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A couple of years ago Sanwa updated their venerable JLF joystick mechanism, making what appeared to be a small change to the 30 year old stick.  Their release notes were short, and beyond the usual 'it's better!' fluff it was only the materials that rated a mention: they swapped the materials used in the pivot and the substrate.  They also changed the shape of the substrate, giving it a wider platform, with only a few other tweaks to some rarely used mounting holes.  And they changed one letter: the JLF became the JLX.


The Sanwa JLX

The JLX stick was a great experience out of the box.  It felt smooth and it worked well, but all joysticks feel great when they're brand new, dust free and slick with exactly the right amount of the right kind of grease.  I bought a pair of them for an arcade machine I was assembling, and they were great.  It was more expensive but basically the same as the JLF.


The old JLF (left) and new JLX are interchangeable

But it was, effectively, an incremental update.  Possibly just change for the sake of it, because 30 years is a long time to do nothing.  But, foreshadowingly, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Sanwa fixed it.

I didn't play with the JLX much, while I worked on other projects.

Some time later Sanwa released something new, based on the JLX.  They replaced the clicky microswitches with silent adjustable ones.  The JLX-TPML uses drop-in replacement switches with a tiny yellow dial allowing the user to change the activation point, making them switch on sooner or later than default as the stick was moved.

This seemed like it might be an actual innovation, and I can't resist a New Thing, so I ordered one immediately.  It's exactly the same as the JLX, but the switches.


The adjustable dial

I didn't like it.  For me, the click is feedback that I can feel and hear, and the stick feels mushy without it.  I think the idea of an adjustable switch is a good one, if it also adjusts the throw - but this solution does not do that.  The stick feels exactly the same, soft and lifeless, and there's no difference in the feel whether it activates two tenths of a millimetre earlier or later.  It feels like a gimmick to me, like a keyboard with different activation depths, sold to players trying to buy better skills. 

But I might be a cynic.  For sure I am not a fighting game player whose reflexes are so elite that this difference matters to me.  Even if it did, losing the click is a hard compromise to accept.


The adjustable switch: turning the dial moves one leaf closer to the other

But I noticed something else: when at its earliest activation point, the stick was prone to reflex inputs.  That is, if you pressed one direction and released the stick, it would bounce back too far and activate the opposite direction before returning to centre.  There are a lot of things at play here, so I tried to figure it out.


The default, softest spring, and the stiffest (red) option and installed on the JLX (right)

I swapped out the springs with Sanwa's alternative offerings.  Their JLF-SP spring series offers a range of stiffness and progressivity, and four lovely colours.  None of them solved the problem. 

The red spring, the stiffest at double the resistance, made the problem better but it didn't go away entirely.  I adjusted the adjusters, moving the activation point farther away from the stick, and this didn't fix the reflex input problem either.  I swapped the 30 gram knob for a 10 gram hollow knob from Buttercade, and that made it much better, but still didn't fix the problem.

And I thought, I don't remember having this problem with the normal JLX.  So I went back to the JLX and tested it, and sure enough it had the reflex input problem too.  It wasn't a one-off, both of my units did the same thing.  Two years had gone by since the JLX was released and I was finally testing them out.  I messaged a friend who sells the things, and asked if they'd had any feedback about the adjustable stick, and he replies funny you should ask...  Apparently Sanwa had just announced the JLX2. 

Two years after the release of the JLX, Sanwa is quietly releasing an update.  They don't say much publicly, except to point out a change to the washer which is now a different shape, and the colour of the actuator is black instead of white.  But they do mention to their dealers that the reflex input issue was a reason for the redesign.

By way of verification, I put the silent adjustable switches in the older JLF mech, and they worked fine without the reflex input problem. 

I still don't like them.  Mushy feeling stick is mushy.

Maybe, if it ain't broke...