Hello, Tech Talk!
I recently finished building my first arcade stick, encountering and tackling only a few small problems (with help from you guys!) along the way. It certainly isn’t as great as some of the stuff that I’ve seen around these forums, but I am quite pleased with the way that it turned out. I have, however, run into a very odd wiring problem. A friend of mine helped with the soldering; he regularly does random soldering projects and has even gone so far as reconstructing a few old arcade cabinets, so he was the obvious person to ask for help.
Upon completing the first round of soldering, using a Madcatz Fightpad PCB, we had a problem involving RB (FP) not working, so we re-soldered it, at which point B (MK) stopped working. After re-soldering again, everything worked fine for about an hour of play, at which point Up on the stick stopped working.
Basically, it became a game of re-solder one button and another one would stop working. We looked over the PCB very closely to see if any loose solder-bits had attached themselves to a strange location and found nothing unusual. After hours of messing with the wires to make sure nothing was wrong there, everything magically worked… until the next day when the guide button decided to start activating on its own. Since it is the guide button and not required, I just cut the wires running from the PCB to the button and left it alone; however, the button continued to activate on its own volition at increasing rapidity, eventually activating so quickly on its own that it was like i was sitting and spamming the button as rapidly as i could. At this point I deemed the stick unusable until that problem was fixed.
A couple of days ago, I decided to plug the stick in just for the hell of it, and it worked. It worked totally fine for two entire days with no mishaps whatsoever. Everything was cool, aside from the guide button no longer being connected. Today I gave it a shot, and it worked, so I decided that it was time to reattach the guide button. Upon doing so, everything worked. I screwed the bottom plate on it and, as soon as I plugged it back in, the Right directional input no longer worked.
I have no idea how to handle this situation, as my experience with such things is quite limited. Have any of you ever experienced similar problems? It seems like a pretty unique case and googling/searching the forums has not really given me the answers that I am looking for.