Johnperkins: You know what? I never even considered whether or not positions 3 and 4 would even use 49-way joys. I think what motivated the thought of using the 49-ways was that all joysticks would feel the same in any of the player positions and would behave the same way. No, no... I know I'm not going to get every game to play the same. I think that's the fun challenge of building control panels though. Getting as close as possible to original layouts with the least number of controls and the least amount of clutter.
I'm sure there's a mathematical equation that we can use to come up with the PERFECT control panel though. You know... like facial beauty is actually a function of symmetry.
Samshaw: I'm going to look into those joysticks you mentioned. You have me interested in the price/performance margin. Thanks
Mccoy: Thanks for the tips on the 49-way. I had a limited understanding of what it would take to implement one and Shardian mentioned that 49-ways are not really mame compatible right now without an encoder (do I have that right?). I have plenty of wiring to consider without a distinct 49-way encoder to work too much with at the moment. I'll probably take your suggestion and use 49-ways in the 1 and 2 player positions and then some nice 8-ways on the corners. Good call and I appreciate your input. It helped.
DaveMMR: Yup, you guessed it. I really like the games that utilize the 49-ways
Oh, and you were also correct in that I was looking for not only very smooth and consistent joys, but also uniformity throughout the CP. I think I can achieve visual uniformity with ball tops and don't necessarily have to worry about uniform fluidity on the player 3 and 4 positions. I probably won't play there much.
To any moderator listening in: an interesting sticky would be a list of the top ten (twenty?) joysticks, pushbuttons, spinners, etc based on their "debut" date. This board is WAY too big to search through these days to gleen quick information about what works well and what doesn't. I wouldn't know how to make the list or how hard it would be to maintain (a key factor), but I would certainly have used it. I have seen the FAQ about hardware and it also helped me with this.
I'll post back here when I've come up with a cursory grocery list. Let you guys have a wack at my hardware considerations.