i havent been able to find a decent gamepad or joystick that could be described as 'cheap'. if i had the money, i would pick up one of
these, but at 100 bucks for a 1 player stick, its a bit much. joysticks these days seem to be made for flight simulators, and i really dislike every gamepad ive looked at for the pc, including the one i settled on, the ms sidewinder. the problem is that most of those older arcade games had only 4 directions, and controllers these days can detect generally at least 8. well, todays games are more forgiving when you dont quite hit the right direction (a common problem when the d-pad is a big bubbly thing, see the sidewinder), but older games simply ignore any direction that isnt a primary compass point. and that makes pac man really hard. im very fond of the playstaion controller, and the design of the d-pad would do a damn fine job of minimising the problem i described above. so maybe something like
this would serve you well. maybe i should look into it.
~james