On my previous company, we just finished building a system just like this using OpenACS. We used prepaid cards for the billing system.
What you need:
- A prepaid card management system for generating card numbers
- A billing system for tracking how much money is left on which card.
- A program running on the workstations (we used Windows98) to lock up the workstation if no one is logged in, or if the current user has run out of money.
Item #1 was outsourced; we used OpenACS on #2, and VB6 on #3.
For the billing system, we used ad_schedule_proc to update account balances, and Linux shell scripts to restrict the IP packets of workstations that aren't in use. It's not a very big module, about 200+ lines for the data model and 500+ lines for the Tcl pages.
By this time, the system should have been deployed in several dozen cybercafes all over the Philippines.
You can contact my former employer at www.klikstation.com, and you can probably contact my former team through www.kliktambayan.com (we also developed this static site).
