I tried the zippy switches in the JLF and they don't work that well with the round and octagon restrictors.
The restrictor being smaller and sitting closer to the joystick body causes the ledge on the actuator to catch occasionally.
Silent omron switches work, but for what they cost, you could almost buy the basic optical setup.
The plan for my new cab was to use the SparkCE sensor and replace the adjustment pot with some type of command line controlled variable resistor. So for shmups, it could be super sensitive and for 4-way games, the sensetivity would be low enough only one switch would be tripped at a time. I'm not done looking, but the best idea I've come up with so far for a computer controlled resistor is an LED and a photosensor.
Sigh, the more I talk about this idea, the more I want to do it, so I guess I'll go ahead and order the SparkCEs.
Hope I'm not
when I see Ond's solution.