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They've also recently added ssf4 for pc to the esrb's site.

I suggest you build one on your own as most purchesable stuff is pretty flimsy with a few notable exceptions (Madcatz SFIV tournament edition is damn nice, for example).
I built mine using mdfboard, glue and some lexan glass and it is very sturdy. It has taken quite a beating from frustrated gamers and mashing beginners as
well as enduring an occasional kick without looking too shabby.

Anyway, making your own ranges from pretty simple to pretty difficult. With the simplest possible design you will finish it in a single day with a bit of effort.
Buttons, pcb and stick can be bought from the akihabarashop or lizardlick. Help can be found on the shoryuken forums' tech section.
I suggest reading through the faqs you find there, they are worthy of your time.
A note on joysticks: most american joysticks, Happ sticks for the most part, comes with a octagonal (eight sides or corners) restrictor gate.
What this means is that it has a piece of plastic shaped like an octagon that restricts the joysticks' movement. However they only come with four actuators.
Further note that the actuators are digital, on or off, nothing in between. Japanese sticks such as Sanwa and Seimitsu most often come with the square restrictor gate.
The restrictor gate is easy to swap out on the Seimitsu models and there are, for example, two way restrictor gates avaliable.
Another note on the joysticks: Happ sticks are very stiff. It will require quite a lot of force to move them about. The same is true for Happ buttons. Sanwa buttons activate
very easily whereas Seimitsus requires slightly more force.

Once you have the box ready you will need some form of joystick -> gaming device interface. I chose an old $5 playstation one pad which i got from ebay and soldered
some wires directly on it and then connection them to the buttons and the stick. Soldering on the PS1 pad can be tricky but there are plenty of guides and pictures floating
around on the shoryuken forum to guide you in the process.
Quick disconnects are highly recommended that you use since they are easy to remove should a button wear out. You can probably pick up a few for next to nothing at the local gas station.
Unless you plan on playing on your playstation this solution isnt all that great as it is. A PS1 to USB converter isnt that difficult to get though, heres a list of converters that doesnt cause input delay.
If you dont have a soldering iron or a playstation one pad handy the Chtulu/ChImp board might be of interest.

Slagcoin is a very good source of information, i highly recommend it. Byrdo takes orders from time to time and you can browse joystick vault for inspiration.
Here is my own workhorse creation. Protip: measure twice, cut once.

Good luck and please consider posting some pictures of your creation in the Show off your stick thread.

I suggest you build one on your own as most purchesable stuff is pretty flimsy with a few notable exceptions (Madcatz SFIV tournament edition is damn nice, for example).
I built mine using mdfboard, glue and some lexan glass and it is very sturdy. It has taken quite a beating from frustrated gamers and mashing beginners as
well as enduring an occasional kick without looking too shabby.

Anyway, making your own ranges from pretty simple to pretty difficult. With the simplest possible design you will finish it in a single day with a bit of effort.
Buttons, pcb and stick can be bought from the akihabarashop or lizardlick. Help can be found on the shoryuken forums' tech section.
I suggest reading through the faqs you find there, they are worthy of your time.
A note on joysticks: most american joysticks, Happ sticks for the most part, comes with a octagonal (eight sides or corners) restrictor gate.
What this means is that it has a piece of plastic shaped like an octagon that restricts the joysticks' movement. However they only come with four actuators.
Further note that the actuators are digital, on or off, nothing in between. Japanese sticks such as Sanwa and Seimitsu most often come with the square restrictor gate.
The restrictor gate is easy to swap out on the Seimitsu models and there are, for example, two way restrictor gates avaliable.
Another note on the joysticks: Happ sticks are very stiff. It will require quite a lot of force to move them about. The same is true for Happ buttons. Sanwa buttons activate
very easily whereas Seimitsus requires slightly more force.

Once you have the box ready you will need some form of joystick -> gaming device interface. I chose an old $5 playstation one pad which i got from ebay and soldered
some wires directly on it and then connection them to the buttons and the stick. Soldering on the PS1 pad can be tricky but there are plenty of guides and pictures floating
around on the shoryuken forum to guide you in the process.
Quick disconnects are highly recommended that you use since they are easy to remove should a button wear out. You can probably pick up a few for next to nothing at the local gas station.
Unless you plan on playing on your playstation this solution isnt all that great as it is. A PS1 to USB converter isnt that difficult to get though, heres a list of converters that doesnt cause input delay.
If you dont have a soldering iron or a playstation one pad handy the Chtulu/ChImp board might be of interest.

Slagcoin is a very good source of information, i highly recommend it. Byrdo takes orders from time to time and you can browse joystick vault for inspiration.
Here is my own workhorse creation. Protip: measure twice, cut once.

Good luck and please consider posting some pictures of your creation in the Show off your stick thread.

I suggest you build one on your own as most purchesable stuff is pretty flimsy with a few notable exceptions (Madcatz SFIV tournament edition is damn nice, for example).
I built mine using mdfboard, glue and some lexan glass and it is very sturdy. It has taken quite a beating from frustrated gamers and mashing beginners as
well as enduring an occasional kick without looking too shabby.

Anyway, making your own ranges from pretty simple to pretty difficult. With the simplest possible design you will finish it in a single day with a bit of effort.
Buttons, pcb and stick can be bought from the akihabarashop or lizardlick. Help can be found on the shoryuken forums' tech section.
I suggest reading through the faqs you find there, they are worthy of your time.
A note on joysticks: most american joysticks, Happ sticks for the most part, comes with a octagonal (eight sides or corners) restrictor gate.
What this means is that it has a piece of plastic shaped like an octagon that restricts the joysticks' movement. However they only come with four actuators.
Further note that the actuators are digital, on or off, nothing in between. Japanese sticks such as Sanwa and Seimitsu most often come with the square restrictor gate.
The restrictor gate is easy to swap out on the Seimitsu models and there are, for example, two way restrictor gates avaliable.
Another note on the joysticks: Happ sticks are very stiff. It will require quite a lot of force to move them about. The same is true for Happ buttons. Sanwa buttons activate
very easily whereas Seimitsus requires slightly more force.

Once you have the box ready you will need some form of joystick -> gaming device interface. I chose an old $5 playstation one pad which i got from ebay and soldered
some wires directly on it and then connection them to the buttons and the stick. Soldering on the PS1 pad can be tricky but there are plenty of guides and pictures floating
around on the shoryuken forum to guide you in the process.
Quick disconnects are highly recommended that you use since they are easy to remove should a button wear out. You can probably pick up a few for next to nothing at the local gas station.
Unless you plan on playing on your playstation this solution isnt all that great as it is. A PS1 to USB converter isnt that difficult to get though, heres a list of converters that doesnt cause input delay.
If you dont have a soldering iron or a playstation one pad handy the Chtulu/ChImp board might be of interest.

Slagcoin is a very good source of information, i highly recommend it. Byrdo takes orders from time to time and you can browse joystick vault for inspiration.
Here is my own workhorse creation. Protip: measure twice, cut once.

Good luck and please consider posting some pictures of your creation in the Show off your stick thread.

I suggest you build one on your own as most purchesable stuff is pretty flimsy with a few notable exceptions (Madcatz SFIV tournament edition is damn nice, for example).
I built mine using mdfboard, glue and some lexan glass and it is very sturdy. It has taken quite a beating from frustrated gamers and mashing beginners as
well as enduring an occasional kick without looking too shabby.

Anyway, making your own ranges from pretty simple to pretty difficult. With the simplest possible design you will finish it in a single day with a bit of effort.
Buttons, pcb and stick can be bought from the akihabarashop or lizardlick. Help can be found on the shoryuken forums' tech section.
I suggest reading through the faqs you find there, they are worthy of your time.
A note on joysticks: most american joysticks, Happ sticks for the most part, comes with a octagonal (eight sides or corners) restrictor gate.
What this means is that it has a piece of plastic shaped like an octagon that restricts the joysticks' movement. However they only come with four actuators.
Further note that the actuators are digital, on or off, nothing in between. Japanese sticks such as Sanwa and Seimitsu most often come with the square restrictor gate.
The restrictor gate is easy to swap out on the Seimitsu models and there are, for example, two way restrictor gates avaliable.
Another note on the joysticks: Happ sticks are very stiff. It will require quite a lot of force to move them about. The same is true for Happ buttons. Sanwa buttons activate
very easily whereas Seimitsus requires slightly more force.

Once you have the box ready you will need some form of joystick -> gaming device interface. I chose an old $5 playstation one pad which i got from ebay and soldered
some wires directly on it and then connection them to the buttons and the stick. Soldering on the PS1 pad can be tricky but there are plenty of guides and pictures floating
around on the shoryuken forum to guide you in the process.
Quick disconnects are highly recommended that you use since they are easy to remove should a button wear out. You can probably pick up a few for next to nothing at the local gas station.
Unless you plan on playing on your playstation this solution isnt all that great as it is. A PS1 to USB converter isnt that difficult to get though, heres a list of converters that doesnt cause input delay.
If you dont have a soldering iron or a playstation one pad handy the Chtulu/ChImp board might be of interest.

Slagcoin is a very good source of information, i highly recommend it. Byrdo takes orders from time to time and you can browse joystick vault for inspiration.
Here is my own workhorse creation. Protip: measure twice, cut once.

Good luck and please consider posting some pictures of your creation in the Show off your stick thread.

I suggest you build one on your own as most purchesable stuff is pretty flimsy with a few notable exceptions (Madcatz SFIV tournament edition is damn nice, for example).
I built mine using mdfboard, glue and some lexan glass and it is very sturdy. It has taken quite a beating from frustrated gamers and mashing beginners as
well as enduring an occasional kick without looking too shabby.

Anyway, making your own ranges from pretty simple to pretty difficult. With the simplest possible design you will finish it in a single day with a bit of effort.
Buttons, pcb and stick can be bought from the akihabarashop or lizardlick. Help can be found on the shoryuken forums' tech section.
I suggest reading through the faqs you find there, they are worthy of your time.
A note on joysticks: most american joysticks, Happ sticks for the most part, comes with a octagonal (eight sides or corners) restrictor gate.
What this means is that it has a piece of plastic shaped like an octagon that restricts the joysticks' movement. However they only come with four actuators.
Further note that the actuators are digital, on or off, nothing in between. Japanese sticks such as Sanwa and Seimitsu most often come with the square restrictor gate.
The restrictor gate is easy to swap out on the Seimitsu models and there are, for example, two way restrictor gates avaliable.
Another note on the joysticks: Happ sticks are very stiff. It will require quite a lot of force to move them about. The same is true for Happ buttons. Sanwa buttons activate
very easily whereas Seimitsus requires slightly more force.

Once you have the box ready you will need some form of joystick -> gaming device interface. I chose an old $5 playstation one pad which i got from ebay and soldered
some wires directly on it and then connection them to the buttons and the stick. Soldering on the PS1 pad can be tricky but there are plenty of guides and pictures floating
around on the shoryuken forum to guide you in the process.
Quick disconnects are highly recommended that you use since they are easy to remove should a button wear out. You can probably pick up a few for next to nothing at the local gas station.
Unless you plan on playing on your playstation this solution isnt all that great as it is. A PS1 to USB converter isnt that difficult to get though, heres a list of converters that doesnt cause input delay.
If you dont have a soldering iron or a playstation one pad handy the Chtulu/ChImp board might be of interest.

Slagcoin is a very good source of information, i highly recommend it. Byrdo takes orders from time to time and you can browse joystick vault for inspiration.
Here is my own workhorse creation. Protip: measure twice, cut once.

Good luck and please consider posting some pictures of your creation in the Show off your stick thread.

It's hard to do your first time, but if you're really having trouble there are forums for it. Try Shoryuken.com's tech/hardware section. There are many people who will build a custom controller for you. Happ controls has pretty much any arcade joystick part you could ask for. As for compatibility, I don't have a clue, ask an expert.

Surely you must be joking. The golden standard for fighting games is 60 and nothing else.
Heres a faq for Tekken 5 Also have a look here and here

The fighting game community has been doing this for a while now, and no high-tech Ben Heck controller was needed (an LED gives a pretty good visual indication).

See NKI's videos documented here:

http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=144797

http://nki.combovideos.com/

For arcade-style fighting and shoot 'em up games, lag is a killer. Flat screen TVs and upscaling lag have made things worse in recent years, which is why many of us still play on CRTs. New 3D game engine developers seem to care even less, as is evident by discussions like these appearing all over gaming forums worldwide.

I don't understand. From my reading of the article, this area was designed for combat between players. If that's what it's for, why is anyone complaining when he uses it that way? To me, it seems like the whiners are the fuckwads.

Compare this to a fighting game, where new players (called "scrubs") will often decry certain moves as "cheap" and try to get people not to use them. Sorry no, it's part of the game, they put it in for a reason, and you're not smarter than the developers.

You could always build your own

http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=132452

And just in case you actually were considering the X-Arcade - Don't.They are laggy at best ( for fighters a no-go ) You are better off pad-hacking a stick using official Sony or Microsoft pads and buying actual cabinet parts. They aren't very difficult to build ; some soldering and if you can have the wood or board cut for you even easier.

Original 2D games are near non-existent these days, except for a few ones left on the DS

You're just wrong about that. 2D fighters are alive and well, with updates and completely new games coming out every year. I can name half a dozen current franchises off the top of my head. We're an underground community in the US, but the games are much more mainstream in Japan, where the arcade scene hasn't died off.

Yeah here are some more sites for arcade stick parts and research:

Himura Games for purchasing Japanese-style sticks, buttons, misc.

Shoryuken.com hardware forums for "talking shop" with other like-minded enthusiasts, or for just asking questions and getting feedback.

MAS Systems sells Complete systems and American (Happ) parts

2-D, arcade-stype fighters aren't dead by a long shot. Most of the community has just gone underground. Instead of playing in arcades, they buy arcade sticks and play on their consoles. But there are still places for fans of 2d fighters, and dozens or hundreds of tournaments every year.

If you're mostly interested in the arcade games, there's still a few places to go in LA. X-Cape at UCLA stays pretty up to date with its games and has free play every saturday night. Southern Hills Golfland isn't to far of a drive and has a great selection of games and freeplay saturday afternoons.

Check out the tournament listings on Shoryuken. Odds are you'll find an arcade around you that competitive gamers will hang out at. The competitive aspect of arcades has always been the reason I was driven to them. You also have the added satifaction of being able to see the person you were playing against and you have a financial motivation to play your best (your hard earned quarter is on the line).

You'd eventually get bored and attack your opponent. And then you'd get hit because by simply waiting for your opponent to attack you will always have an advantage.

This is known as "turtling". There is a big difference between that and defensively goading your opponent into leaving himself vulnerable by executing an attack at the wrong range or time. Interestingly, despite the apparent effectiveness of turtling, you will be hard pressed to find higher level tournaments where turtling players win.

Where I played it was considered "poor sportsmanship" to throw your opponent

And that is probably why you were faced with the turtling problem. When someone is passively standing there waiting for you to attack him, he's a prime target for being thrown. When you refrain from throwing, you miss out on a very important aspect of SF.

To hear the words directly from a high level player, please go to
Domination 101 at Shoryuken.com.

What was Ken saying when he threw those fireball things? To me it always sounded like "COOL whip!"

It's "HADOKEN". The "HA" was very brief and the "DO" dragged on for a bit, so it's understandable that it might sound like "ha DOOOO kIN" or "a COOOL whip".

this artcile [shoryuken.com] is an analysis of a top level match in a tournament. if you think that button mashing is a way to win in street fighter, or that it takes no skill, think again!

Sorry... Here's that link the right way: http://evolution.shoryuken.com/

TTFN.

-PipTigger

For those who are interested, there's a short trailer for the movie on File Planet. There's also an interviewwith Peter Kang,one of the producers, on Shoryuken.com. We got a press DVD this weekend which has 4 more teaser video clips. We'll planning on capturing them and putting them up on SRK in the next few days.

Check out Shoryuken.com, for the latest information (tournaments/ranking) on the SF scene, as well as combo videos and recorded tournament matches.

Currently, the most popular games are Capcom vs SNK 2 and Marvel vs Capcom 2. I am a big fan of the latter, and I often play at Southern Hills Golfland. The players there are incredible, and on the weekends the place is completely packed (15 minute wait for a game sometimes). I played in the MvC2 tourney last month, but lost first round. :)

There is an article at shoryuken.com about the reasons for the decline of the arcade. It makes some excellent points on why the home console is not responsible for it.

Yeah, yeah, replying to self, bad form, etc.

Just now got to check out shoryuken.com; they have a link to that tourney between USA and Japan. They pretty much tied at SSF2, Japan kicked it on SF3TS and Alpha 3, and the U.S. dominated on the (pfff) Marvel dialer game. Read into that (or my previous post, parent to this one) what you will.

< tofuhead >
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If you think Arcades are losing steam because of competition from home consoles, think again. Read this excellent article by Seth Killian from Shoryuken.com.

Here is an excerpt:

Blaming consoles because "they let you play the same thing for free!" goes wrong in at least two serious ways. First, it doesn't explain why the same thing doesn't seem to affect other industries of which EXACTLY the same thing is true. Take for instance the absolute *explosion* of coffee houses over the last few years. Gamespot reasoning: "Can't people get coffee at home? Virtually everyone has a coffee machine- and they're cheap, too. Sure, the coffee houses have fancy machines with lots of chrome- but that's essentially just a gimmick, right? It's still coffee. And 3$ a cup?! Who do these coffee places think they're kidding? No thanks- I think *I'll* just stay here and drink my perfectly-good coffee in the comfort of my own home!". Seems "logical" enough, right?

People like to see the best play. Its as simple as that.

See, the problem is, *watching* people play video games is mind numbingly boring. Either you're watching a demo/movie of the game itself, or you're watching a room with a pasty geek sitting, twitching infront of a console.

Niether of those is entertaining. Football, basketball, hockey, etc. are entertaining becasue you actually get to see real people do really exciting things like ram into each other on ice at 70mph, and viceral, exciting acts like that.

After 5 minutes of watching a quake demo, I'd rather go play quake myself. Try it and see.

The only people who are generally interested in watching demos and analysis of video games are those who play seriously themselves, and want to improve thier game.

Check out http://www.shoryuken.com/ - it's a Street Fighter tournament site (I'd give a better link, but it looks down right now). There are tournament videos, and analysis of videos there. Would you really pay to see shit like that?


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