Creating a game time system

[anthonyamar]

Hi everyone.

I'm building an arcade game to put in my music studios, and I want to monetize game time rather than credits. The idea is that, because not all games can be used with credits, and because we do not want people to stand on the arcade games for hours for free, but still able to play any game/console, I would like to create a system of game time: you put a coin in the arcade, and you get 1 hour of playing. Once the hour spent, the system freeze, waiting for another coin to unfreeze the system.

For now, here's what I found and explore:

• I can easily create a script that watch with a while loop for a coin to be inserted, and then activate the system, else displaying a box asking the user to insert a coin for 1 hour of game time.
• I first thought about switching on and off controls, and It seems possible to toggle on and off the USB ports, but it seems that we can't just toggle two of the four (the two players) using a script, so maybe not the best idea.
• I don't find anything on RetroPie that seems to match this kind of feature (freeze or everything like that)
• I don't find how can I run scripts in the background while RetroPie is working, in order to watch for a coin, toggle on/off the system and display messages.

Is anyone ever tried to do something like this? Is there any workaround that I could search for to achieve something similar?

Thanks for your help!

[ByteThis]

@anthonyamar The Retropie Project frowns upon people trying to profit utilizing their software. I'm sure other people here will fill you in.