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Thread: Desktop Arcade Pop'n Music Arcade Style Controller Owners

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    Alex (Level 15) InsaneDavid's Avatar
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    Default Desktop Arcade Pop'n Music Arcade Style Controller Owners

    Posting here since the Pop'n games I play are of the PS1 era. Anyway...

    A little background first - I bought an ASC over a year or so ago for $5, third hand from a local electronics based flea market. It worked fine from the start and it appears to be a V4 controller (due to the housing size) with the optional LED lighting in the buttons.

    If anyone else here owns an ASC from Desktop Arcade I have a favor to ask. See, I disassembled all the actuators in mine today to give them a good cleaning. That went off without a hitch but I was never happy with some of the wiring inside the controller, it just seemed extremely haphazard although it worked fine. So I redid some of the connections to the PCB, touched up some solider points on the diode leads, etc. When taking a close look to see if anything else needed adjustment I noticed that the quick disconnects weren't properly seated - none of them.

    You know how a quick disconnect looks like this from the end... o_o

    Now the sides are supposed to wrap around the switch leads, holding the lead tight to the blade of the quick disconnect, making a solid connection. On my ASC instead of being properly plugged into the switches, the quick disconnects were shoved onto the switches with the switch connection between the blade and the insulated housing.

    I'm curious if anyone else has one of these controllers if they can pop it open and check the connections. It's not a big deal but DAMN, this is freaking amateur hour stuff on a $200+ controller. (Yes, I got mine for $5 but that's beside the point) It's very possible somewhere down the line another owner could have screwed with the internals and not put it back together right, really I'm just curious if this is how they were being shipped.

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    Kirby (Level 13) norkusa's Avatar
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    Do you mean your disconnects were connected to the microswitches at an angle instead of sitting flush with the contact? Yeah, mine were like that too but I bought mine used, so I just assumed the original owner did that.

    Wow, it looks like DA is still in business. I thought DJ Dao ran him out years ago.
    Last edited by norkusa; 01-28-2012 at 11:51 PM.

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    Alex (Level 15) InsaneDavid's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by norkusa View Post
    Do you mean your disconnects were connected to the microswitches at an angle instead of sitting flush with the contact? Yeah, mine were like that too but I bought mine used, so I just assumed the original owner did that. Traded up to a Dao ASC though, so I don't have the Desktop Arcade any longer.
    Maybe we're talking about the same thing, I'll try to clarify. Instead of the male switch going into the female quick disconnect, it was wedged between the outside of the QD and the QD's insulation. It still made contact, but if you knocked it around a little with your fingertip it would pop off. From some old non DP forum posts I know a lot of people had problems with Desktop Arcade ASC's over time - I wonder if this simple screwup in assembly was one of the issues, which would be stupid easy to correct.

    The DJ Dao ASC's look really nice but I'm not quite enough into PNM to warrant the purchase. If I was going to start out with the big money that's where I would go though, isn't the price difference only like $60 between them (before shipping) these days?
    Last edited by InsaneDavid; 01-29-2012 at 12:08 AM.

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    I've got a desktop arcade Pop'n controller, but its of the non-light up variety. Its lightly used but one of the switched shitted out. Since we mostly do 5 button, i switched it out from one of the corners. I still need to buy new switches (and just replace em all).... The wiring in ours was pretty fugly, but it functioned as it should have.
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