Building arcade cabinet with PC and PS3

[DragonflyJones]

I'm a complete newbie to building cabinets, and hardware in general but I'm building a PC/PS3 cabinet. It looks really straight forward to build a cabinet that uses either/or but when you want to use both it gets confusing. I want to use the trackball and joysticks for MAME games, which the IPAC can handle pretty easily but the MC Cthulhu seems to work better with PS3, though it doesn't support the trackball for MAME. Using both IPAC and Cthulhu would seem to be a lot of wires, if it can even be done. Any ideas on how I should approach this?

[DeLuSioNal29]

Hello and welcome to the BYOAC forums!

If you buy the Cthulhu, you won't need the iPac since Cthulhu can be wired to do both PC and PS3 (see video below).

As for the trackball or spinner issue, if you go with Ultimarc's U-Trak or GroovyGameGear's Electric Ice-T, they are USB plug and play and do not require any additional interface boards (Note that the U-Trak has a USB2 board that you can add as an option when using the checkout feature when purchasing).

The same is true for spinners:  They have their own plug and play USB interface:
GroovyGameGear Turbo Twist 2
Ultimarc SpinTrak

Also, take a look at my buddy Jason Slaughter's video he did on the Cthulu chip:


Hope this helps!

DeLuSioNaL29

[DragonflyJones]

This is some great info, thanks! Just so I'm clear, what I'm effectively doing in this case is making a PS3 joystick that can also be used with a PC, and then I just setup MAME to use the controller(s). Or am I misunderstanding something? Also, for four players, I'd need 4 PCBs and four PS3 connector cables correct?

[ark_ader]

Get an xarcade.  Its cheaper.