Button Layouts for Popular Fightsticks

Yesterday's post on fightsticks reminded me of a discussion that several of my FGC buddies and I have had regarding button layout. More then a few have "complained" that the Qanba Q4RAF's buttons were "too close to the stick" and would cause them to play poorly. I maintained that there was no difference between the Q4RAF's button-joystick spacing and the Mad Catz TE's button-joystick spacing.. which are the only points of reference that I have since those the only two sticks that I currently own.

I decided to download the templates from Art's Hobbies (who I highly recommend if you plan to customize your stick... they do very good work!) and compare the templates. What I found was that 4 out of the 6 templates that I compared had almost exactly the same distance between the joystick and the leftmost buttons. The Qanba Q4RAF, the Mad Catz TE, the Mad Catz TE2, and the Hori HRAP V3 were nearly identical in their spacing. In fact, the Hori HRAP V3 and the Qanba Q4RAF were almost pixel-for-pixel the same. The only difference was that the joystick hole for the HRAP was just a tiny bit smaller.The TE and TE2 were also nearly identical. The TE2 just had ever so slightly bigger button holes.The SFxT Mad Catz stick was a few millimeters further away than the ones I mentioned and the Mad Catz Soul Calibur V stick was waaaay over to the right. Honestly, that's more variation that I thought there would be on that SCV stick.

Anyway, take a look for yourself: (CLICK PHOTO TO EMBIGGEN):

 (NOTE: Most of you probably know this, but the Eightarc Fusion stick is the same as the Q4RAF but without the start button on the top. That's why I didn't bother putting it in.)

You can download all the templates from Art's Hobbies yourself if you'd like: http://www.tek-innovations.com/arthobbies/index.cfm?loc=about&sub=templates


UPDATE: Someone asked me for JUST the Q4RAF vs the TE layout. I left the HRAP V3 because it's literally the same exact layout as the Q4RAF.