USB Arcade Stick Recommendations

[treismac]

Hey all.

I'm looking to buy a sweet USB Arcade Stick to bump my RetroPie M.A.M.E. experience up to the next level. I'd love to be able to grab something from AliExpress for under $50 if it plays and sounds (microswitches rock) well, but I'm willing to shell out more if the general consensus advises otherwise.

Thanks in advance!

[bb_hood]

Hey all.

I'm looking to buy a sweet USB Arcade Stick to bump my RetroPie M.A.M.E. experience up to the next level. I'd love to be able to grab something from AliExpress for under $50 if it plays and sounds (microswitches rock) well, but I'm willing to shell out more if the general consensus advises otherwise.

Thanks in advance!

I dont have any experience buying fightsticks from AliExpress, but I highly doubt that you can find a quality one for less than 50$.
If anyone has any good suggestions I would be interested as well. From personal experience, if you buy cheap fightsticks they just suck.
Did a quick browse of Ali Express's Fight/Arcade sticks and everything under 100$ looks like junk.

It may be easier if you only want something to play MAME with, idk if you have any interest in using it for PS3/PS4 as well. I recently discovered that my PS3 MadCatz fightstick is not compatible with PS4 or PC. You can find fightsticks that are compatible with PS3/PS4/PC and thats a huge plus in my opinion.

[jb143]

You could always build your own. Then you get all the parts you want in the exact configuration you want. It doesn't take expert carpentry skills either since it's basically just a box with holes drilled in the top. There are plenty of resources online, and you could build it with your Pi inside it if you wanted to do such a thing.

[Az]

Did a quick browse of Ali Express's Fight/Arcade sticks and everything under 100$ looks like junk.

Virtually every single stick on Aliexpress uses the same components; knockoff Sanwa sticks and buttons and a generic PS3 USB encoder board. The board itself supports a lot of stuff that isn't used by the sticks due to their lack of buttons, like the ability to assign rapid fire for individual buttons or to have the stick swap between being the d-pad or left analog stick. The one thing I do not like about this encoder is that it defaults to the joystick being mapped to the left analog stick rather than the d-pad, so if you use it on an actual PS3 console with PS1/PS2 games they won't work (unless you wire up an additional button) since most fighters don't support using analog sticks for movement.

You can buy a these same components (minus the stick box) for around $25 USD shipped. While not the greatest things ever the sticks are a lot more responsive than the usual crap you'll find in sticks that don't use actual arcade components. They're comparable to some of the first released Madcats Street Fighter IV stick innards. If it suits your price and you don't plan on going to Evo 2k18 with it, you should be fine. After all, you said it's being used in a Retropie MAME setup, so dropping $150 may be putting lipstick on a pig.