So I'm finally biting the bullet and making my own raspberry pi old school emulator thingamabob. In the interest of space, I'm not going to do a full cabinet, but just do the controls portion. When thinking of my setup though, I had an idea, but I'm not quite sure how to pull it off.
My idea is to have the raspberry pi in one of those mini snes cases you see on amazon, which will be hooked up to my TV. Then, I'd build my 4 player control panel with all the hardware necessary to convert the buttons/joystick to keyboard commands. on the back of the control panel, I'd have an output usb port that I could connect a cable from the panel to the pi, so that when I'm not playing something, I can simply disconnect it from the pi and hide it.
The other thing I'd like to do is (and this is mostly due to my room layout) is also use the control panel as a usb hub so that i could attach usb gamepads to the control panel, and then route all the signals through the control panel back into the pi (this is mostly because of the distance from my couch to my tv).
I guess my questions are:
Would there be any issues getting flush mount usb ports? I'd like it to look as nice\professional as possible.
I haven't messed too much with multiple controls in emulation station/mame. Would the Pi/Retropie be able to swap between control panel(button/joystick) controls and gamepad controls on the fly? I guess what I don't want to happen is that if I remove the control panel, that I'd have to reconfigure everything when I swap to a gamepad, and vice versa. If it helps, the gamepad would ONLY be used for console emulation, and the gamepad controls would only be for mame/arcade titles.
TIA!