Wireless Hori EX2 Arcade Stick Mod

I picked up a Hori EX2 arcade stick to play fighting games on my Xbox 360. Great unit, though it always bugged me that it was USB and not wireless. I finally decided to investigate converting my arcade controller to wireless after having owned it for a few months. After some googling, I found out that a few people had managed to convert the EX2 (and similar arcade controllers) to wireless by gutting the arcade controller and cramming the board out of a regular Xbox 360 wireless controller into it.

These controllers aren’t exactly what most people would call throw away items at around $70 each, and it would be fairly easy to make a mistake turning both into paper weights. It seemed like a fairly simple process, and for the bulk of the wiring it was. Unforunately some of the digital buttons on the Hori controller are mapped to the analogue triggers on the wireless controller. I had a play with rigging up some circuitry to make the digital button presses register as a voltage level on the controller, but managed to damage some traces on the multi-layer board when desoldering the trigger pots… I thought I’d have to start again on new board, but luckily all of the fighting games I had at the time have the ability to map buttons, and I was able to use different buttons in their place.

Did it end up working? Yep! No more tangled cords while handing controllers around and one less cable to trip over. Every game I’ve tried with the controller so far has had the ability to map buttons, so my stuffup with the triggers didn’t turn out to be a complete disaster, it’s just a minor annoyance as I have to map the buttons before playing a new game.