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Left-Buttoned Arcade Joystick for PS2?
GusherJizmac writes "I just got the Midway Arcade Treasures game for my PS2, and, as I found with Activision Anthology, the games are very difficult to play with my left thumb on the gamepad or "analog" stick. What I want is a proper arcade style joystick with big fat buttons. Even a souped-up 2600 joystick would work. The catch is that a number of those games in the arcade (and on the Atari 2600 as well) had a right-handed person holding the joystick with their right hand and using your left thumb/fingers to hit buttons. All of the arcade/retro controllers I've seen for modern systems have the stick on the left side. I guess there was some cultural shift to using your left hand, but I missed it, and I really want to play these games properly, and without building a MAME cabinet and joystick myself. Anyone have any leads on classic style controllers for PS2?"
Mad Catz Joystick
It does'nt look very classicly but does have a controller layout how you wanted, and pretty big buttons, just maybe too many for your needs.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 00JDFT/103-4105171-0097428?v=glance
A sidewinder precision pro blahblahblah. Its done well for me for years now, more so for flght sims though. Im not sure if it would specifically fit your request,butit is a solid piece of hardware.
I personally use a X-Arcade joystick.
I couldn't be happier with it. It is incredibly sturdy , and just feels right (especially for my capcom fighting games or bizarre japanese puzzle games ie. puyo puyo)
If the left buttoned nature is so important to you (and you are using mame.. ) , you could just rebind the movement to the right joystick and use the left's buttons.
I personally find left joysticked better to use.
Morals.. isn't that some fancy kind of mushroom
Real life tennis, that is.
Left handed people actually have an advantage in that sport.
Back to the topic at hand [pardon the pun]
The Left Hand doesn't carry video game controllers.
But, Lik-Sang carrys a left-handed PS2 controller
Imagine what 2 minutes of Googling for 'left handed playstation' could do for you
Oh my children... you have much to learn... Prior to 1985, lots of arcades had buttons on the left and right side of the joystick.
Then the NES came out, millions bought it, and the buttons were on the right, because that's what the Japanese in general (and Nintendo in particular) decided was right.
Combine that with the ever-increasing popularity of 2 player games, limited space on the control panels of most arcade cabinets, and the rise of conversion kits, which caused arcades to take the old dual-side-button cabinets out of service and replace them with two player games, and there you have the one-sided conclusion. Speaking of kits, Street Fighter II was the most crucial of those, and it had 6 fighting move buttons per player. Imagine the same duplicated for left and right hand:
2 players x 12 buttons + 2 joysticks + 2 start buttons - 28 holes in the control panel, which the players proceeed to beat on until it falls apart because there isn't enough wood left to keep it together. Not to mention the labor and hassle to drill and wire this panel.
So it is that joystick-on-the-left became standard.