Berserker Barrage: the Marvel Vs. Capcom Stick Saga Part 1 - What Have I Got Myself Into?!?

Much like a steering wheel or flight controller, fightsticks are pretty specialized tools. Their main purpose is to replicate the arcade setup for a given fighting game. Because of the parts involved, they tend to be pretty sizable, heavy, and not exactly cheap. But if you’re serious about your fighting games, at some point you’re going to have to get one. At least you only have to pay for it once. Unless, of course, you want to play on more than one system, that is. With the advent of XBL and PSN, you no longer have to have someone over your house to show off your fighting prowess. With a high speed internet connection, you can issue beat downs to your buddy down in Pennsylvania or in Prague. But what if one of your friends only has it on PS3, and another for the 360? Well, you could play one friend with your awesome fightstick and the other with your crappy (j/k) controller. Or, you could buy another fightstick, which, unless you have deep pockets, seems a bit frivolous. There is a third option, but it’s not for the faint at heart.


As explained in my last build, people have been ‘padhacking’ for years, taking the guts of a perfectly fine pad and soldering buttons to them. That basic concept has extended to a ‘dual mod’, whereby two different pcbs are wired together then wired to the buttons. When the appropriate plugs wired to the pcb, it’s possible to use one stick for, say, a Playstation 2 and a Xbox. Of course, it’s much more involved than it sounds. Over the years, people with much more electronic experience have made custom boards that make it easier (relatively, anyway) to use your fightstick with more than one console. One of the more popular boards is Toodle’s Cthulhu board (which you can read extensively about here). The board interfaces directly with a PS3 or a PC, allowing you to use your custom fightstick on either machine. It also has software coded in its chip to allow you to use the stick with a Playstation, Xbox, Gamecube, etc, provided you solder the appropriate machine’s controller cable to the board. Alternately, you could wire up a RJ45 jack and use RJ45 connectors for each system you wanted to use , like so:

(for more info, you can go here). In order to use the stick in conjunction with an Xbox 360, however, you still need to padhack an actual Xbox pad. Microsoft has seen fit to install some special coding that will not allow a third party controller to work without it (even though it still hooks up to an USB cable. So much for the universal part). Many people have used the Cthulhu board along with a pcb from a 360 pad (the MadCatz 4716 is pretty popular) for their custom projects, and there are also plenty of people that have modified their MadCatz TE and SE fightsticks to be used on both PS3 and 360. However, those solutions still involve running a USB cable to the console to use it. If you want a factory wireless fightstick, you’re choices are pretty slim (recently, Hori released a wireless stick to coincide with Tekken 6, but the stock parts are the Hori stuff, not the genuine arcade parts. Plus, the PS3 version needs a stupid dongle, and I really hate dongles….). Granted, most tournament players prefer using a stick connected via USB, to ensure there’s no chance of lag, interference, dead battery at the wrong time, etc. Still, having a wireless stick eliminates carrying around a 10-15 foot USB cable and negates the possibility of your little brother tripping over the cable and pulling your console off the shelf (remember those SNES days? I know I’m not the only one…). And, as I mentioned before, if I have a wireless pad, why not a wireless fightstick?


So, why haven’t there been many wireless dual mod setups? Mainly because of how the boards are wired. For a dual mod to work, both pcbs must be ‘common ground’, and all the ground lines of each board, along with the buttons, joystick, battery, etc, need to be wired together. While it is possible to find a common ground 360 pad, as discussed in the last build, the PS3 pcb is not common ground. To get a wireless dual mod setup to work, you would need some extraordinary soldering skills, a pretty good knowledge of electronics, a handful of transistors, resisters, inverters, breadboards, very thin gauge wire and the patience of a saint. If so, you could produce something that looked like this:

Told you, not for the faint of heart...

Needless to say, this isn’t something that lot of people would bother with. However, Gummowned, the same SRK member (or mad man, depending on your outlook) that created the above monstrosity decided there was a market for this sort of setup and set out to make it easier for others to do the same thing. After a few months, the Leo board was born:

All those parts were soldered BY HAND. Gummowned is the man!

The Leo, through electronic wizardry, converts the PS3 pcb into a common ground pcb, allowing the user to wire up a PS3 pcb and a wireless 360 pcb for dual system wireless goodness (along with another added benefit which we’ll get to soon enough). That said, there’s still a good deal of work that needs to be done to make it all work. Unlike the axisadaptor, there are no screw terminals, so everything will need to be soldered to the Leo board. In addition, the contacts the wires need to be soldered to on the 360 pcb are quite small, and some pieces need to be desoldered and connected to a resistor before it will work. For a detailed look at what needs to be done to modify the above mentioned Hori Tekken stick, have a look here. In short, I have my work cut out for me on this one. But the possibilities this opens up are too great to ignore. Plus, the building bug bit me not long after I finished El Kabong2 . So, with the winter chill getting ready to set in over the east coast, I started planning my next stick. Such a shame I’m not going to keep it!