Hori Stick Nightmare!

I have two Hori Dual Shock fighting sticks, and the buttons have started to get a bit flaky.

I decide to open up the stick because with the 8 button arrangement it shouldn't be that difficuly to swap buttons around.

To my horror the green PCB board is soldered DIRECTLY to the buttons. This means it is a major headache to try and repair the stick. I was wondering if this is the case with all available Hori Sticks. I know this is the arrangement in the VF4 stick, and likley in the others too. Can someone confirm this?

My DC Agetec sticks were easy to repair and now I'm on the look-out for a decent stick that can be repaired if need be without needing a masters degree in engineering!

I really liked the Hori Dual Shock joystick, but if the damn buttons start going after a few months I can't really recommend it, and the nightmare innards are a pain!

Now I'm on the look out for Namco sticks (there must be some floating around) or a Saturn/ DC to PSX convertor because I still have my Saturn and DC VF sticks, can anyone help with regards to this?

I'm also worried about the 'ice-9 sandpaper VF4 stick complaint'. I'm starting to think that the Hori sticks may be good and usuable, but suffer unreliability issues...

Anyways sorry about the rant, but you've been warned. /versus/images/icons/mad.gif

Peace

UK-Guy

 

Dealing with direct-soldered buttons isn't that much of a nightmare, as long as you have either desoldering braid or a solder-siphon. Get the solder nice & hot, then pull it away from the button's pins.

I have a virtua stick 2 (hss-0136) that used to have buttons soldered to the pcb. One of the buttons stopped working after its pcb trace bent & broke. I just desoldered all the buttons from the pcb. After tracing where the connections went, I cut off most of the pcb, leaving just enough near the ribbon connector to solder wires to. Voila, easily replaceable buttons, in only part of an evenings work. It's an hour or two spent tinkering instead of playing, but not really a headache.

As for a saturn-psx converter box, those are near impossible to find anymore. I convertered my saturn stick to work on the psx, and it turned out pretty clean. There's plenty of room inside the case to cram a cheap psx controller pcb in there. Ran wires from the saturn buttons to the appropriate psx pcb points. You do need something to act as a select button - either give up one of the 8 buttons, or add a new one. I've never opened an agetec dc stick, but I imagine it'd be just as easy.

If that all still sounds like something you'd need an EE degree for , I'd be willing to do the work for you. Although round trip uk-> texas shipping would probably cost you more than i paid for my saturn stick in the first place ($15).