MegJan 11

So I've started playing Tetris: The Grand Master again lately and so I decided to get a new arcade stick because my old one is great but it is bulky, heavy, and wired and I'd really like something lighter and wireless for just playing on the couch with.

I ended up getting the 8bitdo NES-style stick and it's mostly pretty good, but I had to replace the restrictor gate on it because the one it came with is not good for tetris and since most people probably have no idea what a restrictor plate is I thought I'd do a little thread about it, and why you might care about this if you ever decide to get an arcade stick, and why for Tetris you probably want to use one of the more unusual gate setups.

So the first thing to know is that arcade sticks (aka fight sticks, not to be confused with flight sticks) are digital devices. The stick literally pokes at 4 buttons arranged around its bottom. This means they're really more like a dpad than an analog stick. You can press them in a total of eight directions, including pressing two to indicate diagonal.

A restrictor plate goes at the bottom of the stick and controls how the stick can press the buttons as you move the stick around. They help or hinder certain motions and encourge, discourage, or even prevent certain combinations of directions from being pressed.

There are essentially 4 kinds of gates arcade sticks can have. They fall into two categories:

- octagonal or circular gates: These don't really restrict motion at all, but make it really easy to make sweeping motions around the buttons. Think fighting games where you need to do back, down, then right. And maybe you even need to have the presses overlap. Octagonal gates give you some little grooves to sit in the 8 possible positions (so including diagonals) more easily on top of allowing for those sweeping motions. Fight sticks don't usually *come* with these, but I think some fighting game players swear by them.
- square and diamond gates: These have four preferred positions, and those are either (for square gate) the four diagonals and (for diamond gate) the four cardinal directions. These make those sweeping motions a bit more technical, and in the case of diamond gates they prevent diagonals altogether.

In the rest of this thread I'm gonna talk about the latter, because I have pictures of a restrictor gate that can be configured to either square or diamond and I do not have (or want) an octagonal or circle gate because I don't really play fighting games.

Show threadMeg

Pictured here is my restrictor plate taken apart, next to the innards of my new arcade stick. The larger plastic piece goes on the outside and the smaller circular piece is put into it and rotated to become either a square or diamond gate. I believe that if you just leave this inner piece out then you kind of have a circular gate, but I've never actually tried that.

Once assembled it'll go onto the clips at the bottom of the stick.

Jan 11 at 5:37amWeb
Show threadMegJan 11

Here you can see the inner circle put into the middle and rotated to be used as a square gate. Once mounted like this, the corners where the stick can easily rest would be diagonal to the stick's buttons (which are on the four black boxes around the metal stick shaft).

This arrangement makes the stick work a lot like a dpad. You can hit all eight directions and easily shift between diagonals, but you aren't left with absolutely no guidance about where the directions are and when you'll shift between them.

This is probably the most common configuration for most uses. If the game you're playing wants you to use diagonals, this is very versatile.

But in Tetris you do not want diagonals, so, we're going to arrange this a bit differently when I put it in.

Show threadMegJan 11

This is the arrangement I use: the diamond gate. This setup literally prevents you from doing diagonals at all. You can only press the cardinal directions, and if you move along one of the edges of the gate you will most from one cardinal direction to the other without ever pressing both of them.

TGM in particular requires a lot of very precise switches between left/right inputs and up/down inputs, and you really don't want to accidentally inch into pressing down while you're trying to put a piece into place.

(Unfortunately I took this with the restrictor rotated a little so it might be a bit confusing, sorry. In the next post I put it on the stick and show it moving around so it'll be more clear there)

Show threadMegJan 11
In the video attached here I have put the plate on the stick's clips so you can see it in place and in action. In the video you should be able to hear the clicks as I rotate it around and it presses and unpresses the buttons in sequence.
Show threadMegJan 11

Oh I guess I should note that if you get one of these sticks, it does not come with a configurable gate like this. More expensive ones will, but the 8bitdo comes with pretty basic (but replaceable) parts. The gate it comes with is a fixed square gate. I took this restrictor plate from my Street Fighter Special Edition stick that is much fancier.

I actually will probably get a whole new stick for it tbh because the 8bitdo stick has a little too much play in the center for my taste. But it's really cool that you *can* replace these parts in it.

I like 8bitdo a lot tbh.