@Pongo - I have my system overclocked to 'Turbo' (use the raspi-config overclock settings to keep your warranty intact). I don't use heatsinks, they are rather unnecessary in my opinion. I used them for a while when I ran a content heavy website, but honestly, it's not a hugely significant difference, especially when running pimame. If you plan on running psx games, I really recommend overclocking to 'turbo', anything else seems a little bit too slow.

@mholgatem
for the bluetooth keyboard/mouse you suggested, will I need to do any kind of initial setup or will it be plug and play?

Here are some of the things I learned so far, much thanks to mholgatem for the help.

When it comes to controllers:
your options are as follows:
buy prebuilt joypads (tankstick has a 2 player version, $$$),
buy a usb encoder + buttons + joysticks (more customized and a bit cheaper, $$)
buy buttons + joysticks (use the gpio header, $)

Here is a link that gives instructions on wiring the buttons:
https://learn.adafruit.com/retro-gaming-with-raspberry-pi/overview

Now if you choose to buy buttons there are 2 big brands to look for if you want quality; Seimitsu, and Sanwa. Those seems to be the highest quality and most expensive. If you dont plan on doing much gaming then you can get away with Chinese made components but you get what you paid for.

As for the power supply, I ordered the Raspberry pi B+ so I need a 2 amp power supply. I will see if I can wire the screen and the pi power to a single switch later.

Any speaker would work, but if you are playing classics then high quality speakers with bass would not be necessary, so any speaker should work as long as it does not draw power from the pi (has own power supply)

At the moment I actually have a x-arcade dual stick controller ordered, I got a good deal on it because it is the older version. I can get a USB adapter for it but I think I'm gonna wire the buttons directly with the gpio header... Ill contact their customer support to see what they say before I do any cutting.

Ill keep updating this with more info as I learn more.

Also for the noobs (like myself) here is a video of how to get the pimame loaded on an SD to use in the pi:


And if I'm not mistaken, you want at least an 8 gig sd, but up to 32gig should work, nothing too slow though. I'm gonna experiment with a 32 gig class 10 (only thing I have laying around) and see what happens, I might have a 16 gig somewhere also to experiment with.

There are whole websites devoted to this topic, so it's probably beyond the scope of a thread here.

There is another option when it comes to interfacing your controls; a gamepad hack.

In theory, this is simple. You simply solder wires to the guts of a usb game pad, so that when a switch is closed on your control panel, the game pad thinks that one of its buttons has been pressed.
If you're lucky, the game pad will have a 'common ground', which means that you only need one wire for ground, and one wire for each button.

I was not so lucky. My game pads had a separate ground for 'up' and 'right'.
I used these four (two per game pad) inputs as admin buttons, because Mame doesn't care which inputs you tell it to use for which function.

So why did I go with such a complex option when there are simple solutions like the ipac and the Zero Delay?

Time, money, and the learning process.
My build was getting expensive fast, and I didn't want to spend the money for an ipac.
Zero Delays come from China (unless you want to spend the same as an ipac), and I didn't want to wait a month to finish my project.
I already had two perfectly goo game pads to hack, so I went with this method because it was free and immediately available.

The other reason that I mentioned was the learning process.
I didn't need to learn about this myself because it's pretty elementary stuff, but I'm building this cabinet with my 12 year old son, and he's not going to learn anything by simply wiring up an ipac.

Would I do it again?
Almost certainly not.
I mounted the game pad pcb's in plastic boxes, and use DB25 connectors that I cannibalized from old parallel ports for neatness and modularity.

I have ended up with two nice units. They are plastic boxes with a usb cable one end and a DB25 connector the other end.
Old printer cables plug into them and are connected to my control panel switches.

Making these nice neat modular units took a long time.
I work pretty fast, but it still took around 4-5 hours of work to complete them.
Most of that time was taken ensuring that the units were wired up identically, and meticulously labeling all the wires and keeping records of the pinouts.

I could have done it in an hour or so if I hadn't taken the time to put them in enclosures, but then my interfaces would have been fragile, and confusing to wire into the control panel.

I'm very pleased with the results, but looking back, it simply wasn't worth the time and effort that it took to do it this way.

In summary, to throw together a game pad hack is cheap and relatively simple, but doing it properly is time consuming and laborious.

Incidentally, you may come across keyboard hacks too.
With careful planning of the matrix, these were great in the days of PS/2, but usb keyboards are no good for arcade controls.

Usb keyboards interfaces don't support enough simultaneous keypresses to be useful for a standard two-player cab.