The Controller Board

Depending on whether you decide to purchase a pre-assembled controller board or whether you build one yourself, you can skip this entire step. For those who wish to build their own controller board, which I encourage, should purchase their parts form paradisearcadeshop.com; I had a great experience with their service.

Upon receiving your shipment, first make sure all of your parts are there and undamaged. After looking over your controller board parts we must then assemble them into something that at least somewhat resembles an arcade controller. Follow this great tutorial for learning how to wire your board.

The design of the controller board is completely up to you and it really depends on what cabinet you're building. I used koenigs' arcade plans to build my arcade cabinet and controller board. You can find my plans here.

My finished controller board constructed from MDF board

Upon making your your controller board, plug it into your windows machine via USB to test your wiring job. Go into the windows program "set up USB controllers" and select 'advanced'. From here, the program will register joy-stick and joy-pad presses. If the buttons aren't mapped correctly, simply rewire it until you have the correct configuration (it took me a couple times, especially the joystick).

After your controller board is constructed, simply plug into you pi and boo into PiMAME.
Once PiMAME starts navigate to "Exit to command line".
Run "jscal /dev/input/js0" to calibrate
Run "jstest /dev/input/js0" to test the controller board (just like in  the windows program).

Make sure you have followed Booting up! to make sure you have the lastest software and drivers.