It would take me a while to get all my current PC game controllers together for a photo, but I might as well comment on some of the ones I have now, as well as the ones I had in the past. I'll limit this to gameport/serial gear for now, because this is VOGONS and I'd have to double the length including all the USB stuff I've tried.
-Microsoft SideWinder 3D Pro
This was the stick I mainly played with back in the late 1990s. I didn't think much of it then because it wasn't a HOTAS, but now I have a newfound respect for its optical sensor system and analog gameport compatibility.
However, it has a really short throw and the spring system feels weird around center. Makes it difficult to make fine adjustments.
-Mad Catz Panther XL
A most unusual stick with a trackball derived from the FPgaming Assassin 3D right into the base, this thing was mainly pitched at FPSs in an age where WASD + mouselook wasn't quite the standard yet. It actually has proper mouselook with the trackball in Hexen, curiously enough.
However, the stick itself feels really cheap, and I'm talking sloppy in the center. I suspect it's because the gimbal springs don't provide a whole lot of force by themselves and most of the resistance comes from the rubber boot.
There's a passthrough for gameport rudder pedals, but there's a major setback in that I CANNOT calibrate the rudder axis properly with the Windows drivers installed. It's always very off-center, and I know it's not the pedals' axis pot at fault. The DOS calibrator works fine, though. I have no idea what's going on there, but it seriously cripples the Panther XL's usefulness when the only viable rudder axis control is through emulation on the trackball, and that obviously means no sense of center.
I'd probably use it more if I could just fix that ONE problem with the rudder pedal port, because that trackball would be really nice for slewing target designator cursors around.
-Logitech WingMan Interceptor
This is, without question, the best stick Logitech has ever built. Ergonomic grip, THREE hat switches, three pushbuttons and a two-way digital rocker switch right underneath the trigger. It would make a great HOTAS if there were a full-size throttle to go with it instead of that little throttle lever on the base.
Also, the main stick axes use some kind of contactless sensor, possibly Hall effect with a bunch of PCB traces and metal-lined wedges hovering over them. Unfortunately, this is also what makes them much more difficult to PCB-mod with a USB controller.
There's no keyboard emulation here; it's a Logitech ADI digital gameport stick without any analog fallbacks, so don't think about using it in DOS. It's an awesome stick for Windows 9x, however, if you've got some gameport rudder pedals handy and don't mind resorting to keyboard emulation for two of the hat switches because most games don't know how to properly interpret DirectInput hat switches 2, 3 and 4 (they're not mapped as sets of four DirectInput buttons like modern sticks).
Windows 2000 and XP recognize the stick fine, but have a problem in that there's no way to enable rudder pedals with it. If not for that, again, it would probably be one of my main retrogaming sticks.
-Suncom SFS Stick and Throttle
The stick is ergonomic and easily has one of the best gimbals of any joystick I've ever used, though it's a complete pain to take apart and leave the rubber boot intact. Thrustmaster/Guillemot would go for something similar years later in the T.16000-M and HOTAS Warthog, only they somehow did it WORSE. These old Suncom sticks still feel better.
However, the SFS stick has two main flaws that keep me from using it: crappy slide pots and chorded buttons for the hat switch ala CH Flightstick Pro. That second point means it's no good for Wing Commander/Privateer and anything else that needs you to depress multiple buttons simultaneously. I get the feeling the F-15 Raptor/Talon/Eagle sticks don't have this problem thanks to keyboard emulation.
As for the throttle, it's probably the best-feeling throttle I've ever used. Nice, long throw, handles that are solidly in place and without too much of a gap in between, gentle idle/AB detents, and a generally quite ergonomic switch layout. It still uses those crappy slide pots, though, and they made the dumb mistake of making the boat switch and china hat/weapon mode switch programming bank selects instead of actual keyboard emulation controls.
You also have to be careful with mapping keyboard commands to it, because while it will support modifiers, chorded inputs aren't held. For instance, if you need to hold, say, Ctrl-B to retract your speedbrakes, it'll almost immediately let go of Ctrl after you press the button, likely to keep from interfering with other keyboard emulation mappings on the other buttons and switches.
Due to analog gameport limitations, the left handle takes up the rudder axis. You can disable it with a hardware switch if you have proper rudder pedals, but that also detracts from one of the nicer features of the throttle itself. Suncom was probably too ahead of their time with it, considering that USB was just on the horizon and flight sims with proper multi-throttle support didn't quite exist yet.
One of these days, I'm gonna mod that throttle with a modern USB board and switches more true to the F-15E, like a real analog antenna elevation rotary on the left throttle, proper analog slew control with click-down (maybe just cheating with a gamepad analog stick) and a weapon mode switch that holds its position instead of springing back to center.
-Thrustmaster F-22 Pro (not currently owned)
Thrustmaster's top-of-the-line gameport stick, before they went bankrupt and Guillemot bought them out. Fully-functional F-16C-style grip with better ergonomics and a few more functions than the CH Products Fighterstick, metal gimbals, the first to feature logical programming...this was THE stick to have.
But the gimbals were cheap pot metal that had a nasty center play problem, an issue that would come up again in the later HOTAS Cougar. The analog gameport interface also meant only four DirectInput buttons sans hat switch and some axis spiking, though it wasn't until later that I realized said spiking was the result of not having a modern USB controller reading the pots (high-quality CTS ones similar to what CH Products uses) in voltage divider mode.
There's a set of rare SWF22 digital upgrade chips that can be used with the F-16 FLCS/F-22 Pro and F-16 TQS throttle that give them much better Windows support with a digital gameport interface, double the logical flags (funnily enough, the HOTAS Cougar regressed back to 48 flags) and all the DirectInput controls you could ask for, but at the complete expense of analog gameport support and DOS game support along with it. I wish I could get my hands on a set, but for the prices they usually fetch, I'd rather put it toward a modern USB HOTAS setup.
-Microsoft SideWinder Freestyle Pro
It's a typical gamepad...with a not-so-typical-for-the-era accelerometer. Microsoft beat Nintendo and Sony to the punch there, and it actually handles pretty well in the bundled Motocross Madness, I have to say. No real latency or spiking, and the lack of a tactile center wasn't a problem for that game.
However, it has THE MOST GODAWFUL, INACCURATE D-PAD EVER. No, seriously, the Xbox 360 D-Pad is downright godlike compared to the Freestyle Pro's piece of crap that tends to have you pushing down-right when you wanted right, among other similar problems all around. It's quite a shame, because the rest of the pad feels quite nice and it's ergonomic to hold, but there's no way I can recommend this thing without some significant D-Pad modification.
-Spacetec SpaceOrb 360
Successor to the Spaceball Avenger, competitor to the Logitech CyberMan 2, predecessor to today's 3Dconnexion devices, and THE controller for Descent, Forsaken and any other 6DoF game you can think of...but most especially Descent. I'll explain why later.
The ball feels a bit loose with a bit of play, but otherwise, the tactile feeling's great and the force sensor array or whatever it is provides clean, accurate axis output. You just work the ball like you'd want to move in a 3D space. It's a bit tricky to not accidentally input across other axes when you just want to move along one or two, but coordinated motions are so much easier that it's hard to go without it afterward.
The main setback is that there's only six buttons; Descent II has enough functions that I still need to reach for the keyboard now and then. It would've been nice if the ASCII Sphere 360 had a PC equivalent with its additional buttons and D-Pad.
After playing my share of Descent with the SpaceOrb in its original DOS incarnations, I played today's source ports and the turning just felt all WRONG. I later found out why: Spacetec IMC outright removed the turn rate limits on Descent II somehow, and the DescentBB community actually thinks using one is cheating because of that, especially with older SpaceWare versions having a 180-degree flip button from what I've heard. Said source ports do not implement this, so it feels all gimped even if I set up my 3Dconnexion SpacePilot as the controller of choice.
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