I’ve been wanting a PS2 compatible arcade stick for a while now and if you’ve ever tried to find one yourself you probably already know that none worth buying exist and the ones that are are priced up in the frightening $150-200 range. I of course don’t want to pay all that so I’m going to do the next best thing. If you can’t buy ‘em, make ‘em.

My first idea was to create one of the surprisingly popular tupperware sticks. While they’re nice and cute, I questioned their durability and playability and scratched that idea out.

I looked through the internet a bit more and it seemed every other ghetto stick mod is made from an even worse substance. Seriously, these stick makers are amazing, shoebox sticks, pizza box sticks (srsly), Xbox 360 stic-wait a minute that guy may be onto something.

While I’m not willing to purposely RRoD my 360 just to salvage the remains into an arcade stick, I did then realize that I could use some old machine’s frame for my own arcade stick mod. And as luck would have it, a cousin of mine was throwing out a bunch of junk in his front yard while I was over and I stumbled across…

Yep. An old DVD player that was gonna be junked. The frame reminded me of the HORI VLX so I took it. It’s light, it’s durable. I opened it up and there’s a great amount of room to work with. What’s even better? It still works! Which now brings a difficult decision to my hands… do I scrap the original DVD player’s guts or not? It’d be a waste to just get rid of the working components, however if I do take out all the insides then I have much more room to work with and it’d function much better as an arcade stick.

Anyway, as you can see by what used to be a PS1 controller there, I’m performing a gamepad hack and am using the controller’s circuits and jazz to create the arcade stick. It’s a relatively simple mod and a much cheaper alternative to purchasing a factory arcade stick. I’ll begin ordering my parts and working on this project for the next few weeks and I’ll post my results when done.

Parts

• Seimitsu LS-32 Joystick x1
• Sanwa OBSF-30 Button x 6
• Sanwa OBSF-24 Button x 2

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