Don't worry about getting a stick with a button. The easiest way(AND the way that feels most natural) is to configure the game to accept moving the joystick DOWN as button #4. That way you move down to duck. It doesn't interfere with anything because Super Punch Out only uses left,right, and up. Letting the joystick center is how you body blow.
peace
Not in the arcade (or MAME). If you pull down it goes to a guard-down position (body blow). If you push up it goes to a guard-up position (head punch). It stays in either position without having to hold it there. It defaults to a guard-up position at the start of each round. This is in contrast to the NES's Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and the SNES's Super Punch-Out which is always in the guard-down position unless you are actively holding the controller up. In the case of the SNES version, pulling down is the default method of ducking which makes sense, since the game works the way you describe.
Anyway, I wouldn't think that you would necessarily need the actual arcade Super Punch-Out joystick to make it work like in the arcade. All Nintendo joysticks of that style (including the joystick on a standard Punch-Out machine) will pull up in the same manner that the Super Punch-Out joystick will; except that there had never been a function assigned/wired to it before SPO. You would just need to rig up some sort of a switch to a regular Punch-Out joystick that activated when the knob was pulled straight up I would think.
Has anyone examined a real SPO joystick setup? It shouldn't be too difficult to replicate it's function, since, it seems to me, that the function was retrofitted in an
ad hoc manner to an already existing design of joystick in the first place. Something like "Hey, you know how that, as an unintentional byproduct of design, these little joysticks of ours can pull straight up a little bit and then spring back down? What if we assigned a function to that for our new game..."
Well, maybe it wasn't an unintentional byproduct of design; maybe they had a possible future function in mind when the joysticks were designed; but the point is, all of those little Nintendo joysticks can pull up and spring back down in the exact same manner as the SPO joystick.
Old thread I know.