It's called an actuator...

It's that bit that sits at the bottom of the joystick that hits the buttons/switches when the joystick is moved. The one that I had on the Atomiswave wasn't good enough anymore.

Let me explain, but go back a bit as well.

When I finished up the JAMMA RGB-Pi build, I noticed that my controllers would stick, mainly left and right. This made configuring Retroarch hard, as it would mess up my setting when I tried to change them. Since the switches were old, I figured I'd swap them out for some new, crisp sounding ones.

Well, I was able to do it, and it did eliminate the sticking of the controls. All directions worked fine, but the diagonals. Since I mainly play fighting games, diagonals are important for blocking and special moves.

Kinda frustrating...

I was gonna break down and return the switches and get new joysticks for the cab, but before I did that, I figured that I would try changing out the actuator. I had to look for what that thing was called, so I did an image search and found the term for it on a blown up view of a typical Happ style joystick.

After Googling for a bit, I found an actuator that I could 3D print that could work.

After slicing 2 of them and 40 minutes of printing, I got these.

 These are slightly wider than the stock ones, so I hoped that they'd fit ok.

Here it is installed. Pardon the sideways pic. It's installed so the wider area of the actuator is hitting the switches.

I tested it for a while (just the left player side) and everything seemed to work better. I'll have to do further testing with it. I printed the actuators with 100% infill, so hopefully it'll last. If not, I can print more, maybe with a different filament. I'll have to change the right player on another day.

I could've tightened up the shot, I know. Anyway, the black actuator is the stock one, the white one is the printed one...you know, for comparison...The printed one is ~3mm wider than the stock one, which helped a ton with these new switches.