Stepmania 

Our next strategy involved attempting to deploy something that would mimic a retail installation environment. Coin operated arcade systems are a long standing example of embedded system deployment. Read Only Memory, flash, hard drive, and optical storage are commonly seen in these sorts of systems depending on the needs of the application deployment itself. Flash has some advantages over traditional magnetic and optical storage in this environment primarily relating to power, thermal, shock resistance and overall reliability issues. Having worked in field technical support for an amusement company before, I can speak directly to just how hostile an environment retail can be.

Coin Op machines are kicked and beat on. They often have to live in environments with significant temperature change when installed in breezeway's and lobbies. The environments are dusty beyond measure and have to deal with the vagaries of power outages, brownouts, and surges. Certainly more so than in a home or data center environment. And the average rack administrator doesn't have to deal with 10 year olds spilling Slurpee's all over there equipment or the vagaries of very infrequent service.

For this scenario we went with an even thinner OS installation, utilizing LitePC's 98Lite to pair down a 98SE installation to next to nothing. To actually have a video card supported by 98SE, we had to forgo using our more modern ATI x1600XT and use an older card, a Geforce 4MX440 PCI. We also stuck an old Soundblaster Live Value in the system for similar reasons. We paired down everything possible in the 98SE installation getting rid of most everything including virtual memory support and even Explorer. The latest version of DirectX 9 was installed along with the latest drivers for the Geforce4MX and Creative Labs Soundblaster Live.

The game we installed, Stepmania, is an open source Dance Dance Revolution clone. Not only is the game itself open source, but there are quite literally thousands of dance routines available for download and installation. Furthermore Stepmania natively supports coin and bill vending hardware, so it can be deployed in a retail environment. Stepmania requires at minimum DirectX 8.

For controller support, we found an Xbox DDR Step-pad (luckily on closeout, so we got it cheap), and did a simple USB mod. This involves little more than hacking the proprietary Xbox controller end off the device and wiring a USB connector, matching wire colors. Game Controller support was provided by installing the freely available XBCD driver.

We followed the same paradigm as we did with the XP OS installation, using our spare Hitachi hard drive to build the installation, tweak it, install Stepmania and 1.5gigs worth of Step routines. After tweaking the installation to our liking it was a matter of transferring the files from the installation HDD to the Compact Flash card and changing boot devices.

Upon rebooting we were greeted with the Stepmania start screen within about 45 seconds. Stepmania cache's/preloads XML data on all installed Step routines during it's startup process which makes the startup process rather long in this scenario. Once started however, there was no real detected or obvious performance difference between using Compact Flash over a HDD, other than the occasional rare stutter which would have been mitigated by using a faster CF card. Actual writes to the CF card are only necessary when saving high scores, or for writing housekeeping data if used in a coin-op installation. Because of this, as well as the relatively small filesizes of music, video, and jpg/png images used in Step Mixes, file I/O stays pretty much a non-issue here.

I used my daughter's as official "playtesters" and they didn't seem to notice or quite frankly care that they were playing off of a Compact Flash device. They're a bit insane about Stepmania anyway, having installed it on every PC we have. And yes, they totally kick my butt at it! :P

Time to move on at this point, and make some conclusions about this interesting adapter.