coin acceptor retropie for non mame games

christo1992

hi all,

i am wanting to create an arcade game box but a little different.. im wanting to be able to use multiple types of roms not just mame .

ive seen a lot of tutorials for coin acceptor for MAME but none of them will work with what im trying to acheive. i want to make the coin acceptor signal the rasbery pi 3 model b to run retropie.

i had thought of disabling auto boot of emulation station so it goes to the command prompt screen on bootup.. but i am unsure where to go from there.

i have seen tutorials where the coin acceptor gives pulses to the pi then gives the relevent commands e.g while true does this and that blah blah blah

i believe that principle would work with my plans but i am new to this area and unsure of what other coding is required and where i place the coding so when i put a coin in it gives a signal to run the command to start emulationstation.

i have done a lot of googling and havent found anything that i can really relate to that will help.

any suggestions as to how i do this? or any ideas that may work?

p.s sorry if this is hard to understand. im not very good and wording what im looking for

christo1992

im doing this project as a save and play type set up. just thought ild make that stated so people didnt think i was trying to sell after

spruce_m00se

if you wait for the coin to be inserted before loading ES then you may find the boot time to be too long,
You could take the output from the coin acceptor and run it to an arduino, then make the arduino turn the power on and off for the monitor according to the coins entered etc.

Xeon

@spruce_m00se
or even disable the controls till a coin is inserted.
Problem is detecting game over events in non mame games.

spruce_m00se

@xeon yeh thats true, I hadnt thought of that,
disabling the controls may not be the best idea, nor turning off the monitor, I think the best way would be to diable the buttons, so you can move around the games list and watch video previews etc, then you have to insert a coin to continue.
the obvious choice here would be to use a pandoras box 4 which is meant for this kind of use, but if using the pi then the only other thing I can think of is to use the coinmech to start a timer, so you get 10 mins of play for 1 euro for example, no matter how many times you die, that could be a good idea.

you could lock the controls out in the game when the timer expires, then give them a length of time with audio warnings or whatnot to put more coins in and continue, and after a set time, if no further coins are inserted then reset back to the main menu with the buttons locked out.