Question: Building a cocktail cabinet with a third set of controls

Hawkins409

I'm building a cocktail arcade cabinet. Of course, it will have the usual sets of controls on each side of the cabinet with a portrait screen orientation for those two players. I know PiMame will allow you to flip some games when player 1 finishes for player 2, just as it should. So that's cool. But what is even better is this... I really like the idea of adding a THIRD set of controls (two players next to each other) on the side of the cabinet. This allows two players to play games with a landscape screen orientation.

That way PAC Man is played using with the traditional cocktail controls on the ends, and Street Fighter is played with the ones on the side. With dozens of games loaded, you have to tell Mame which games to display portrait and which games to display landscape, and which controls apply.

This can be done with a PC mame emulator. Can it be done with PiMame? We looked around and could not find an answer.

Hawkins409

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? haha.

mholgatem

I don't think that there is anything built in right now (other than editing the boot config file and restarting). I could be wrong, can anyone else comment on this?

Conno123009

Yeah sorry, no idea :(
The only alternative I can think of is to pick up a old PC to replace the pi and use a different version of mame... One with three sets of control support.

Sorry

mholgatem

You could wire up a button, that when pressed, runs a script that edits the boot config file to switch the screen rotation and then reboot the system. I doubt that you will be switching back and forth between controls super often, so this may be the best way to do it if you really want to use the raspberry pi.

Hawkins409

Thank you both for your comments. Mholgatem, I like your idea. I'd have no problem with the button... you are right, you would not switch back and forth that often at all. Do you have any suggestions on where I could read up on how to create a script that edits the boot config file to switch the screen rotation and then reboot the system?

I'd like to give it my very best shot before I would pull the plug and go with an old PC. There are so many other advantages to the Pi, I'm just trying to find out if this is going to be a deal-breaker.

Hawkins409

I've built an upright arcade cabinet with a PC before, and the question I had and others have wrestled with for a long time is whether to install the screen portrait or landscape. Some arcade classics are made for portrait, others for landscape. And if you want to play both on the same machine, you have to deal with that issue. It's a big problem. People try to solve that problem in different ways... some mount the screen so it rotates. But that doesn't look right to a guy, like me, who grew up with these classic arcade machines. So the best solution I've seen to the problem is building a cocktail cabinet with the controls at the ends, and two more sets of controls on one side... as described in my original post. Hopefully he programmers at PiMame will do something to allow selection of the screen rotation under each individual game built in. There's a configuration menu already there for each game, it would be a matter of adding this to it somehow].

mholgatem

something like this: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/robot/buttons_and_switches/

should get you started in the right direction. If you aren't familiar with python, I would just do a search for finding and replacing text with python. That should be all that you need to edit the boot config

Hawkins409

Thank you all for the help. After reading about this, I think this is well beyond my ability to understand what to do

Hawkins409

I think I will use a PC instead.

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