Yeah so I built an arcade cabinet quite a while ago. I’ve had all sorts of fun and good times with it over the years and it’s now the location of the annual Tetris-off between Charlie and myself. The only problem is when I first built it I didn’t really know what I was doing with the electrics. The earth wiring loom that came with the joysticks was a 4.8mm female spade connector which was absolutely perfect for the joysticks, but the buttons had a 2.5mm male spade. So being the “it’ll do” person that I was I put the 2.5mm spade into the 4.8mm female and crushed it with a pair of pliers. This worked ok’ish. Every now and then a button would stop working and I’d have to go digging around inside and make a repair.
Fast forward to November 2025 and I thought to myself “must do a bit of a service on the arcade cabinet and make sure everything is working for the Tetris-off”. So I fired it up and true to form one of the buttons wasn’t working. So I opened up the cabinet and went inside. Pretty quickly found the dangling wire and reattached it. In doing so I managed to dislodge two more connections and in fixing those connections dislodge some more. I was properly pissed off. Didn’t even need the original broken button for the Tetris-off anyway.
Anyway, given that I’m now more of a man of leisure I tend to do things properly and make sure I don’t have to fix them again in the future.
So out I went to the local electricians shop place which is like a trip to Aladdin’s cave for me, and picked up the new crimper pictured above and a selection of connectors of different sizes. Turns out if I’d gone to an online components shop I’d have saved a fortune but you live and learn…plus I wanted them that day because despite my mature years I’m still an impatient bugger.
I started taking the buttons out one by one and doing a better 2.5mm female spade connection to the 2.5mm male spade connector on the button. Because I’m doing it properly I had a bunch of black wire that I made connections with a 2.5mm female spade on one end ( for the GND connection of the button ) and a 4.8mm male spade on the other end. The goal was to make it easy to identify the GND connections from the signal connections. Incidentally I also used the appropriate coloured wire for the signals, so now the red buttons have a red wire and the blue buttons have a blue wire.
Everything was going swimmingly until I came across a few buttons where the connector snapped off after I disconnected/reconnected it one too many times. They’re pretty flimsy connectors and not really designed to be mucked about with by a clumsy oaf with a pair of pliers. Rather than just buy some new buttons I thought I’d break out my trusty Dremel and my soldering iron and repair them. How hard could it be?
Turns out it wasn’t really that hard. I managed to get two of the buttons working again but the green button was properly cabbaged and I’d have to buy a new one. Slightly annoying, but not the end of the world.
So I went on eBay but couldn’t find matching buttons and then I ended up on https://paradisearcadeshop.com/collections/buttons where I managed to find a matching green button.
But I didn’t buy it.
Whilst looking at green buttons I saw that you could now get a green button with an LED inside it. God damned lighty up arcade buttons! How had I not heard of these before now? So I ordered four green buttons and four red buttons to give it a bit of a test run before committing to all sixteen buttons.
This opened up a whole new can of worms…