Super DC Stick Mod II'

[randombs]

I've signed up for the Evo tournament in July for HSF2 on PS2 and the bring-your-own-pad rule got me all worried. My favourite pad is the Saturn pad but the PS2 version is rare. I tried hacking in the chip from a PS1 pad into the Saturn pad but I buggered it up so I then turned to my DC stick

I decided to go for orange buttons and stick to match the Japanese DC scheme.

The buttons are from Gremlin Solutions (6x orange, and 1x smaller white button for Select), stick's from a mate. It's the JLF-8Y or something.

Seeing as I'd be taking it to the tournament, I wanted something that would stand out from the rest while taking into account the lack of time/energy/tools to do a complete mod.

Besides, there are so many sticks of such high quality doing the rounds (including the ones on this thread, serious props to all of you) that mine wouldn't be able to hold a candle to any of them in terms of workmanship, so I decided to go at it from another angle.

The VMU slot wouldn't be used anymore, and as I wasn't painting the stick, I couldn't just fill it up or cover over it without it looking more than a bit lame, so I decided to do something with it.

But what?

Ideas were flying around, and at one point I even tried looking into VMU hacking so I could power a VMU through the PS1 pad circuitry and have it do cool things like maybe a nice SF2 animation or something equally clever.

Suffice it to say that didn't get very far, but the fact was I wanted to do something with the window, and that's when it dawned on me - I had a few Capcom All-Stars capsule toys lying around.

Specifically, a Ryu one:

But he's the wrong colour! I think that's his 2P Alpha outfit, I can't remember, but it's just all blue, and JUST PLAIN WRONG. Another plain wrong thing is that I don't even use Ryu hardly ever, Ken's my guy, but Ryu IS Street Fighter, so it makes sense (plus I don't have a Ken toy), so I decided to paint him:

It took a few days as I have work, and I needed to do about 3-4 coats to really get rid of the blue. It was really fun painting him, I might try painting other things!

Having Ryu in the VMU window is all well and good, but he really needs some stuff in there instead of grey plastic, so I took some screen grabs of SF2 in an emulator and Photoshopped his stage (it's orange and red so matches the stick's scheme, see) and shuffled things around so there'd be enough going on. I also made a floor, and also an SF2 logo for the ceiling:

I covered the images with sticky-backed plastic to give them a shine and make them last longer, then shoved everything into the VMU slot and glued Ryu in there, too. I had to hack his legs up a bit, so no more hurricane kicks for him

Here's the wiring. It's messy, but believe me it's the neatest wiring job I've ever done, and it's designed to allow for easy swapping for another pad's circuitry in the future if/when needed, using terminal blocks (got the idea from another stick modder's pics I found):

There's no point going into specifics, suffice it to say everything worked first time which was a big relief. I started it on Saturday and just finished it now.

Here's Ryu in all his hand-painted glory, ready to dive into the VMU slot:

And here's the end result:

Hope you all like it, and I wonder if I'll find any more like this. Imagine the possibilities...



Full-size images are here if anyone's interested

[huxley]

Nice job fella. Thats wiring is not a messy in the slightest.
You should of seen the mess I made when I did a DC stick to Xbox, I just soldered the wires onto the xpox pads pcb and lobbed it in the box.
Once again good job, keep us posted about the comp.

[kernow]

ROFL thats awesome. love the extras.

[angelx]

Its great billy but he kinda has no eyebrows :P sorry to be picky!

[Pavey]

Neither do i really though, so no big shakes.

When is the compo Billy, may come down to watch?

Stick looks great mate, love the orange buttons.

[randombs]

lol he DOES have eyebrows though! They're a bit thin, but you can see them in the closeups.

I would've done the eyebrows properly had I bought black paint for his hair, but I forgot so left it brown. Blame whoever painted him in the first place

Competition's 26th/27th July:

https://www.battleofdestiny.com

I won't be kicking any arse there, but at least I'll get mine kicked in style

[BigDeadFreak]

Wow! I'd give anything to be able to do something like that. (apart from hard work and effort, obviously)

[Mercian]

That looks great! Dare I ask how long it took you to complete?
I've been thinking of modding a DC stick for use on the 360 (with SFII HD, SC IV, and SF IV on the way) but have absolutely zero electronics experience. I've done a bit of research over at SRK but I'm not sure if it would be a wise idea for the (hopeless) uninitiated!

[mmmonkey]

Very very nice, I love the capsule toy idea - it's excellent

Pete

[randombs]

@ Mercian:

It took ages actually, I've got a new job so I'm out from 7:30am until about 8:00pm. I started it Friday night I think (or Saturday, it's all been a bit of a blur so I can't remember) but it was broken down into stages over the days and I didn't really do different things on each evening, so one was spent soldering, say, the next was filing, then wiring up, etc.

The bulk of the time was naturally spent on filing the button holes and dremmelling the plastic to fit the joystick in (it's actually trickier than it seems, and the little dremel filing discs kept breaking!) which took a good few hours altogether. Speaking of filing:



That was a brand new file I used, see how much of it there is left!

There's a bit of a scar on the side of the housing now, as when I was shaking out the little bits of plastic I decided to whack it with the big file to get the bits out properly

I opened the stick up again just now as someone had pointed out on SRK that there was a gap between the Ryu stage bit and the SF2 logo. I knew about this already and didn't bother sorting it but it started to nibble at me so I fixed it. In reopening the stick I managed to rip out the wire going to the pad circuit's left button so had to spend some quality time resoldering that but now I'm definitely 100% happy with the stick and shouldn't need to open it for a long while yet.

Yeah right...

[kernow]

It'd be a lot of work, but you could take the modding one step further still and design a whole new plate for it, get rid of the DC logo as such, a lot of effort but if done well could look very good. (or not bother ) hehe, looks great.

[randombs]

It'd be too much work to do that. I was thinking about it for a bit, but I needed closure so I could concentrate on actually practicing for the darn tournament

[kernow]

Yeah, I agree, I seem to remember J0e getting custom 5 button plates made for his consolized atomiswave, although it might have been hearsay because no-one ever saw pics.

[randombs]

Also, the problem is I'm not too good with these things, I tend to convince myself that I can do it and just jump in and see what happens. With the plate, if I cocked it up I'd be stuck (although I do have another vanilla DC stick for an emergency but that's not the point )

I'd imagine the DC sign would be quite straightforward to remove if I was inclined to do it, assuming it was painted on at the end. If the paint is under the plate's coating stuff then It would look a bit rubbish I think. I used whiteboard marker to mark the edges of the button holes so I'd know roughly when to stop filing (when you get into the mood it's easy to lose sight of that bit!) and then had to remove it with isopropyl and I think the lettering (ABCXYZ) got agitated by the same stuff so maybe the paint is on top of the lacquer or whatever it's called.

I can kind of see the point in removing the DC logo as it's no longer used with the DC but the stick's iconic as it is so I'll probably leave it. Or maybe I could do a test run on the spare DC stick?

Hmmm...

[randombs]

OK peeps I need some advice. The stick got a wicked reception at BOD 2008, but the problem was in the dark rooms it was hard to spot the Ryu, so I've been thinking about rigging up some LEDs in the VMU slot to light him up.

I've no idea how to go about this or where I can source decent LEDs (not fussed about price, really). I've seen a few floating around in Maplin. Ideally they'd be powered from the stick itself if possible, and maybe I'll install an on/off switch to stop Ryu melting

Any ideas?