Arcade machine credit control, time and button disconnect

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi there folks.
I’m pretty new to Arduino use but I’ve managed to get a couple of previous projects working with no real trouble following some tutorials, I think I need some help with this one though...

I’m in the process of making an arcade machine as an installation for an art submission at university.

The general idea is that a player can put a coin in and play for a certain amount of time - which is fine.
The panel uses an Arduino micro to interpret player control (from a modified game pad to a modified gameboy - code here NES-controller.ino · GitHub) and the coin insert is using an Arduino Uno (using this code GitHub - hxlnt/arduino-coin-acceptor: Source code for adding a programmable coin acceptor to an Arduino project. Includes video tutorial.)
Is it feasible to connect the uno to the game pad button layout and have the code lock the controls when the timer runs out? Going one step further, would it be possible to have it soft reset, in the gameboy this is a button combination so press 4 buttons at once, and then lock the buttons?

Thanks for your help in advance!

2

Welcome to the forums. Your idea certainly looks doable. The first thing you need to figure out is how are these two arduinos going to communicate? How close together are they?

It seems like the most straight forward method would be to have one pin on the Uno (coin acceptor) be an output which it tied to one pin on the micro (control pad) as an input.

When someone inserts a coin, the Uno sets it pin HIGH (play allowed) and starts a timer. When the timer expires, it sets the pin LOW (play not allowed)

The micro just has to read this pin every time through loop() and set some variable. You adjust your controller code to do nothing if this variable is LOW or do what it is doing now if it is HIGH.