Looking to replace my X-Arcade stick for PC shmupping

[Mischief Maker]

Could someone tell me what the gold standard is right now for PC arcade sticks for people not quite ready to custom build their own? Are sticks for the 360 in any way glitchy or incompatible with Doujin shmups like, say, Crimzon Clover or Sora?

Thanks for any input!

[Barrakketh]

Are sticks for the 360 in any way glitchy or incompatible with Doujin shmups like, say, Crimzon Clover or Sora?

Short answer: Yes. The stick won't be recognized in most (all?) doujin games because the 360 controller driver only registers stick movement as the POV hat (d-pad in most games), while doujin games only look to the left stick for input. Dual-modding or an annoying workaround would be in order.

[captpain]

I have an HRAP3 for PS3 and it works with no troubles or special setup in Windows 7 x64. There's a little switch on the joystick that lets you select if the joystick acts as the left analogue stick, right analogue stick, or d-pad, so there are no worries about doujin games.

[Mischief Maker]

The PS3 stick runs as a generic joystick in Windows? No special drivers needed?

If so, sweet! Which one would you suggest as the best for shmups?

[brokenhalo]

The madcatz te stick would work for you as well. Both the 360 and the ps3 version will work on pc without any drivers. They both have the d-pad/ analog stick selection switch, but im not sure if that works for pc or not. The few doujins ive played either worked fine using the ingame setup, or i used joy2key as a mapper.

[Mischief Maker]

Now that I know they'll work, which stick in the $100-150 price range is the best at the moment?

[Paro-da]

Now that I know they'll work, which stick in the $100-150 price range is the best at the moment?

Mad Catz TE: I personally have two xbox 360 versions and love them. You could always use xpadder or similar programs to get around games that don't like the x360 drivers.
http://www.amazon.com/Street-Fighter-Fi ... 672&sr=8-3
Every once in a while the madcatz store does promo's for these sticks anywhere from 10-20% off

Hori Real Arcade Pro V3 SA
http://www.amazon.com/Real-Arcade-Pro-V ... 72&sr=8-15

Hori Real Arcade Pro Older Version with Sanwa stick and hori buttons if your on a budget or feel like changing buttons or color scheme later.
http://www.amazon.com/Playstation-Real- ... 875&sr=1-2

If you op for a TE or HRAP, either way you'll end with a great stick for the price.

[brokenhalo]

Personally, i'd recommend a 360 TE. Super easy to change out parts, and fairly easy to do various multi-console mods to. Also, looking around on another thread here in hardware, it seems that some people have problems with the ps3 TE on pc. Dont know how widespread that is, but something to be mindful of.

[Thjodbjorn]

I use a Hori Real Arcade Pro EX-SE (xbox 360) for the PC.

Some games (not many) recognize it off-the-bat. For Crimzon Clover, I use "Xpadder", a cheap program to make it appear to be a keyboard (left is the left arrow, etc.). It works really well for that.

I also tried using my PS3 hori RAP v3 SE, but for some reason, I cannot shoot AND move at the same time, which is kind of a dealbreaker.

[Mischief Maker]

Now I'm confused all over again.

Does the Xbox 360 HRAP have the switch to change the stick from pov to directional buttons to left stick? What about the VLX?

Do PS3 controllers map as generic joysticks?

Is X-Arcade still the best there is for PC-native arcade sticks?

[shmuppyLove]

It's really hard to say that one arcade stick will work in every situation - the PC is such a flexible platform, and every software/game is a little bit different.

No matter what, at some point, you're going to have to work around something. Comes with the territory.

e.g. Years ago, I bought a Logitech dual-analog gamepad for the PC, and it worked fantastic for just about every game. Then when the Xbox 360 came around and the whole Games for Windows thing took off, it didn't work all that well in newer games because Microsoft changed the way that joysticks worked in DirectX. So I eventually replaced it with the 360 controller for Windows, which is also fantastic, but as mentioned earlier the d-pad is recognized as a POV hat, which a lot of older games aren't programmed to use, so you have to use something like XPadder or Joy2Key.

And don't even get me started on what they did with the analog triggers ... REALLY dumb imo

As for sticks, right now I have a custom stick that's PSX / USB dual-modded, and an SNES Super Advantage that I've added USB to.