I don't know...
I'm not interested in doing this right now, but what if someone was to write a decent looking GUI for it. You could integrate a small touch screen into your cab and have full control of Mala from there.
Instead of telling people "use joystick 2 up and down to change emulators, left and right to choose game lists, blah, blah, blah" they could make all choices with the newly intuitive touch screen.
Sounds like it could be slick if it was implemented right.