"The Arcade" from SUZO was the best joystick ever made - IMHO. Still have one back from my C64-times (that means 1984) and still playing DGalaga on my old A4000 once a while.
Just take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arcade_(joystick)
At http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~stahl/com/index_uk.html#1 you can find a plan for an interface to connect those joysticks to the game-port.
Haven't found something like USB <-> 9-pin arcade; but as I'm not into hardware I would have no use for this anyway.
