For this week’s #fightstickfridays, Matt Gummo will be our featured modder. If you don’t know who that is, Gummo is probably one of the most respected and well known hardware modification engineers in the business. He doesn’t make things pretty, he doesn’t really build kits, he doesn’t even specalize in replacing buttons and other hardware. Matt Gummo can make anything play on anything. That’s much harder than it sounds, and it’s a skill he is best known and respected for. Gummo actually designs and builds the circuits necessary to allow your controller of choice to be able to work on your system of choice.
In the FGC, there are a plethora of consoles that are used in your average major tournament setting: Playstation 2-4, Xbox 360, Dreamcast, Xbox One, Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, and PC. From nostalgia (Marvel vs Capcom2, Melty Blood) to the newest fighting games on the market (Mortal Kombat X, Killer Instinct) you will end up dropping some serious money to be able to have all the controllers necessary to be able to play all the games you want. Not to mention carrying all of that stuff is a pain.
And for competitors that have already bought arcade sticks or controllers that work great for them, they certainly don’t want to have to give up their favorite because a game has a fractured player base scattered across multiple consoles (looking at you Capcom and Netherealms). So what options do they have to be able to use the controller they own, on a different console?
Enter Gummo. Tell Matt what the controller was originally made to work on, and what systems you want it to work on, and he’ll make it happen. Doesn’t really matter from what to what, as long as there is space to install his custom made chips and PCBs mod chips (the control boards that interpret your inputs into information the console can understand). After he does his thing, you’re ready to go.
In a nutshell, Gummo designs a PCBs blueprint in a program named Eagle, them he mocks up a basic design and sends it off to a fabricator that has a machine that prints PCBs. He then can personally install that chip himself, soldering it to the internals of the controller as need be. His custom controllers actually lead him to redesign smaller PCBs to fit inside of the much more limited space he had to work with. All of his skills are self taught, from trial and error over the years working on arcade cabinets and arcade sticks.
He’s very dedicated to his craft: actively looking for different arcade sticks to work on so he can do a good job when someone asks. He’s one of the few that can work on more difficult to modify arcade sticks like the Hori Fighting Edge, and can also do controller mods (Trimod Playstation 3 Sixaxis, Hori Fighting Commander 3 Pro,) without the need for often laggy and illegal converters. So while many can make it pretty, Gummo can make it work.
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Who is going to be our next featured modder for #fightstickfridays? Check in next week and see! And don’t forget, J1Con is this Sunday from 12-10 pm at 3810 Market st, Philadelphia PA. Who’s gonna be there?
