Special controllers for MAME questions (pachinko, mahjong)

[Cryomancer]

Now, I know there are ways to get spinners and trackballs going in MAME. Spinners you can buy interfaces for, trackballs as well, or you can get a bigass trackball mouse like what I've got.

My question is, are there ways to get a few other specialized controllers...say, pachinko or mahjong? I know there's a Mahjong controller for neogeo, is there a usb adapter or such? Anyone know if there's ever been a pachinko controller for PC, I've seen some odd famicom/pce ones, and a weird PSX one but that's all google can show me...

Alternatively, can anyone think of a decent alternative for a pachinko controller? Maybe a spinner could work, I'm not too sure.

Also, anyone got a good lightgun they could suggest? i was looking at the stunner-style "bio guns", but I dunno what would actually work with two players properly and not look really dumb like that one MAME pages always has ads for.

Sorry if these questions are difficult to answer.

[Hovoc]

the act labs are supposed to be really good.

http://www.act-labs.com/scripts/proddetails.asp?pid=92

and now they seem to have gotten it to work with another gun on a pc monitor, used to only be with tv's



also, what controls do mahjong and pachenko require?

[Cryomancer]

Mahjong uses a lot of letters mostly, a a few buttons for different bets / moves in the game.

http://www.daddelkingz.de/pics/mahcon.jpg Here's a neo geo one

Pachinko uses some kind of dial / pressue trigger or such, I'm still not 100% sure how it works.

[Flack]

A Mahjong controller would be super simple to build ... the I-Pac has 26 connections, so you could just run buttons down to the specific connections and program the I-Pac and go from there. I'm not really familiar with those styles of games on arcade platforms, but if you don't have to hit too many of those keys at the same time I would probably just hack a keyboard which wouldn't cost much at all. Unless you want a dedicated Mahjong Machine, I'd probably also have to come up with some way to interchange controllers. If I were doing this for my MAME Cabinet, I think what I would do is run a USB connection to the front of the cabinet and then hack a USB keyboard. That way, I could simply plug the controller in to the front of the machine on the fly and play away. If you're playing in on your regular PC, even better -- just slap it into your USB port and away you go. If you wanted to get really fancy you could come up with some sort of swappable control panels for your cabinet.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to mention something. If there's a PSX one you like, just pick up one of those cheap-o PSX-to-USB adapters. Problem solved!

[petewhitley]

I've seen pachinko controllers for sale in Japan for PCs, PS1/PS2, etc. I would imagine you could pull one from Yahoo! Japan or possibly one of the import sites ...

[ventrra]

I've seen a few arcade replacement parts for machines in Japan at this site: http://www.riverservice.co.jp/PARTS/conpane_e.html It would probably cost quite a bit to get them imported, though.