A little while ago, I was inspired by some work done by a fellow Aussie Arcade member on a series of fight sticks (Link).
After some planning and design, I thought I would try my hand at creating my own fight stick also.
First up was to decide on a button layout and size. I knew I wanted to have 8 player buttons, along with select, start and guide buttons since this is to work on a PS3 and Xbox360 console. I have gone with a top face size of 300 x 200mm. With the side panels added, this increases out slightly. With that decided on, and a button layout, I went about cutting the top panel to size, and cutting out the main player buttons and joystick hole.
Once I had settled on the size, I also ordered a piece of acrylic (3.5mm) to sit on top. This will give a better surface feel for my hands, and protect the artwork too. I have cut out the main player buttons and joystick hole also.
I wanted to make the fight stick look visually nice, so decided on some Ken artwork – which also allowed me to finalise the colour scheme for the fight stick.
With the artwork decided on, I could then purchase buttons and a joystick to match. I went with a bubble head for the joystick – slightly more expensive, but looks much better 🙂
The heart of the fight stick will be a Dual Strike v2 PCB. This was a more expensive option than my original thoughts on hacking a USB controller ($40 compared with $5). If all goes well with this fight stick, I will look at doing a cheaper version using a hacked controller also – but one thing at a time 🙂
To try and avoid having just a “box” fight stick, I went with some architrave that looked a little smoother. Pieces were cut for the 4 sides, along with small support bits that will be used to help hold it all together.
So where to from here?
1) Sort out Start, Select and Guide buttons
2) Cut holes for those 3 buttons
3) Create wiring
4) Create hole for USB cable
5) Assemble 🙂
So still some work to be done, but given I was able to get quite a bit done in a single day, it shouldn’t take too long once the last few road blocks have been removed.