Hi Ben et al!
Thank you for the very practical and informative videos, particularly the Getting Started With Beaglebone Black video that really helped me figure something out about the set-up process that had eluded me. Anyway, since you have done so many custom builds, I thought you'd be a good resource for my current project.
My name is Byron and I am an active maker who spends a lot of time at my local community workshop/hacker space, Fresno Ideaworks. I had been thinking about making an arcade cabinet to set up at the shop after seeing a great kit for raspberry pi mini arcade at Maker Faire Bay Area. Anyway, before that went anywhere I came across an old iCade at my local thrift store. I bought it just for the buttons and joystick and case. Then I realized that it was a Bluetooth keyboard and should be able to work with an old Lenovo K1 (Android) tablet I had lying around that happened to be the right size. Well, after a little bit of legwork I was able to get them working together nicely and all the guys at the shop had fun yesterday playing Donkey Kong.
Great! No need to reinvent the wheel, I can probably use what I already have and not even worry about a Pi in this equation. I plan to build a new, slightly larger cabinet out of plywood that will securely house the iCade controller circuit, tablet and a small sound system, all powered by one ATX power supply. So far so good, I know what I am doing up to this point but here's the catch. I would like to turn this into a semi-permanent cabinet that can simply be turned on and played by anyone at the shop. Also, I would like to add a game I will design and have different games default or cycle through each time the system starts so that sooner or later, someone will play my game along with a handful of early 80s games that people already know.
So, is there a straightforward way to program the Android tablet to boot into Mame4Droid so that everything is ready to go? Are we talking some kind of shell scripting here? And secondly, if I want to program an old 8-bit style game, in this case the kind of cheap knock-off copycat we used to see in the arcades (mine will be called 'Cuber' if that rings a bell, or knocks on a cabinet...) do you have any advice about what language/parameters I should use and how to compile it into a rom that my emulator can handle?
Any thoughts? Thank you and keep up the good work.
Byron
