I had built an arcade cabinet a long time ago that was making use of a USB control interface called Happ UGCI. It allows you to directly interface real video game style controls (buttons, joysticks, trackball, coin door, etc) with a PC.
It was perfect for that I was doing, except that it sucked on Linux. Back then, I actually had to write some patches for the kernel to get it all working correctly (firmware bugs in the UGCI). In addition, much of it was not accessible via USB input layer, and so I wrote a library called libugci that took advantage of the HID interface to the board.
The board allows you to connect a real coin-door, and libugci+mame will convert that to coin-door events in the software. I always wanted to complete my MAME cabinet with a coin-door so I could make money off my friends :)
The MAME code has support for libugci built-in (thanks to my patches submitted all those years ago). Installing libugci, and recompiling MAME with this support enabled will make use of it. There are also some programs for accessing the EEPROM on the board, as well as mapping events from UGCI to HID keyboard strokes (in cases where you would want that as opposed to real joy/mouse events).
So if you're a MAME junky like I am, and need that extra bit of features that only the UGCI can offer, you can download the library from:
- Tarball
- git://github.com/benmcollins/libugci.git
Good luck and happy gaming!
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