The Junkfood Arcade LBX Is Bad and I am Mad

July 26, 2023

For most of the people reading this, you probably already know who Junkfood is, and likely have strong opinions on them and their behavior towards the open-source community (see: flatbox incident) or for their affordably priced, easily portable Snack Box Micro. Personally, and potentially spoiling the rest of the review, I think they're a bunch of hack cunts and the FGC would be better off leaving them in the dust with Hitbox Arcade. Last year, JFA dropped the LBX (as far as I know it is pronounced “lunchbox”, a concept that should get someone fired), their take on the Boxx, a 20-button SSBM focused digital controller. I bought one, and now you get to bear witness to my descent into insanity.

Part 1: The Good(-ish)

The case is pretty nice. There's lots of places with pretty bad flashing on the key holes, but other than that it's got a basically perfect amount of heft: light enough to take with you wherever, heavy enough to feel stable on your lap.

Part 2: The Bearable

The controller comes stock with matte, concave keycaps atop Kailh choc red switches. I think the entire choc family is fantastic, but buying red, white, or brown chocs comes with the issue of them shipping with in switch stablizers. These piece of shit wires are extremely rattly and noisy and can lead to a less desirable feel. While it's not a difficult process to remove them, it can be a time consuming one, and in general I think they would've done better to ship with something like the 40g silvers, 35g pro reds, or even the 20g pinks, all of which ship without the in-switch stabilizers. Additionally, I think concave caps are something that can be dealt with, but are objectively worse than convex caps, particularly for any game where you might want to only press a button for fewer than 3 frames (LIKE A GAME WHERE THE MOST POPULAR CHARACTER HAS A 3 FRAME JUMPSQUAT AND IS EXTREMELY DEPENDENT ON SHORT HOPPING). Convex caps allow for easy swiping presses for even reliable single frame inputs, while concaves can cause your finger to get stuck for a fraction of a second more. In a game where the difference between holding a button for 4 frames instead of 3 can be the difference between bairing for the kill and getting up air tech chased into rest, this matters imo.

Part 3: The “This is so bad someone should be fired”

The LBX shipped in May 2022, well into the span of people making their own DIY boxes based on the firmware of people like Crane, Arte, and Haystack (creators of CL-FW, pico-rectangle, and HayBox respectively), and the hardware of things like the openframe1 and the controllers from rana digital. This means that the Raspberry Pi Nano, powered by the RP2040 chip, was a known quantity for quite some time. As such, it is disgustingly inexcusable for this controller to ship with an Arduino Leonardo (technically ATmega32u4) as its brain. The 32u4 caused me to deal with infinite usability issues, randomly breaking on certain setups, requiring a full 5V instead of the 3.3V that the nano can use (thus not working on wiis/gcs with broken 5V rails, only working with official Nintendo or Mayflash GCC adapters, and only if both USB ports are plugged in), not having an in-built adapter mode like can be used with pico-rectangle, and generally being an extremely limited and outdated platform. As I said, the RP2040 was an available chip, and does all of these things plus infinitely more features I've not been able to capitalize on. It is appalling to me that JFA was willing to ship a product with hardware this bad for $40 more than the Frame1 Light.

When the LBX first came out, it was powered by firmware made by JFA for the controller. This would be fine if the firmware was usable in the slightest, but unfortunately it was designed by JFA devs and designers, so it was fucking miserable. Most notably, changing between layouts for games required you to Completely Reflash Your Firmware, meaning you couldn't play both PM and Melee at the same weekly without bouncing back and forth to a laptop to reflash between sets. This is, to put it politely, fucking horseshit, and JFA explicitly knew it. Their actual solution was to tell people to flash HayBox onto it, but then not support anyone having issues with HayBox because no one at JFA can do their fucking job. This left one place to be tech support for LBX users, the Crane's Lab discord server. Not at all associated with JFA, and entirely run by Crane for the purpose of building a resource hub for DIY boxx makers. I had joined right when I had gotten my LBX for some tips on how to reconfig HayBox to work with the layout I prefer, but quickly became JFA's tech support team until LBX support was explicitly banned by Crane because no one was getting paid for doing their labour. This is a fucking abhorrent way to treat the open source community who may otherwise be willing to work with you in good faith. Instead, you looked at them as people who have already done the hard part for you and used them like a third party IT firm instead of hobbyists trying to do a thing for other hobbyists. This happened fresh off the heels of the aforementioned flatbox controversy, in which JFA pressured developer jfedor2 to take down the design files of their controller.

Part 5: Conclusion

I can no longer recommend anything JFA sells in even neutral faith. They have proven themselves as bad actors willing to prioritize their pockets over everything else. They harass open-source developers in the same spaces as them, abuse those who in those spaces before them, and then deliver subpar hardware at premium prices with no intention of making them even remotely usable by standards even a year before their product dropped. Ideally JFA would be left in the dust by a company or maker with actual fucking ethics to their work practices, but until then all I can do is recommend other products. For those looking for a boxx, the superslab by prong studios looks promising, the frame 1 light is probably the best value grab when its available, and many makers like rmz and rana digital are making controllers in limited quantities or even for commission, but expectedly at higher prices. Alternatively, building one's own box isn't too difficult provided one has introductory soldering skills and tools available, but I'm well aware this isn't a universal solution. I'd be keeping eyes on rana for now, who's absolutely killing it between the standard digital controller (which is open source and 3d printable, with a good number of people selling prebuilts), and has the most promising prospect in the market with the Tadpole, a pocket sized controller with mouse switches as the base switches. Definitely keep an eye on that (twitter/@ranadigital).