So wait, you can buy one of those, put your minimal linux distro on a big CF card, and have the boot times be sped up by this? That's a pretty sweet proposition. Not sure how that'll be sweet in terms of cost because the adapter is 30 bones, plus buying a reasonably large CF card I'll assume.

Interesting to say the least.

EDIT: Oh btw, I didn't think to mention this before, but can you use Ebay Tom? I mean, someone is probably willing to ship it to you at cost. Or if not that, is there an equivalent that is local to your region? That way you could save on shipping costs.

-Flecko

There are two types of CompactFlash. Type 2 is made for slightly higher cards than type 1. Type 1 cards work in type 2 drives, but not vice versa. Because they had to fit a whole harddrive into it, microdrives are for type 2 slots. I don't know of any other problems.

I say we set the standard for an 8-way dpad
and 8 buttons. SNES (Super Famicon) pad of sorts.

well thats what I am using for my standard

I didn't mean actual SNES pads but what the
button config would look like

dpad

1 start
2 select
3 A
4 B
5 C
6 D
7 L shoulder
8 R shoulder

and concerning the snes pads I believe I have
about fifteen of them

theres also ebay...

By "equivalent that is local to your area", I meant a local form of EBay. There are alot of spin-off sites that are auction sites. I figured maybe there was one that was closer to you than America, thats all.

I personally vote for 128megs of RAM(256 is overkill since there isn't as much OS overhead), and any CD drive is fine, and an 8-direction,8-button pad. Plus, we'll probably need that IDE->CF thing if thats the route this is going.

I personally have a USB microsoft sidewinder that has these features(6 front buttons, 2 shoulder buttons, and a "shift" button allowing for 16 total combinations.) Its a pretty nice controller.

I also have to say that I'm not totally in support of using the console controler->converter->PC things is a good idea. There are tons of them out there, and not all of them work the same. Plus, getting ahold of legacy controllers isn't always the easiest thing to do.

Here is a pic of my controler.

And here is a review.

EDIT: Oh...and I vote for the 533mhz variety of Eden. I think that might be our sweet spot. Any other thoughts on this?

EDIT #2: This site doesn't help you any Grudge?

EDIT #3: After reading a review, the 533mhz Eden performs FPU/multimedia computations a bit better than a 233mhz Pentium MMX, so I think thats not a bad spot, considering the games we want to design. Anyone else think so?

Hope this helps.
-Flecko

Nope, not really. I though I'd try Belgium as I have some money in a savings account there, but the Belgium sites are expensive and it'll be cheaper to try and buy directly from mini-itx.com, the sites on there are also limited with what they sell...

This is what I originally wanted to do, but I think I'll stick with pc-clone for now. If you do ever do something like this, then please let me know. I'd be very interested to see how thats going.

The best pad I've found, which I own: ThrustMaster FireStorm Dual Analog.

Not cheap compared to other pads though. Paid $39.99 CDN for mine last July.
Very comfortable, and it's got dual-shock w/o batteries (USB, of course).
The only problem I have with it, which I have with every single pad on the PC, is that the D-Pad is icky. I hate how it's all one button. (I know it's like that with console pads, but it doesn't feel like one button)

This idea does sound great. I might consider grabbing a mini-itx and trying it (Sharing results/ideas if you're interested, of course).

Perhaps we could include a number of different controller drivers, and list them all as requirements. As long as they have 8+ buttons?

I think that makes pretty good sense, and shouldn't be too hard to do.
-Flecko

kewl I wanna help

Have you considered the compatibility of Allegro (or Linux) with USB gamepads? I have no personal experience (my gamepad fits on the gameport), so I don't know if this is an issue at all.

Then there's the following thing that needs to be considered: how will you bring down the system if you want to deactivate the console? Ordinarily, you'd just throw the switch. With Linux filesystems, just powering down the system is going to give you problems, as they need to be unmounted first. Not a problem (assumably) for read-only filesystems, but for writeable filesystems (savegames!) it is a problem.
Any thought on how to handle removable file systems, btw?

About the powering down ... I don't know how it works for you, but when I press the power button on my box, the OS powers down gracefully as it is supposed to - it just doesn't suddenly shut down.
So, obviously it's possible to get this to work in a good way ...

Also, I've never had any problems with USB gamepads. Of course, I've never tried them much in Linux. Will do when I get home.

Hmm... If I throw the switch on my box the power is cut. Wait - I actually need to hold it for a few seconds for the power to go off. I don't really know what happens if I just tap it slightly, but I have a feeling the system will go into stand-by mode.

Well, the boot media will be write-protected anyways, hm? So, the only thing that could be damaged would be things like save floppies or whatever we decide to use - but then again, turning off ANY console while it's saving tends to screw things up. As long as all file writes are flushed properly, it should work, hm?