Controls and controller id's

[Runadumb]

I have been looking through the "show your control panel" thread with awe.  It has made me want to go the route of an arcade pedestal which housed the PC.  I currently use my HTPC with various controllers, an arcade stick, ps2 controllers, PS4 controllers running as emulated 360 pads and 2 lightguns.
This is in my living room so I can't leave all this stuff connected under the tv all the time and plugging/unplugging these in as needed messes up the controller settings in emulators.  So looking at the setups with spinners, trackballs, guns, 4 sticks, flightstick etc had me wondering how you handle this problem.  Do you only emulate MAME which makes this less of an issue? Is it not a problem so long as you never unplug anything? Is there a simple number of controls you don't go over.

Ideally my minimum would be  to have a 4 player control panel, with a trackball, flightstick and 2 guns.  However I would also like this to take over from my HTPC for emulated console games and PC titles, so I would want my DS4 controllers connected along with, potentially a bliss-box for N64, nes, megadrive controllers that would be plugged in and out as needed (though the bliss-box, if it is ever released, would always stay connected to the same USB port).  Finally a steering wheel would complete the setup. 

I feel that this is a dead-end as it will be a never ending nightmare with broken controls across various emulators but I thought I would ask.  Could any of you that have gone heavy on control options weigh in with your experience?  Some of the control panels in that thread are modular, which stuns me how you make that work, unless you just reconfigure the controls each time?

Thanks

[mgb]

Well one thing to consider is if all your controls are standard arcade controls with switches and then connected to an encoder such as the Ipac or something similar, then the encoder is the only usb device that would plug into your pc so you wouldn't have the address issue.
There are encoders that can take digital inputs such as joysticks and buttons as well as optical inputs such as trackballs and spinners.

If you use joysticks that actually connect via usb such as the ultra360s then you can get the usb addressing issue when plugging in and out multiples.
I have never dealt with this setup so hopefully someone else can chime in on that.

[Runadumb]

Ah thanks for the information. An ipac would mean at least all the arcade side works.