DIY Custom Arcade Style USB Joysticks made from Pizza Boxes :D 01-09-25
1These were some DIY Arcade Style controllers I made out of pizza boxes several years ago :)
This whole idea sprung out of the issue that I've always wanted a nice arcade style stick to use on games, but have never really been completely satisfied with any of the console arcade joysticks I ever tried.
Usually either the stick is... sub-optimal :\ or the buttons are cheap and funky, I dunno, always seems like something is wrong.
And also, when I was growing up, most of the games I played on Atari 2600 at home, or in the arcades, had the joystick on the right, and the buttons on the left.
That's just how it tended to be.
And it seemed to make perfect sense, considering the place you tended to need quick/precise/accurate/deft movements, was on the joystick.
So if you are right handed, why WOULDN'T you want to control your movement with your dominant hand?
Whereas with a lot of those old arcade games and home console games (which were often either arcade ports, or somewhat arcade-style games themselves), you did a lot of *button mashing*, and button accuracy in general wasn't as important.
Anyway, so I really wanted to see what a lot of the old games were like using a "left handed controller", which is what would've actually been considered a "right handed controller" when I was younger.
So to get that project started, I picked up a sort of a combo "Kit" off of ebay, that included two joysticks, some buttons, a USB circuit board, and some wires to connect the stuff together. (basically, enough parts to build 2 arcade controllers)
These were some reeeeally cheap Chinese kits, but the stuff ended up being pretty decent except for the JoySticks.
The Joysticks themselves were HORRIBLE!!
Extremely sloppy and inaccurate.
So later on I ended up getting some much higher end JoyStticks to replace the awful original sticks.
I ended up using Pizza boxes cause I wanted to work on getting everything laid out the way I wanted it using something cheap to build and modify, but ended up leaving keeping them as pizza boxes lol
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