In high school, I was obsessed with an arcade rhythm game called Wacca. I wanted to find some way to play it at home, however the cabinet with the touch ring needed to play it was expensive and difficult to import from overseas. I decided to use this as a chance to put my skills to use and make my own controller.

The controller is designed with easy manufacturing in mind, being made out parts that can be laser cut on a machine I had access to at the time. It uses a segmented design to reduce the number of unique parts and has a frame that’s manufacturable with aluminum extrusion and plate that can be bought in bulk. It also has fully custom electronics, featuring cheap PCBs that can perform the touch sensing, LED lighting, and cabinet emulation in a compact package.

To make it work with the game, I met a group of other enthusiasts who had been working with this game and worked to reverse engineer the protocol used by the cabinet to send and receive data to the computer. With this, you can take a copy of Wacca intended for the arcade, plug in the controller, and it thinks a full cabinet is there for it to use.