That sounds a lot like the popular d-pad mod for the PSP. God, I would play my PSP so much more if the d-pad wasn't terrible. I only managed to make my d-pad worse when I tried, so expect your mileage to vary.

As for "general gaming" with an arcade stick? Well, I suppose if you're not used to using an arcade stick, there's a lot of people who never grow to like using them, but at the very least they make 2D fighting games... well... playable, I'd have to say. They're useless for 3D gaming and most PC gaming. Platformers, shmups, fighting games, pretty much anything you'd want to play in an emulator, really, it's brilliant.

Sometimes I prefer to just have a controller in my hand more than anything. It depends on what I'm playing, really. It's the only way to play fighting games and run MAME, though. ;) I'd say it's simple, but really, I guess it's not. MAME roms come zipped up with several files (don't bother unzipping or renaming them), and oftentimes these roms have dependencies, missing files, or are just outright broken in some way. MAME's interface isn't the most user-friendly thing in the world. It's not complicated at all, really. Just more cumbersome than it really needs to be. Thankfully, you can use a version with a GUI like this (click the download at the top, it's in bold above the source code) to make things a good deal easier on yourself.

My advice? Just fuck around with it. It won't explode if you do something wrong, so experiment. Make sure to press F5 when you add new roms to populate the list, keep roms in the roms folder where it's installed, and make sure to have the neogeo bios (neogeo.zip) with your roms if you intend to play anything SNK like Metal Slug and King of Fighters.

Oh, and some companies, like Capcom, SNK, Taito, Data East, Tecmo, IREM, and Atari, for instance, have released arcade compilations (mostly on consoles, but IREM has one on DotEmu), in case you'd like to legally own some of the games you download/support the rights-holders. You don't wish this. I'm one of those people who hate them for a myriad of reasons, but their sale of used games doesn't exactly help the industry. Some game stores have professional machinery for buffing scratches out of discs. The stoned teenagers working there usually don't know the specifics on operating them, however, and I ended up with a number of games that were even less playable than when I brought them in. Of course, these days I have my own PC and do a lot more PC gaming, so that's really a non-issue now.

You might get lucky and find an employee who has a hobby in this sort of thing, but you probably won't. You're much more likely to find a desperate man in his early 30's named Alex, blatantly concerned with some sort of unmet quota, who follows you around the store and spends ten minutes trying to convince you to pre-order some Ghostbusters game you clearly have no interest in. Even if it does come with a shirt. And should you politely say "Eh, I'll think about it", they'll respond with "Don't think about it! Pre-order it!".

They could be held liable for things. Given that they steal pre-orders and sell broken XBoxes while claiming that you already showed up earlier and picked up your pre-order (and that they have it on video footage that they refuse to share and have sent to corporate), and that the used XBox your friend bought for your birthday had, apparently, been opened and tampered with since it left the store, therefore voiding your right to a refund of any kind, there's all sorts of nightmares that could emerge from services like custom work.

You don't want those clowns messing with anything they can potentially steal or destroy. You especially don't want them shipping things off to who knows where, or you're even more likely to never see it again. This is all far more than they're willing to bother with, too. Most of their clientele is kids and their parents. Maybe a niche game store with a more mature customer-base would be good, if those still existed. There's so much room for fuck-ups, I laugh just imagining the potential stories and scenarios people would have to tell. I can't wait to get my Raspberry Pi. It's gonna be so much fun. Is there anybody (technically inclined) who DOESN'T want one? :P