Interface advice needed

[menace]

Heres the situation: I will be going with a 3 panel 1 up rotary design and need some input on how to best interface the controls with the least amount of fiddling each time--heavy fiddling up front is okay though

panel 1
2 8-way rotaries (wico-style), 1 4-way and 14 buttons.

panel 2
8-way joy with 2 buttons, a spinner and a trackball to be added later

panel 3
primarily used to accomodate 2- 360 wheel assemblies with gas/brake pedals down below.  will occasionally use a 270 pc-wheel (15 pin joy connector) and will eventually have a homemade USB star wars yoke.

For the primary panel I will be getting a mk64 for the buttons and rotaries--this will cover all the buttons on all the panels i'm guessing.

Do I need an optipac for the spinner and 360's and eventual trackball or will a mame build (likely analog mame+) handle all these as dual mice?  Can the 360's be hot swappable or will they have to be plugged in before the machine starts up?

[u_rebelscum]

[snip]

panel 2
8-way joy with 2 buttons, a spinner and a trackball to be added later

panel 3
primarily used to accomodate 2- 360 wheel assemblies with gas/brake pedals down below.  will occasionally use a 270 pc-wheel (15 pin joy connector) and will eventually have a homemade USB star wars yoke.

[snip]

Do I need an optipac for the spinner and 360's and eventual trackball or will a mame build (likely analog mame+) handle all these as dual mice?  Can the 360's be hot swappable or will they have to be plugged in before the machine starts up?

If you hacked the 360s and spinner to USB mice, you could "plug and play", as long as you plugged before you loaded the game into mame(Analog+); mame checks for inputs only at start.  The other problem is you'd need to plug them in in the correct order, and if you leave them in when you turn off the computer, they might be reordered on bootup.  (A windows and USB "feature".)

OTOH, if you used only an optipac, you would not need to worry about the order you plug the 360's, spinner, and/or trackball into the otipac.  If the optipac is plugged in, mameAnalog+ will see it as if two USB mouse type devices are attacted, whether the 360s etc, are or not.  This makes it much easier to have the left wheel always control the left car.  (Yes, you can plug and unplug a device from the optipac while the optipac is attatched to a running computer.)  Also, if you leave the optipac plugged in, you can start loading the game before worrying about plugging in the 360s.

[menace]

i guess the optipac would be the way to go since i would need to scroll to the game and select it using panel 1 or panel 2 then plug in the wheels after that point.

thanks for your help u_rebel!