A very important element of any arcade machine are its buttons, joysticks, trackballs, gun grips, steering wheels, or whatever user input devices you decide you need. To play Millipede or Missile Command properly, for example, you really ought to have a trackball.

But trackballs take up a lot of space, and a cocktail table is not really the proper form factor for one. The same can be said of most of the more exotic controls.

Control Panels

I decided that the best course would be the simplest course, where each player has one joystick and a total of six buttons, arranged in two rows of three. The lower row on each side consists of a red, green and blue button. The top row for player one consists of the one-player and two-player start buttons, and a special button that flips the screen image from one player to the other.

Player two's controls are the same, except that all buttons on the upper row are black.

Joysticks

I chose the T-Stik Plus from UltiMarc, with a red ball-top handle. Not only does it look good, it has a unique feature that allows you to correctly play a larger set of arcade games.

Some games require only four directions of movement: up, down, left and right. Other games require eight directions. Playing a four-way game with an eight-way joystick can result in unexpected behavior in the game, so you really need both kinds of joystick. The T-Stik Plus solves this problem by allowing the player to lift up on the joystick handle in order to rotate a restrictor plate within the joystick assembly, resulting in switching from four-way to eight-way and back.