RetroSticks® for SEGA Game Gear - RetroSix

There is no documentation or easy to follow document guide, instead, you have to watch a 24 minute youtube video.

The LEDs and the potentiometer screws are not in the most easy to discern places (which LED and which screw goes to which direction? There is no silk screen to tell you! Gotta look it up! And because there is no documentation, You have to skip around the you tube video to find the part where he mentions it.)

Also, The calibration makes diagonals basically impossible. You can kind of chose if you want a diagonal on up right OR down right by biasing the stick in that direction... but not both. So top down games with 8 direction movement are basically unplayable.

The joystick itself, being a Nintendo Switch stick, is comically small. And looks ridiculous. I understand this is likely availability of parts, and perhaps a better sized stick could be used in the future.
The dust cover is barely larger than the hole in the shell, so it is always popping out of position, and looking tacky.

Over all I was excited to have this mod, but the pay off was lack luster and disappointing. do not recommend.

No matter how it was calibrated it would still input up right when holding right and down left when holding left

Once calibrated, as per the YouTube video, this stick is a great option that feels much more natural than the older style directional pad. Easy solder points. Well worth the money.

I installed this in a custom game gear kit. I had immense difficulty trying to calibrate it so that it's balanced enough in all directions, but I still get some vertical drift with the horizontal directions and it makes controlling games or navigating menus overall quite difficult.
This came with a rubber diaphragm to cover the opening around the stick. this however was of such a size that makes it look comical, bulging and moving uncontrollably, and overall looking worse than without.

Regarding the retrosix stick, I have installed like instructions provided, but unfortunately, it not work properly, only down key on stick works, the other is impossible to calibrate, seems to have an issue in the stick part.
About the shell, quality is good and came everything like expected, fits very well in my old game gear.

I want to preface that I'm not a professional but have recapped many game gears successfully. I really wanted to love this item, but it has been problematic on both installs for different reasons. I'll start with generic feedback first.

The stick itself is really hard to install because of the fact its meant to fit both 1 chip and 2 chip boards. The extra appendage it has to reach the 2 chip board solder pads means that it sits on top of the solder pads you need access to when working with a 1 chip board. The only way I could get it to reach easily is by removing the solder on the PCB first and resoldering with less solder so that the retrostick sits flatter on the board. Since the extra appendage is there for reaching the 2 chip board it also makes soldering to the m12 pad very far away. This makes for making a join a difficult task.

With my first stick (before I was sent a replacement) I actually got the stick soldered and responding to the troubleshoot LED signals. The problem was in the calibration step I could not get the north west corner to respond at all no matter how much I calibrated the potentiometers...They ended up sending a replacement.

After I received my second one, I could only get two lights to light up on the LED. Without much direction on what to do I was told to calibrate the pots more...In doing so I was able to get all 4 lights to show on the troubleshoot port, but the lights would not respond to any stick movement at all. I redid my solder joints to see if that would help to no avail. R6 offered to send another one, but I don't know if I feel like dealing with this product a third time to install and put my working game gear motherboards I have under anymore stress...I really really wanted to like this item but...

If the only solution to solving the problems with the stick is to send another one its almost not worth the heartbreak again in having to deal with all of the above or potentially new issues...