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

There's a basic UvA machine in the Arcade Box; with Wake on Lan. Just send the WOL packet to the right mac address, which can be found on the machine:

 00:21:70:03:31:1b

Here is an example command line that will turn on the machine (etherwake defaults to eth0, so wlan0 is specified)

 sudo etherwake 00:21:70:03:31:1b -i wlan0

Input

Arcade Machine 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

The Arcade Machine input exposes itself as a single keyboard over USB and PS/2. This is problematic for most games, with the exception of MAME and a few emulators.

The chip does not expose more than one HID, we will have to fiddle around a bit to get all the software to read from the input devices as two seperate 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.

See the "Writing out own input driver" below for more details.

Other Input

We attached two PlayStation controllers, but I (Wizzup) am not a big fan of them. Regardless, there's a USB hub so feel free to plug in other controllers! It would be nice to have proper SNES ones.

This may be useful: https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/f08d/ and http://www.amazon.com/Classic-USB-Super-Nintendo-Controller-PC/dp/B002JAU20W Or we can make our own.

Coin Input

This should be handled by the Input over PS2/USB as well. It is probably mapped to a key.

Video

We replaced the built-in monitor with a TFT monitor.

Sound

The sound works and is connected to the computer as well.

Games

Emulators:

• ZSNES (SNES)
• UAE (Amiga)
• MAME
• ...

Writing our own input driver

What we want to do is the following: - Turn input from one keyboard into several virtual joystick devices:

 /dev/input/jsX

Useful:

• CONFIG_INPUT_UINPUT
• http://gillibert.fr/andre/open-projects/filter_evdev.html
• http://thiemonge.org/getting-started-with-uinput

Other uses

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