So the RT on my MadCatz TE stick died… well outside of the 90 day warranty and I took the thing apart and after some testing discovered that its not the cable, It’s not the button but some part of the board simply is not registering the RT slot at all. Sadly I do not have a multimeter to test which board is not working.
I have treated my TE stick like a second child. It has been loved, doted upon and cared for and to have this sort of random hardware failure is heartbreaking. What are my options for repair? Seeing as how Madcatz will probably charge me more in shipping than the repairs would cost myself I was thinking of picking up a cheap brawl stick for $50 and using the guts from that to do repairs however I thought I would ask the experts if their are any better options?
You can swap the button with LB so LB is RH/A2. All you have to do is change it in game.
Basically take the disconnects off of LB and put it on the RT button.
So youll have the setup like so:
X Y RB
A B LB
There is also a tutorial that corrects this problem.
Also if you want to go the brawlstick way, try all local and near gamestops they are going for 30
I doubt the trigger fix will help if it remains dead after a replug.
A full innards replacement with a brawlstick should be doable, but it would be ALL of the innards. The main board, the button distrobution board, and swapping the existing LED daughterboard with the one from the brawlstick. If it’s an option for you, its not a bad one.
To “Fix” the issue I switched RT out with the back button but this doesn’t solve the issue for all the games I play as not everyone can be remapped in such a way.
Will replacing the innards with the brawl stick parts just have the same problem down the line? Was this a TE specific problem? Is there another cheap stick I could gut the parts from?
I think you;ll find the electronics in the brawl stick to not have that problem that the earlier TE boards had.
You do have a bunch of options if you want to use a different set of electronics, and most would recommend the brawlpad because its the easiest to use. But it would require soldering, itd be a little difficult to get the home LEDs working, and the turbo LEDs (possible turbo itself) wont be usable. If you dont mind the little extra scratch for the parts from a brawlstick, it’s the way to go for best results.
The problem with the triggers (if it’s related to the problem discussed in that thread) seems limited to the first gen of TE boards, including the original 360 SE sticks. Current ones dont appear to have that problem.
What soldering would be required using the Brawlstick? Did Madcatz not use standardized parts? I was hoping I could just lift the guts out of the Brawlstick and slap them in the TE and connect the stick/buttons.
erm… a Brawlstick turbo panel will not fit in a TE stick without some heavy modification with a Dremel. Just saying.
The next best thing you can do is to unscrew & unclip the pcb off the back of the turbo panels and swap them around. The problem with this is that it leaves the ‘Guide’ button and ‘turbo’ button slightly out of placement as the two pcb’s are not identical. You can still get the buttons to work but it requires some patient pressing.
While on the subject you will also be better off keeping the original TE terminal strip wires as the wires in a Brawlstick are much shorter. You will still need to swap the terminal strips over.
Thank you everyone for all your advice and insight so far. I am really not too concerned about the turbo buttons. While I would like to restore full functionality I have never used turbo.
First of all, my apologies for being a complete noob here, however:
When I first took the TE stick apart I found the board was in 3 parts, the one with the xbox button, the one where all the A,B,X,Y, LB, RB, LT, RT (Terminal strip?) and one in the middle where the USB cable and Microphone hooked up to (Along with everything else.) Which of the 3 boards is the trigger problem related to, or will I simply have to replace all 3 boards or can I swap them out one at a time until I find the source of the problem? (This would be so much easier with a multimeter.)
Also just for my future knowledge, are there any of the Cthulhu/Kitty type options that work with the xbox 360 and would let me move away from whatever the heck Madcatz is using?
If you’re replacing the innards with the Brawlstick innards, then just replace everything from the brawstick into the TE. The source of the problem though is the middle board with USB and mic hookup.
As for Cthulhu/Kitty type options, there probably wont be for some time yet, but you can use these boards with a PSX cable and get a 360 converter like the xtokki to avoid ‘madcatz’ pcbs.