Finally picking up on this. I've studied the innards of the Mayflash, decided what to get, and sent in the order for replacement parts. Sorry about the lack of photos. I have no camera.
The bottom plate is made of steel and secured by six screws, but four are concealed by the rubber feet. I used a razor blade to carefully peel off the feet, then used goo cleaner to remove the glue residue from the plate and feet. After everything was clean and dry, I superglued the feet back on, repositioned to not cover the screw holes. Superglue doesn't like to stick to smooth metal though, and I had to use a C-clamp, with some coins and slips of cardboard to spread the pressure out and ensure flatness.
With the screws out it was easy to pry the plate off with a small flat screwdriver at the point where the cable enters the case. The plate accounts for about half the weight of the unit. The PCB is labeled MF-STICK-B1 2009-04-20. The stock stick is secured to the case by four long screws passing upward through the white plastic restrictor gate and threading into holes molded into the underside of the top surface. Unscrewing the ball top is easier if done before removing those screws.
Fastening with upward screws was abandoned by brokenhalo and vedasisme, who obliterated the molded holes and drilled new holes into the top surface on either side of the stick hole. The problem with this is the screw heads are unsightly and a potential nuisance to the left hand. And the top surface may not be thick enough to accomodate countersunk screws. However, jorjet27 reused the existing screw holes and reappropriated the stock restrictor as a spacer for his JLF. The JLF bracket and microswitches had to be countersunk to allow the screws to get out of the way of the JLF restrictor. I will try to do this as well.
The offensively loud microswitches in the stick are Lema brand. To keep track of the leads, I'm going to wait for the replacement parts before desoldering them. It won't be necessary to get wires for the replacement if the old leads are reused. However, akishop doesn't seem to offer Sanwa sticks without the 5-pin common ground connector, so a harness and some daisy chaining will be required. Actually I'm not sure you have to use the 5-pin connector if it's there (the microswitches are the same, right?) but I'll order a cheap harness anyway. The Seimitsu H5P costs less and is cross-compatible with the Sanwa JLF-H.
The buttons don't interface with the main board individually but through a huge daughterboard. Pressing the button lowers a plastic rod that makes contact with the board and completes (or breaks?) a signal. I believe these are called leaf switches. This is how keyboard keys are supposed to work, not arcade controls. The button board in brokenhalo's stick was translucent green. Mine is brown on the bottom and the front is labeled TG-STICK-A2 2006-11-18. Beneath the button board is a molded black plastic piece with a tube underneath each button. Both the daughterboard and plastic thing are screwed to the underside of the top surface through molded holes, like the stick. Presumably the plastic piece with the tubes is to help the daughterboard withstand the downward force of button pounding.
The button board connects to the smaller main board by a row of soldered pins bent at a right angle. There's nine pins: one for each button and the common ground. The board must be removed either by cutting/breaking or by desoldering those pins. A clean desolder would be annoying because all the pins have to be disconnected at once or else they'll cool and resolidify. It's easier to just use the hot iron to both melt the solder and bend the pins out of the way, one by one.
The stock buttons are snap-in and removing them requires pressing in the snaptabs with a screwdriver or similar tool and pushing the cylinders up and out through the top surface. Thanks to the weird daughterboard system, they are wholly incompatible with the replacements and they will all have to be removed. (I was considering leaving L1 and L2 in place, since those aren't critical for gaming.) Additionally, wire will be needed for the button leads.
Each button hole is 29 mm in diameter, with two 1 mm nubs protruding inward to facilitate the stock button snap-in mechanism. These holes are slightly too small to accomodate standard 30 mm buttons and will have to be widened. The stick hole is 22 mm. The top plastic surface is about 3 1/2 mm thick.
Including shipping, the prices on lizardlick actually came out a few bucks less than akihabarashop, but I had to substitute other items of the same price because of lizardlick's unreliable stock. I'm not going to wait around on a waiting list and pay for shipping separate orders. So, I went with akishop. I had to create (fake) accounts on both sites just to get shipping quotes. Advice to e-stores: don't make me do that.
ok I need better way to get a hold of you. I was messing around with the rent version of x-men cota (xmcotajr). Only to find out it still had its dev console on except no need to worry about the region settings.
Menu
http://i820.photobucket.com/albums/zz127/jedpossum/0000.png
Parts Editor
http://i820.photobucket.com/albums/zz127/jedpossum/0001.png
Rainbow text makes me giddy when on an arcade board.
Posted by: jedpossum | 01/18/2011 at 09:30 PM
Haha, it doesn't bother me. My email is dammit9x at hotmail if you prefer that.
It looks like you just hold 1p jab while pressing the menu button, pretty cool. It must have taken a lot of work to program the debug modes, too bad they get taken out.
So far that's Final Fight and SF2 Turbo on CPS1, COTA on CPS2 and Jojo on CPS3. Maybe more left to find?
Posted by: dammit | 01/18/2011 at 11:05 PM
In regard to finding any other hidden debug modes: is there a practical way to search the dipswich's or to know if the game is waiting for any input on startup? I would think finding them (assuming there are more) would save you extra time.
Posted by: Taro | 01/24/2011 at 09:17 AM
I don't know if there's a general solution to finding them.
Maybe felineki would know more about it.
Posted by: dammit | 01/24/2011 at 07:24 PM
It is mainly luck when it comes to finding them.
Posted by: jedpossum | 01/25/2011 at 03:50 PM
I learned about the CPS1 SF2 debug menus from someone else, and the Final Fight one just happened to be accessed in the same way.
I've been investigating Vampire Hunter, because it has text for debug menus within the ROM, but I'm having a hard time finding out whether they're actually accessible or not (I'm really new to all of this ASM stuff). I did manage to find that there are branches in the ASM that would seem to load this text, but I have no idea how you'd go about accessing them.
Posted by: felineki | 01/30/2011 at 12:25 PM
I wouldn't either honestly. I did some cursory messing around & found an undocumented dip switch that changes the background tile-map for the King of Dragons (World 910711, turn A6 on if your curious). Not exactly earth shattering.
http://i55.tinypic.com/x21awp.png
http://i51.tinypic.com/flk26u.png
The problem as I see it is trying whatever number of combination's. You've got 24 different dip switches, anywhere between 2 to 14 different buttons (counting two players), plus who even knows if Capcom would have used the joystick inputs as well? They did it for the 'game stats' cheat on SF2:WW so why not? Of course if I were to base my assumptions on what else we've seen work, I'd rule out directional inputs & only concentrate on those dip switches that were considered unknown or unused. Even still that's a helluvalot of combination's to try. Of course this would naturally be assuming more Object Tests await.
Posted by: Taro | 01/30/2011 at 03:39 PM
Well, the hard part is getting into the developer mode if it exists. Once in there it's trial and error to figure out the controls.
Unless the dipswitches can interfere with eachother, you can probably get away with testing only two configurations: all default, and all flipped (or as many flipped as possible). The only relevant buttons for getting into debug mode seem to be P1 LP and the diagnostic button.
Even knowing this it can be touchy. I never did figure out how to get into sf2tj's menu without felineki's cheat. (http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=33039) It would be interesting to know if there are any games where the menu really is fully functional but there's no way to get in without emulator cheats.
Posted by: dammit | 01/30/2011 at 11:58 PM
Thank you both for the information.
Posted by: Taro | 02/01/2011 at 10:57 AM