A little confused on how many buttons

[wonkalow]

I'm trying to make my first cabinet, I'm wanting it to play ...

Atari 2600
Lynx
Genesis
NES
SNES
master system
turbo graphics 16
MAME
And Dreamcast (not off the bat, but in the future.. still not sure how that would work since it has 2 joysticks, probably not doable without having 2 joysticks for each player right?)

I was thinking I needed 6 buttons, plus 2 player start buttons, a pause button and a shift button

But I'm not sure if theres anything else important I need for any of that. I'm thinking shift will cover the things like Escape to frontend, and coin in (Shift + PlayerX start?) etc right? or will shift +other stuff use up more spots on an ipac?
And would anyone happen to know if for the non MAME emulators I could set Shift+player start to Load/Save state?

And finally, With all of those 16 buttons, and 2 joysticks and 1 maybe 2 LCD topguns, would that fit on the smaller 28 input Ipac? Im not sure how many spots joysticks or lightguns use.

[AcidArmitage]

The dreamcast has one joystick

[wonkalow]

or I meant a Joystick and a Dpad.

[XtraSmiley]

I'd go 7 buttons a person with a SFII layout and the extra 7th being slightly lower for an authentic NEO GEO setup as well as being usable for RUN in games like MK3.

Check out the pics at slikstik.com of their panels for a better idea.

I'm not sure how people have been interfacing to get the Dreamcast's analog joystick (the d-pad is standard 8 way stick).

Please post if you have any more questions.

[lanman31337]

I'm doing 7 buttons + player start.  it'll do snes and dreamcast no problem.