Shoulder complaints, serious business.

Shoulder buttons. Not a fan. Maybe it’s my creaky old hands, but shoulder buttons always seem to sit just outside comfort for me. In the case of the Xbox 360 controller, they’re an annoying upward reach for my index fingers which are busy gripping the triggers. It might be a dumb complaint, but it feels counter-intuitive in the heat of a game.

This minor annoyance got the better of me recently, when I bought CellFactor:PW from XBLA. It’s a first person arena shooter in which you’re armed with one weapon and three psychic powers. These functions are mapped to the triggers and shoulder buttons (aka bumpers), and if you don’t have a finger on each of these four buttons at all times, you don’t really have a chance. My options were to change my grip to suit the controls, or change the controls to suit my grip.

I’m stubborn, I have a Dremel, decision made.

First I needed some buttons. A bit of digging around Benheck and the like told me that tact switches were the way to go. They’re basically microswitches, so they’re clicky, not the soft membrane type. I found this 10 pack of 12mm switches with button caps on eBay.

After extensive 3D modelling and wind tunnel testing, I decided where I wanted my new “shoulder buttons” to live (note pen marks). This is where the tips of my middle fingers sit during play. Somehow though, I knew something would thwart me in the first steps. And oh did it… notice the rumble motor sitting exactly where I don’t want it to? Great.

Then a light came on. Fixing these buttons inside so that they hold up to hours of gaming abuse is going to be a fiddly task. But in this position, I can just jam them under the motors where they’ll never move. I marked out the internals, and got busy with drill & Dremel. Rather than locating the holes on my original pen marks, I had to center them between the rails. And there happens to be a handy moulding mark on each side (see the faint circle in between the rails?) so I know the button positions will be symmetrical. Thanks Microsoft, very sporting of you.

That sorted, it was time to prep the electrical side of things. My idea was to find connection points at the existing bumpers, so that I could parallel the new buttons and leave the original ones functioning too. Sometimes things just go right. Note the black microswitches mounted vertically on the PCB – these are the bumpers. And the pair of silver contacts on top of each one are spares! How good.

You don’t need to see my soldering skills in close-up, so let’s skip that part and show everything connected. The buttons are currently held in place by some Loctite 406. It runs like water, and bonds instantly. It runs and bonds so well in fact, that I completely glued up the mechanisms in the first pair of buttons I installed. Criminy! This is take two, with less glue.

The button caps themselves had to be hacked brutally as well, so they could reach the mechanism through the controller shell and still have room to move. I’m not an artist, ok?

With everything connected and jimmied back into place, it was reassembly time. But it didn’t quite fit together. Didn’t see that coming, no sir.

This is where it starts to get ugly. The upper half of the controller shell had to be Dremel’d out to allow the rumble motors to sit higher. There are two things to be thankful for here. One, there is plenty of plastic to work with, so it’s just a matter of grinding it down. Two, the horrendous aftermath will forever be out of sight.

It all went back together nicely without too much pain. It’s shown here complete, but without screws.

The verdict? A huge success. They’re in just the right position, they’re fixed in place solidly to say the least, and they have a very satisfying click. It does take some minor brain re-training to use the right fingers at the right time, but that takes all of a few minutes to nail. Now I’ve got instant-twitch access to game functions that I barely used before.

What about the game that inspired it all then, CellFactor:PW? Has this mod really helped? I don’t know. I’ve been too busy playing BF:1943.

(Originally posted here July 2009.)