Ok, the prototype wasn't actually $2 because I had an old computer and monitor lying around. What I did buy was a used Gravis Gamepad from Value Village, which was infact $2 and thus allowed me to hack it guilt free.

I first of all took an old Celeron 300, grabbed a 1 gig hard drive and formatted it with Dos 6.2. I then installed Advancemame, having heard that it does nice things with the screen sizes. I then went and cut apart my Gravis Gamepad, and soldered wires onto the grounds and the connectors for the directions/buttons. After that, I attached the corresponding wires from the controls on the arcade machine and fired it up.

To my amazement, it worked fine, with the exception of accidentally wiring a few of the directions backwards. At this point, everything was still exceptionally ugly, but I knew it was working

Unfortunately, I was still launching games from the commandline, and using the keyboard to insert coins and select between one and two players, etc. I always hated having a keyboard sitting in my coin slot area :(

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