MadCatz Alpha FightStick Modification Process

For the most part, getting the MadCatz Alpha FightStick modified was pretty straight forward with a few exceptions. I was able to successfully switch out all stock components with Sanwa parts like I had originally planned, but I'd like to go through how I did it and point out some of the issues I ran into.

In the previous blog post, I covered taking the Alpha apart and planning a little so I'm going to overlap just a bit for continuity.

The guts. I needed to get all the buttons and the joystick out because they were all mashed potato feeling. Beware, the molex connectors are not easy to unclip and I broke a corner of the plastic housing on one connector trying to remove the cable. All I'm saying is just be gentle and take it slow when prying each connector out. Unclipping all the ribbon cables and removing the PCB makes it much easier to access all of them.
 

Stock Joystick

Removing the joystick should be the first step after you removed the PCB and ribbon cables. It helps keep all of that wire mess out of your working space. The stock joystick, whatever it is, was kind of interesting to remove. My initial approach would normally be to unscrew the balltop from the shaft and then remove the joystick from the chassis, but no matter how hard I tried I could not remove the ball top from the shaft. I mean the balltop is screwed on with Loctite or some other method of fusing the plastic ball to the shaft was used because I could not separate them. So I needed to remove the e-clip which can slide out from on top of the black plastic actuator. Once the e-clip is removed, the shaft with the balltop falls out and the rest of the joystick can be removed.

Here's a quick comparison of the stock joystick compared to a Sanwa JLF. There doesn't appear to be much difference and for the most part the feeling wasn't terribly different, but I did get an air of satisfaction knowing I was using the Sanwa JLF joystick(confirmation bias?). The Sanwa JLF is on the left and the stock joystick is on the right.

Sanwa JLF and Alpha Stock Joystick

After that is settled, moving to the buttons was pretty straight forward. Desolder, take out the button, put in new button, solder, and check continuity. Because, I didn't want to memorize which color went to which input on the PCB, I just swapped out a single button at a time. Since buttons, or equivalently switches, have no polarity preference you can solder the ground wire and signal wire on either side as long as you don't short the two together. It helps to stay consistent for troubleshooting later though, thankfully I didn't have to.

The buttons have a single signal wire running from one side and then the ground signal is daisy chained to the rest of the buttons. It was kind of troublesome soldering two and three wires to a single post, lots of hot finger soldering owies.





Here's a photo comparing the Sanwa buttons with the Alpha stock buttons. There is a height disparity that later on marginally effects how the PCB mounts to the chassis. The Sanwa button is on the right and the stock button is beneath the wires, but on the left.

Sanwa and Alpha Stock Button Comparison

Once all of the new buttons were soldered in I just needed to remount the PCB, close it up, and call it done-zo. However, as I mentioned earlier, because the Sanwa buttons are taller than the stock buttons that come in the Alpha this causes mounting issues with the PCB. The PCB is supposed to sit above the buttons, and there wasn't a whole lot of clearance beneath it so when mounting it back up it is not wise to screw down those tiny bolts as tight as possible. I'm sure the PCB can handle it, but when I see fiber glass beginning to bend it always makes me nervous.

These photos are the best I could do with my camera phone to get a profile shot of how the PCB sits on top of the new Sanwa buttons. It's passable. The PCB clears the buttons in terms of critical fitting and the only consideration that needs to be made is just lightly tightening the PCB until it stops wiggling, but before the PCB starts to bend from pressure.



Put it all back together like a sandwich that you can't eat that's made of plastic, bolts, fiberglass, and lead and you get the Alpha fightstick with brand new shiny parts.  Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and also how it has improved how it feels now. Second player better be thankful that I cared enough to do this instead of giving them the pleb controller.

Finished

4/15/2018 Update:
A user in the comments (Manu Der Fuchs) asked if it was possible to take some more photos of the internals of the Alpha fightstick. The main interest was to see what kinds of buttons were used for the L1/L2 buttons. I suspected that they were push buttons and that you could wire/solder the more conventional arcade style buttons in place. So here are the photos of the internals:

The upper PCB is where all the button circuitry for the top of the fightstick is placed. Just a few phillips screws are in the way of getting access. Pretty simple.

These two photos show the main board after it's been unscrewed down. The photo on the right shows the two left most push buttons are the L2 and L1 buttons with the far left being L2 and the second from the far left being L1. It should be simple enough to solder wires to the sides of push buttons without having to remove anything, but if you wanted to be really thorough you would use a multimeter in continuity checker mode and figure out which ways the buttons are oriented. I don't have any of my tools with me to give you the answer, but I can probably do that later if there's interest.  I hope this helps.

Blog Update: Graduate School

In 2015 in August, I applied to Purdue University for graduate school and now that it's February, I figured I should probably make a tiny update about that. I was accepted and started at the beginning of the 2016 year.

Here's the letter I received:

Very exciting stuff. My Masters program will focus on the area of Communications, Networking, Signal and Image Processing. I have some wonderful professors that I had for classes in my undergraduate now acting as my academic advisory committee.

Also, small note, I also changed jobs at the start of the year as well. Now, I work in a machine shop learning the ins and outs of what it is to be a machinist. I hope to learn more mechanically technical skills so I can be a better engineer as a result.

With all of these things taking over my life now, I don't know how often I will add more blog content. I had some projects in the work that have kind of hit the back burner since the semester started. Seeing as my last post was five months ago or so, I figured it was time to at least put something here to let anyone interested know that I'm still alive.