Title: Pop'n Box
Classification: Utility (Hand-crafted)
Date obtained: April 28th, 2021

Description: here's an oldie but a goodie. so far we've mostly covered recent things in this series, but here's one from about three and a half years ago now. this here is a custom-made USB controller for Pop'n Music, a rhythm-arcade game series developed by Bemani and published by Konami. Pop'n Music is a simple yet addicting rhythm game. you know Dance Dance Revolution, right? of course you do. imagine that, but instead of stepping on big ol' arrows, you pressed buttons instead. and there's five more buttons than there would otherwise be. yeah, this here is the fabled 9-key rhythm game, and is an absolute disaster to play on any normal controller. there are modes to kick it down to 7-key and 5-key, and 5-key is honestly the most playable of those options on controller, but that ain't the real Pop'n experience at that point. if you're playing on a computer with a keyboard, you could easily bind the keys corresponding to their position on the original layout, so C would be left white, F would be left yellow, V would be left green, etc etc, and that's what i personally ran for a while. but keyboard keys are small, and you can often times find yourself losing your place with very similar feeling keys surrounding your setup, which leads to a lot of misinputs. (especially with the more complex patterns that they throw at you in those harder charts, trust me.) i mean... you could spring the money for one of the official mini Pop'n controllers made by Konami for the home console versions of Pop'n, but those are only compatible with the PS1, PS2, and Dreamcast versions of the games, and if you wanna use em on PC you gotta get one of those fancy adapters. there is also the option of playing the real deal in an arcade... if you can even find one. i live in the great (terrible) American south, and apparently we ain't too receptive to these "Japanese Arcade Games" anymore. my best bet was to go to an arcade called Round1 for a long time, which is the closest us Americans have to a Japanese arcade experience, but unfortunately that place got closed down a while ago. (a real shame too, they had a ton of cool stuff there like the Rhythm Tengoku Arcade cabinet! i never thought i'd get the chance to play that in a million years!) now if i want to play Pop'n on a real cabinet, my options are to either sell my kidney to buy a personal cabinet (which i do not have the space for in my current living environment, nevertheless the money to buy it) or drive out of state just to play this one rhythm game that i really like. so what is a poor country girl like me to do?

enter the world of DIY arcade controllers! yes, now you too can play Sound Voltex in the comfort of your own home, and all you gotta do is wire up some buttons and knobs and bam, you're good to go! i think DIY controllers are an awesome idea, and make things like playing arcade rhythm games so much more of a possibility for people in a situation like myself. but here's the thing. i'm mostly a software girl, and even that is kind of pushing the definition. i know a good bit of java, i kind of know python, i can handle HTML and CSS, and i can make a mean RPG Maker game if you need me to. but hardware? girl, i fucked up a Gameboy Advance SP so hard that it won't even turn on anymore, and all i did was try to open the damn thing. you think i could make my own Pop'n controller and come out with my head still on properly? that's where my good buddy Box comes in. they have a ton of experience with this kind of stuff, and make lots of different types of DIY controllers. as such, they tend to end up with a lot of extra parts, and one day when i told them i was still mainly playing on keyboard, they pretty much said,

yeah i can slap sumn together for you lol

and here we are with this marvel of engineering you see before you. now, let me be completely honest here. i adore how this thing looks. come on, the cardboard box that's covered in stickers, the pen marks that were used to mark where the buttons should go, the cutout for the wire that looks like someone just took a pencil and poked through the cardboard, it's beautiful. i love jank tech like this, and i genuinely wouldn't have it looking any other way. the buttons are super clicky and satisfying (they have a touch too much resistance to be super great for a rhythm game like Pop'n, but i got the thing for free so i have literally no room to complain) and generally works great when used with Spice, the emulator that's used to play most of the Bemani rhythm games.

but that isn't to say this thing doesn't have some... quirks. for one, it works normally for the most part when using it with my laptop, but once i plug it into my main desktop, it starts to get kinda funky. it'll seem normal at first, but then you go to use your keyboard or mouse or microphone and they just... don't work anymore. i guess it doesn't like interfacing with my USB ports there. it also weirdly enough is classified as a PS3 controller? one time when i was playing some of the Pop'n games on my PS3 with my friends, one of them suggested that i plug in the Pop'n Box and see if it works just as a funny joke, and funnily enough, it kind of did?? i say kind of because despite most of the buttons mapping to the PS3 layout just fine, one of them was detected as the select button, and you can't remap the controls to use the select button in Pop'n, so it didn't let me do true 9-key unfortunately. and let me make something clear, Box is extremely talented and makes a lot of awesome creations, but the wiring inside of this thing is...

...a sight to be behold. but i'd be lying if i said i didn't love the jank here, and again this was completely free and i am extremely thankful for them even putting in the time to make it at all. (besides, these wires have never really done me any wrong in the past three and a half years that i've had it, so i don't think i have anything to be worried about) maybe one day i'll finally just bite the bullet and make my own controller to replace this one, but honestly, i think i'm perfectly content sticking with this guy. i don't think i'll ever go past the Normal stages in Pop'n anyways, once you start getting into Hyper and EX is when i start to fall apart and can't follow the patterns at all. and despite its flaws and quirks, the Pop'n Box is probably my favorite controller i own. it's such a beautiful piece of work and actually functions suprisingly well! at least, for my purposes and skill level.