 2 available at http://www.56ok.org/Ambidextrous/index.htm and included is a story how BACK IN THE DAY of the Genesis (but probably not now) a friend had a 6 button pad and I had an ambidextrous stick, and not only did I destroy himad everyone else there, but he so belived that that couldn’t help, that others challenged him and everyone else there beat him bad on right handed stick. Left handed stick was mixed results. But pulling off dragon punches more accurately, quickly, with less telegraphing, and randomly at will helped me win with the right handed stick. And that was when the special moves did lots of damage. In newer games, it’s more about engineered, premeditated combos, thanks to the lack of a CRT TV in modern games…

I noticed in the arcades, the Street Fighter used to be about leftie vs rightie, but back in the SNES and Genesis days, everyone assumed everyone wanted it left handed. You’d think they’d use a straight design and a L/R switch to wire it differently. The PS2/Xbox Original 15th Anniversary joystick could have had that EASILY by rotating 180 degrees, and offering more table room for the right stickers., it’s just that by then, no one supposedly wanted a right-handed joystick.

but yes, an 8 button horizontally symmetric “frown” with 2 sticks could work. It would also work for twin stick games like Robotron, Smash TV, etc. There is a slight tilt of the button hand towards the joystick hand either way, and horizontally symmetric frown would work. Or make it Americna style like the SF15AS but with a left/right switch.

One last statement: to play Street Fighter 1 accurately, you need an 8-way stick with two 2-bit buttons, or else you’ll have the “telegraphing Heavy” problem like the TG16 version of the game. The triggers could work, but the dragon punch would be a pain with the thumb. Add to that I can’t do any moves on a Virtual Console version of Fighting Street, except with the select cheat, even with a Wii Fighting Stick.

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You could just redo it in the options menu to setup custom mapping. Yes it stuck to do it every time but its found in most of not all fighting games. What you are talking about is so far beyond niche because the FGC is a niche in itself. If someone wanted to try this and is a southpaw they would either:
1: conform to regular play styles as with most games and pads and sticks, directions and Dpad are on the left
2: make their own stick to suit their southpaw style
3: have someone custom make it
Or 4: give up and find another hobby.
It would be too hard for a manufacturer to make a ambidextrous style stick because not a enough of people play to know that they want southpaw and there wouldn’t be enough demand for it. So unfortunately the 4 options are the only way. Like @FreedomGundam said probably a project box arcade stick system would be the best go around for it so you can use 1 stick for many different consoles.

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I mean… it’s a fair point, but I don’t think anyone’s going to make something this radical for Street Fighter 1? It’s mostly there for curiosity purposes.

They literally took the pressure pads out because people were smashing the shit out of their hands when the padding wore down. It’s going to be “accurate” to a legitimate version of the arcade machine.

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The 2 analog buttons were bugged, later versions of Street Fighter one came up with the 6 button system.

1 Like
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Yes a 6 button version of SF1 would be a good enough substitute, unless there is some skill and strategy in pulling off different strengths and accurately hitting the strength you want on command.

It would be better as “your own controller” compared to a communal arcade control panel, because you are responsible for your own stick.

If the thumbpad wasn’t so hard to hit specials, I’d say, use the 2 analog triggers on a standard joypad, one for punch, one for kick.

Also, is the Wii Virtual console/TG16CD version harder to pull off the specials than the arcade? I have a Hori Fighting Stick Wii and the specials are hard to pull off on the Wii, even though I know all the moves. Was the Arcade that hard to pull off specials? IK got to try my right handed stick and see if it pulls off.

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Yes I do have my own custom stick, I’m trying to find someone to help me build.

It’s just that Nintendo has historically made you feel like a criminal for buying Tengen Games and using Beeshu right-handed sticks. Sega was WAY less so (so much so they were encouraging people to buy a Sega Saturn foreign adapters during the dark days between the end of Saturn and 9/9/99), and Sony and Microsoft are somewhere in the middle, but probably closer to Nintendo than Sega.

But then again, what’s the worst they can do, not honor a warrantee that’s long expired on every system except the Wii U and the Switch? Considering the fact that Nintendo doesn’t repair any system older than the Wii U, that’s not much a threat.

Now that everything uses USB, they can’t legally use that threat of plugging something unauthorized in a system because none of those companies own the USB standard.

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About redoing it, none of the fighting games I’ve sen let you flip the x axis, and the y axis and let you rotate your controller 180 degrees. It’s easier to hard-wire it right handed.

And yes, you’d thing most street fighter sticks would be reversible by the fact that Street Fighter started as a lefty vs righty setup.

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Let me give you a very brief history of SF1 the arcade cab, and why the 2 analog pressure buttons rubber pressure pads were abandoned very early in the cabs life cycle, only the first production run of that cab used the pressure buttons, and most of those were later retrofitted with the classic 6 button layout soon after.

  1. Those rubber pads tend to break way too quickly. Players tend to mash too hard and break the pad and even the whole panel in some cases.

  2. There was a bug that the game didn’t properly read how hard the rubber pads where pressed anyways.
    (as well as there only 3 settings for the pads in the game’s code, light medium and heavy).

  3. The replacement parts for the Rubber pads are hard and expensive to get, standard arcade buttons are easier and cheaper to source. And Arcade owners don’t like investing alot of money into fixing cabs.

Why the 6 button config is superior to the 2 rubber pressure pads?

  1. Standardized layout, although Street Fighter II is was standardized the layout, SF1 started it. And gamers across the world is now more accustom to the 6 button configuration.

  2. Game mechanics, Street Fighter 1 only recognize 3 pressure setting for each rubber pad, having 3 push buttons replace each rubber pad (six buttons in total) means you have the same access to each Punch and kick. There was never a variation between Light and medium, indium and heavy. Analog to digital inputs are never “Smooth”, and instead goes up and down in a series of steps. SF 1 only had 3 steps per rubber pad.
    Like How Smash Bros never has a 360 degree range of directions for their characters, the whole movement mad at the most was divided up into 64 directions. For most players this will seem like a 360 degrees of movement freedom but that is the furthest from the truth.

  3. Not many people want to buy a dedicated controller that only plays for one game, a game that wasn’t popular in the first place. A Virtual-On twin stick controller can still be used for games such as Assault, Cyber Sleed, Robotron: 2084 and Smash TV. Nothing uses an Arcade joystick and two pressure pads/Buttons other than Street Fighter 1. There be no money for Nintendo/Capcom or any 3rd party controller builder to make such a controller.

As for you other claims of “its harder” to play on the Wii Virtual Console, that is your own personal antidotes and has no bearing on a future Switch game.

When? The customer/ Player was never penalized for playing unauthorized NES carts, only the manufacture.
And Tengan is far from the only company that made unauthorized carts.
The NES/Famicom Library is FILLED with such carts from various companies. It’s in fact one of my (and other collectors) favorite things about collecting NES/Famicom carts is all the unauthorized and bootleg carts and clones.

To the shock of most south-paw players, most arcade sticks are actually left handed.

I never ever saw this in the Street Figther Era, the whole left handed/ Right handed thing was settled back in the early 80s, mostly as a push by Arcade Owners all over the US and Japan and the formation of the Jamma standard.

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I meant for the buttons you can swap around. You would have to do something like a switch to swap between 2 sticks.

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Either that or try to figure out some switch to swap the x and y axis of the stick.

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I hope this is just a dedicated stick and not something you are putting on a cab because it would look real weird on a multiplayer setup lmao

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  1. About Jamma, that was mainly a Japanese thing, American makers like Atari Game and Midway bucked that trend. Gauntlet was right handed. Sega arcades, which had one foot in the East and the other in the West, had Quartet in a non-standard formation of joystick ABOVE the 2 sticks, so they were free to pick right- or left-handed without taking up too much real estate. Your joystick hand was stretch out more.

And the early 80’s was the standardizing? I remember playing LOTS of games in the early 80’s that had right button or a choice. Most single player arcade games followed the buttons on both sides standard. Of course, some miserly arcade owners wouldn’t fix it because only one button or one set was broken. Of course my arcade was a Fun N’ Games, not owned by one of these Japanese conglomerates, so maybe I was exposed to Jamma WAY later than the average arcader…

Universal games and Dragon’s Lair had a fire button on both sides. Some games with the rotating joystick (I forget if that’s Taito or pre-Neo Geo SNK,) had a set of 2 buttons on both sides for both players.

Believe it or not there might be some games where I prefer the left handed arrangement, like games where rapid firing is way more important than moving. In Pac-Land the rapid tap-tap-tap of running I used with the right hand and I used the left hand for jumping.

And I agree the 2-bit analog buttons were a bad idea. It was just about POUNDING the button, and more people used raw power than learned to vary their punches. People thought it was a pure analog button, like a skill game at a carnival where either raw strength or precision was necessary. Real-live mechanical games things like analog buttons, fast video/TV games like Digital ones. And if you have 256 degrees of freedom on the X and Y axis, if a game requires precision, finding 147/256 would be tough.

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As someone who can pull off consistent fireballs and hurricane kicks on command, even the standard stick-left way, dragon punches consistently with stick-right and can do so sometimes fairly consistently if I have the right joystick with stick-left,

I found that with the Wii Virtual Console version of the TG16 version or the arcade game Street Fighter, if someone has that, if you have a joystick you feel comfortable with Ryu’s/Ken’s basic special moves, try to see if you can pul it off with over 50% accuracy, even the easier hurricane kick and psycho fire. Is it just me, or is it near impossible who got initiated on my cousin’s SFII for SNES, and perfected my technique on SFIINC for Genesis, to understand the execution points of the specials on the TG16CD and/or the Wii version of the TG version? And does the arcade version have better special execution rates than either the TG16CD or Wii VC copy of the TG16CD version? And is the Wii VC version an accurate port of the TG16CD version?

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Nope, Jamma was used everywhere not just Japan.
Arcade Owners everywhere supported these as it made it easier to swap out boards instead of buying whole new cabs.

Also Street Fighter II on the TG16 was a Hucard not CD.
The emulation on the VC was probability just bad.

20

Sega did get one thing wrong about Quartet, which is evident when you see the Sega Master System Joystick, which was right handed. When the Japanese owners bought Sega (maybe a part, I heard a different part of Sega and Bally merged. They were co stars on the Bally/Sega label of Colecovision and Atari 800) from Paramount, the Japanese owner knew Americans wanted a choice in their lefty vs righty choice, they just never understood how that effects the buttons.
If you were playing the Colecovision version of Tuthankam, or the Turbo Grafx version of Side Arms, then they have the right arrangement. Left fire on left, right fire on right. But most of the games had a main and secondary button system, which Quartet would fall under. Since Fire and Jump were fixed, either one way or the other would be hindered by the tap-tap-tap of the middle finger, not the index.

A solution at home would be to have either a physical switch, a button swapping dongle, or a software option to swap the 2 buttons. Like, in the arcade, it could have said, Press YOUR fire to start. If you press the left button, you’re playing left handed. If you press the right button, you’re playing right handed.