Arcade Machine

Projects
Participants	Control-k, Maijin, Realitygaps, Wizzup
Skills	Programming
Status	Active
Niche	Software
Purpose	Fun

Arcade Machine

We now own a <MODEL> Arcade Machine. The plan is to bring new life into the machine by putting a computer in there and hooking that computer to the joystick input and screens. The computer will run MAME and other emulators, such as Amiga or SNES emulators.

PS: I set the niche mostly to software because the electronics/mechanics are probably quite simple in this case.

Getting it to work

Input

The input can be read as PS2 (and USB); using a chip that we got alongside the Arcade Machine:

http://www.ultimarc.com/jpac.html http://www.ultimarc.com/jpac2.html

We need to hook this up to a machine and see how it exposes the input over USB. We briefly tested the PS2 output on the BIOS of some machine and it worked. If the chip does not expose a HID, we may have to fiddle around a bit to get all the software to read from the input devices. MAME is known to handle the basic PS2 input just fine (AFAIK), but for other emulators this can be a problem. Solutions include writing our own input driver or perhaps faking a device in X.

UHID, since Linux 3.6: https://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/uhid-user-space-hid-io-drivers/ Possibly this (need to verify): http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/hid/hidraw.txt

Video

We plan to replace the built-in monitor with a TFT monitor; and since we also a have computer in there we can simply hook the VGA of the computer to the monitor.

Sound

The sound works; and I think we can easily hook it to the computer as well.

Coin Input

This should be handled by the Input over PS2/USB as well.

Writing our own input driver

We can also decide not to use the chip we got with the machine and instead make our own with an arduino or similar machine.

Other uses

• We can use it to control a variety of stuff. (light, sound)
• We can hook other consoles into it.
•  ???