Street Fighter IV Fightstick Upgrade

I've had my Madcatz Street Fighter IV Standard fightstick since August of 2009. I thought it was time to upgrade the parts of it. Don't get me wrong it's a damn good stick, I just felt it needed an upgrade, with the stick getting squeaky and loose, likely due to abuse from me. So after partially disassembling and reassembling my stick to test if I could do it, well within the knowledge I could purchase a Tekken 6 Hori stick if I damaged it beyond repair.

Following this I managed to remove a couple of buttons and the stick itself with ease, replacing them was just as easy. From here I ordered the parts I required from Gremlin Solutions: who were very efficient, not the fastest postage, though all of my parts arrived in perfect condition 2 days after I ordered them. The parts I purchased were: A blackball Sanwa JLF-TP-8YT and 6 Sanwa OBSF-30 buttons with a red surround and white button.


A few days later I received my parts, then set about performing the upgrade. A couple of notes to this, some of the quick disconnect cables were a pain to remove, this may have been a manufacturing problem or process. One was so tight that I ended up snapping the contact on an old button. Despite these few flaws I managed to finish with no other problems.

Onto the hardware itself, it feels a hell of a lot better. The plastics are far superior and the edge are a lot smoother, making holding the stick feel more enjoyable. The mechanical parts of the stick are also stronger, particularly with the stick, where you can feel the micro-switches more definitely. While playing it is clear that that the new parts are superior, again the stick is the biggest improvement, performing a Light punch Shoryuken into a Shinkuu Hadouken feels more natural. All said the upgrade was well worth doing, especially with Blazblue around the corner in Europe.


Finally here is a link to the full photo album of the modification: http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickjcarter/sets/72157623627194012/