Fightstick Art

"Cammy" art on Qanba Q1 fightstick

When I posted "Cammy" painting on Reddit, a few people responded that it would look great on a fightstick. I was curious how I could do so but I did not know much about fightsticks. Fortunately, a user with handle "Cringe Dealer 69" was kind enough to share what he knew.

In case you want to know, take a look at "Control Panel Templates" on Focus Attack website. There are so many fightstick brands and models with wildly different aspect ratios, so I went for the model that Cringe Dealer suggested, Qanba Q1.

First thing to do was adapting the painting to Qanba Q1 template: placing the elements to fit a wider canvas and painting any resulting gap. Following Cringe Dealer's suggestion, I added the text label "Menu, Turbo, Mode, Select" for the 4 buttons on upper left corner.

Next came the puzzling bit of info. The fightstick comes with an opaque plastic top. To apply the printed artwork, I need to get a transparent plexi to secure the artwork to the fightstick. This point became clear once I got a fightstick; but I was confused back then and ordered a transparent plexi (which costs around the same as the print cost, effectively doubling what I needed to pay) purely based on trust.

A few weeks later, the plexi and the printed artwork arrived. Note that Focus Attack cut the print according to their fightstick template. Why 2 copies of the print? I would later send one to Cringe Dealer as my thanks for all the knowledge he shared.

Transparent plexi and printed artworks

 Then the fightstick arrived.

 

Qanba Q1 fightstick

At this point, I needed to figure out how to put the artwork on the fightstick. I followed the YouTube video "Modding and Customizing the Qanba Carbon Arcade Fight Stick with Sanwa Parts Tutorial" by Little Dragon Meiling. To my surprise, I had to unplug all button connections.

Button connections before unplugging

Next, peel stickers and glue that cover the 6 screw that secure the top panel on fightstick chassis. After taking off the screws, the top panel can be removed. The buttons were secured on the top panel; so they needed to be removed.

Top panel taken off

Finally, at this point I could place the artwork on the fightstick top, fit the plexi on top of the artwork, and secure them on the chassis. Then it was simply re-attaching the buttons and re-plugging the connections.

Fightstick after reassembling

I could not help wondering why it was so hard to apply a custom artwork on Qanba Q1. From what I understand, this model is a cheaper model. Apparently higher end models allow easier custom artwork replacement.

More shots of the fightstick below.