How I got into all of this

I was really into Street Fighter 2 when that was popular. In fact, I continue to play it at arcades when I see it, even to this day. When the SNES version was out I had remembered seeing arcade style joysticks for sale, but at the time I really didn't have money for that kind of thing.

Well, I still went to the arcades a lot, continued playing the various fighting games out there, Virtua Fighter, Tekken..and years later when I finally bought a Playstation and Tekken3, I thought that it'd be really cool to get one of those arcade sticks for PSX, because I had always hated trying to play fighters with those little pads. Matter of fact, someone I met had one before, but I unfortunately lost his phone number. I think it was a Mas Systems stick. So I started searching through magazines looking for one. I learned to read a little Japanese when I was in college, so I used to look at Japanese video game magazines a lot, and I found some arcade style joysticks for sale in there, but they were all the ball-top syle. At the time I didn't know that only the US used the bat-type.

My brother had joined the air force, and was stationed in Korea, so I asked him to look around to see if he could find something like what I was looking for. He mailed me back this cheap plastic thing, a Korean joystick called a "Mega", the logo looked like the old Sega logo. The quality of the joystick was unbelievably bad. I guess he couldn't understand what I meant.

So I started searching the net for "Arcade Joystick", and after viewing numerous pages showing stuff you can buy at any mall game store, I stumbled across Matt Staroscik's "Build Your Own Arcade Controls" page. And well, I looked at the instructions, and made my very own "Frankenstick" for Dreamcast, based on the info that he had up about how to hack PSX controllers. My version used a Happs Ultimate Joystick and Ultimate pushbuttons mounted on an old speaker box that I bought at a Deseret Industries thrift shop for $5. Wish I had taken pictures, god it was ugly. And the wiring was HORRIBLE, I mean, really bad. I had wires just everywhere, bits of wires soldered to wires. Sometimes the connections would short each other because the wires would occasionally touch each other during heavy use. A little electrical tape fixed that.

Yes, my Dreamcast stick wasn't much to look at, but it DID work, and I was one of the first people to make one. I sent Matt all of the details about what I had made. He posted the info up on his page, too.

It just went from there, I got into the MAME scene, and met the "other" Build Your Own people, and took advice from them about stick building, and became a regular poster in the forum. I also made friends with a guy at work with some tools, he taught me how to assemble more professional looking boxes, similiar to the sticks that I have up on my page now. The two player stick on the front page was a project we both worked on. Since then I've bought a lot of tools, so now I make all of my own stuff now. Recently I converted my first MAME cab, and I'm going to start making them from scratch soon. It's been lots of fun.

And that's it!

Questions or comments? E-mail me at CD_Vision (at) hotmail.com.