Arcade controller

A typical joystick is a digital input device that registers movement according to the range of motion that it is designed to detect.

There also exist common "analog" sticks that in actuality are implemented as 49-way digital, with incremental degrees of movement in each direction.

The most common reason to use a gate in an actual arcade setting is the retrofitting of an older machine that is not compatible with a new 8-way stick.

In cases such as the above, a typical solution is to use a square (diamond) or clover-shaped restrictor, which prevents the stick from entering the diagonals.

This is because most mid-grade and higher controllers use Japanese-style sticks with a traditional square gate—which is chosen because it has an equal area of throw for each direction.

American joysticks are generally made from hard plastic, with a tall, thick shaft shaped like a baseball bat (bat-top).

American buttons have a long stroke, which is associated with a clicking action (which also adds to resistance) to let the player know when the switch has been activated.

Japanese joysticks have a large spherical ball (ball-top) positioned at the top of a short, thin metal shaft.

Also, because of the shaft's low mounting height, users with large hands may find the setup to be uncomfortable and constricting.

Japanese button design is based on requiring less effort from the player to press, and as such they have short strokes and very little resistance.

SNK's AES sturdy joystick was considered by many as the best arcade stick ever to be found on a 2D console at the time.

In a licensing deal for the home version of SF IV, Mad Catz produced the Street Fighter IV FightStick Tournament Edition, the first commercially available console stick in North America to include genuine (Sanwa) arcade parts.

[13] Leverless controllers can be rather difficult to get used to at first, since a lot of muscle memory for a regular stick or a controller is lost, but the benefits for some games can be very high; games like Tekken where there are difficult just frame inputs for moves like specials are now much easier, since pressing two buttons is much more consistent than timing the movement of a joystick to a button press.

Users of leverless devices have to be careful about SOCD (Simultaneous Opposite Cardinal Directions) in which conflicting inputs both the left and right, or up and down, buttons at the same time can cause control issues in game.