Native Naomi Netbooter and Responsive Metro Frontend with Live Tiles
Checking All the Castles for the Princess
I got in on a group buy for several candy cabinets from japan and I wanted to be able to play a multitude of games on the JVS cabinet. Recently I had gotten in on the HP Touchpad firesale and had never had a tablet before. I promptly installed Android and Firefox on it and thought how cool would it be to just have a tablet next to the cabinet to select and play games.I spent the time looking at the protocol Sega's netbooter code and wrote my own implementation in a web scripting language. I then setup a web server on a raspberry pi and stored my netboot images and an apache web server. Finally, I designed animated live tiles similar to Windows 8 Metro. After stringing it all together and doing netbooter calls for CRCs (which are looked up in the image repository database), I had written a netbooter that could beam games wirelessy from a tablet and show what was playing on there.
When games are changed, the number of credits inserted are stored and bios settings saved, then applied after the next game is booted. The interface had both a mobile (vertical) layout and desktop/tablet (horizontal) layout available. The live tiles show previews of game titles in their categories and give a full list of titles available upon clicking.
Screenshots
The main interface |
Checking out game detail |