Dtoid NY. Nuff Said.

Ice-T confirmed for Gears 3? Also, I like how you can see CliffyB's phone number.

read more

I've suffered a great loss today. I've been playing through Beyond Good & Evil lately, and so today I thought I would play a bit more. Only my PS2 wouldn't turn on. No matter what I did, the little red light failed to come on.

In the year 2001, I was in 7th grade, and I wanted a PS2 really really really badly. My parents would give me $20 a week for lunch, and so instead of getting lunch, I saved that $20 so that I could one day buy a PS2. I starved for months and I finally had enough money. I was the happiest kid in the world.

Over the years, I spent countless hours with it. And through all the Disc Read Errors, I patiently opened him up and fixed him. But today, it is no more. Goodbye old buddy, I'll miss you. ='[

I may go and buy one of those newfangled Slim PS2s, but it will never replace you.

So I ordered my custom art and plexi and they just came in the mail! After about an hour of work, here is my stick so far:

Now I just need to get some new buttons and paint the bezel, which I will do in the coming months.

The following is how I replaced the art. It was a pretty easy affair and most competent people won't have much trouble with this, but I am in no way responsible for anything that happens to your stick while you attempt this mod.
I ordered my art and clear plexiglass cover from over at Art's Hobbies, which I would highly recommend.

First things first, I had to get the fight stick open using a hex key. I don't know the actual size, but I had one that fit.



Once inside, we need to remove the buttons. They are connected via quick disconnect cable so its a fairly easy ordeal. Make sure you write down which color wires go to which button! Using a small flat head screwdriver, you can pull the wires off the buttons. Disconnect the wires to the stick so that you can just deal with the top plate.




While we don't need to take the joystick off, taking it off will just make the rest of the process a bit easier. First on the bottom of the stick in the middle, is a flat head screw. Hold the ball of the stick still and make a small turn with the screw driver which will let you unscrew the ball.


With the ball off you can unscrew the stick from the plate and pull it out. The screws had some red stuff on top but its easily removed. Just pull it off and you're in business.


Popping the buttons out is a bit more annoying, but is still fairly trivial. The easiest way I found to do this is push the two clips in on the side of the buttons and rotate it to pop it out.


Once all the buttons are out, you can peel the old art off the metal plate without much trouble.



Once you have the bare metal plate, place your art on top and then the plexi on top of that, and put in the buttons. Make sure you really push the buttons in until you hear them click. If you've gotten this far, reassembling the stick from here is pretty easy. Just put the stick back, wire up the buttons, and screw the plate back in.

I decided on some different art, and went for a more minimalistic design. Also, I ordered my plexiglass cover the for the art (here), so as soon as that gets here I'll post photos of the real thing.

The main problem with the last design was that I don't have a high res picture of the dtoid logo so it will look like crap when I print it out.