Super NES Score Master @ SNES Classic Mini MOD

After spending some time with the SNES Classic Mini, and all the good SNES games that now can be saved at will, I was in the mood for some modding. I had already softmodded the SNES Classic Mini with hakchi2, and added a ton of the best SNES titles, but now I wanted to mod some hardware.

Since i don't have the urge to have the complete SNES library on the console, I didn't make sense for me to upgrade the storage. I had already performed an Internal OTG mod on my PlayStation Classic, and I assume that the exact same mod would be possible on this little machine. Sine I had already done that mod, and since the internal storage is more than enough for my requirements, I decided to mod an accessory instead.

I do like to play SHMUPS from time to time, and therefor I decided that it could be a great idea to have an arcade stick for the system. There are some 3rd party arcade sticks for the Classic Mini, but because I wanted to use my solder iron again, I instead bought an official SNES Score Master, and a cheap ORB Classic Mini controller. From here on the mission was to merge these two units together, so that I can use the buttons / stick from the original SNES Score Master in combination with the ORB controller, so that it translates my input to the SNES Classic Mini interface.

The nice thing about the Orb controller is that it is cheap and has all the same Turbo-options as the original Score Master arcade stick. Besides that, it also has the "home menu" option (DOWN + SELECT), that different 3rd party controllers have.

At this point i did not connect all the turbo buttons, but maybe I will connect these sometime in the future, if I decide to spend some more time with this stick. The thing is that the Score Master uses a membrane pressure plate approach instead of microswitches. This leaves the Score Master in the very low end, when it comes to precision and playability. The stick works, but is very unresponsive, and therefor I would probably use a standard SNES controller instead, or an arcade stick with Sanwa / Seimitsu parts.

I'm somewhat ambivalent about this mod. On one side it was fun to do some hardware modding again, but on the other side the stick performs so bad that I wouldn't use it in practice. I do like the overall build quality and the fact that it's an official stick, though. The whole history and nostalgia of the stick has some value to me, that in some ways counter the negative fact that the stick performs bad in practice.

If someone knows a good way to make a membrane stick usable, please post a comment.