Hi all,
This forum is EXACTLY where I need to be

here goes ..
BackgroundI decided to make a retro gaming setup but it's already getting much bigger than I first expected. I have chosen RetroBat as my UI of choice (seems pretty good, support is excellent).
My idea is to use a rising coffee table as my control panel, with the following attributes:
Left hand side - Player one controls, Right hand side Player 2 controls - Middle section for Analogue setup. For example, left/ Right hand sides have 360 degree steering wheels (for Super Sprint). I've made these from rotary encoders, an Arduino Micro and some software to make it present as a HID/Mouse courtesy of AI/GPT. After having a nightmare with a gear shift, I've decided to use a joystick as a gear shifter, with a restrictor to only allow vertical movement. I have 2 Siden light guns and want to get a trackball but am umming over the size (will probably go for the 3" ball size)
Middle section I am thinking of Logitech G29 steering wheel set up with gearstick and maybe a flight stick.
Control PanelAgain ummimg over Ulitmarc's Ultimate IO and U-HID encoders, to allow flawless set up and operation (but don't know if that's overkill - probably a good idea, I think)
buttons I'm starting with LED buttons but may switch to the fancy RGB ones and then use LEDBlinky to do some funky lighting (not bothered about light show but like the idea of buttons lighting up the colour they should be for the emulator I select), e.g. Xbox light up in one colour order and Nintendo lights up in it's own (different) colour order.
Might get some fancy neon LED strips for the top and the bottom .. maybe ..
Wiring / Set Up This is the hardest bit for me to get my head around. I have cheapy microswitch pedals, which I want to use for Super Sprint (as the game uses digital accelerator/gas pedal only) and for Time Crisis. However, when playing OutRun, in order to be in-keeping, I should use a analogue foot pedal for accelerating and therefore the G29 for steering too.
I have played around with manually setting up different buttons in MAME per game as that seems to work but it seems like a lot of set up ( I might just need to bite the bullet and just do it for each non standard game)
Then there's the mouse buttons for the trackball .. should I use 3 separate buttons or map them to the existing arcade buttons ..
Layout I'm thinking of just figuring this out myself using looking at loads of previous setups to give me a feel of where things should go
Lastly, the idea is to have a false top for the coffee table lid, so it all gets concealed when not in use.
Any ideas/pointers, links to useful videos etc VERY WELCOMED :-)
Thanks guys !!
:-)