Analog stick or keyboard interface?

[fba]

I am wondering what people think about the differences between an analog stick like the UltraStick 360, versus a standard 8-way stick using a keyboard interface module like the i-pac?  Do you find that most emulators work better with one or the other?

[McHale]

I used to favor keyboard encoders (I use the Hagstrom KE72) but would only use a USB joystick controller now (not to be confused with a USB keyboard encoder).  They are cheaper, more importantly MAME has a built in 2-way/4-way/8-way mapping for each game if using a USB joystick (and works great even if it's a simple 8-way joystick) and there's virtually no custom setup.

I picked up a couple of these for about $25 a piece and they were really well: 

Whether or not you want to go the analog route or not is a matter of personal taste.  Some people like to feel the 4/8-way gates and the spring resistance.  I do.

-Mc

[GeoMan]

Ultrastick 360 is the obvious choice! MAME automatically maps it for 2-way, 4-way, e.t.c. (except Q-Bert), you can manually change the maps if you want to and it is recognized as an analog PC joystick so you can use it with any software that supports joysticks.

You can connect up to 8 physical buttons on it without any extra circuity and you can have a total of 15 different buttons (the 8th button acts as "shift" so shift + button1 = button 9).

[TKW4rr10r]

Ultrastick 360 is the obvious choice! MAME automatically maps it for 2-way, 4-way, e.t.c. (except Q-Bert), you can manually change the maps if you want to and it is recognized as an analog PC joystick so you can use it with any software that supports joysticks.

You can connect up to 8 physical buttons on it without any extra circuity and you can have a total of 15 different buttons (the 8th button acts as "shift" so shift + button1 = button 9).

I've read this a few times and wanted to verify something:
So if in my CP I have 8 dedicated buttons and a Joy per player, can I wire all 8 through the 360, or is the "8th button" actually a shift, so I could only wire 7 up? I plan to have at least 2 sets of controls on my 4 player CP have 8 buttons each, so that little piece of info would be handy when I start to build.