Ultimarc is another company creating products that appear to be designed to meet the needs surrounding the growing MAME arcade cabinet community on the Internet. They are a UK-based company and they sell these products through their website. The prices are quite reasonable and the products are extremely well designed.

The I-PAC handles all of my buttons and joysticks by converting their signals into key presses. No special drivers are required because it looks and acts like a keyboard to your PC. It can be connected by USB or PS/2 ports and, for the most part, will meet your needs right out of the box. Your actual keyboard connects to it and passes through unhindered to your computer.

I purchased the smaller model since the larger one is meant more for 4-player cabinets and had more inputs than I required.

It is programmable so that you can assign different keycodes to the various inputs. I ended up using this mode after the system was built as a I began mapping out functions I wanted on my various buttons beyond the base MAME default controls. They mostly involved saving game state through one of the shifted functions.

Shifted functions are a nice feature of the I-PAC. If you hold down the player one start button while pressing another, it will act very much like a shift key and effectively doubles the assignment possibilities. This means you don't have to put one button per desired function on your control panel. It makes the most sense, of course, to put technical functions on these shifted buttons rather than anything involved in gameplay.

Programming can be done either with a freely downloadable interface program for Windows, Mac or Linux or through a built-in programming function of the card that involves a control-key sequence, etc. This also opens the door to being able to script the key assignments for different emulators at launch time.

The Opti-PAC is very similar in purpose to the I-PAC but focuses on analog devices. I use it to handle my trackball and spinner, both of which now appear to be a serial mouse to my system. Again, no specific drivers are required beyond the ability to support an industry standard Microsoft Mouse. It, too, can be either serial or USB. The power for the Opti-PAC is drawn from a jumper cable you connect between the two boards or can be fed from the USB interface.