An animated card carousel for selecting arcade games on linux or raspberry pi
I wanted a simple arcade selection interface for my PiPlay. This program displays one image for each game in an animated carousel. The user moves the carousel left/right and selects a game based on the image. A screen saver will kick in after a configured amount of inactivity. It uses SDL2.
The program reads a carousel.cfg file which defines a few config parameters and the master list of emulators and cards. Each emulator defines a command line pattern which is used to launch the emulator. Each card must specify the emulator name, an image file (.bmp) and the name of the rom that will replace the %s in the emulator's command line pattern. Once a card is selected, the program prints to its stdout the emulator launch command for the game you chose. The host shell script then executes that command and loops back to the carousel when the emulator exits.
cd carousel
mkdir out
cd out
cmake ..
make
make install
To run, cd into the generated bin dir and type
./carousel.sh
You will likely have to compile and install your own SDL2 for raspberry pi from source. The one that came with my raspbian distribution did not work.
You will also need to install libconfig++8 and libconfig++-dev packages using apt-get.
The provided carousel.cfg and resources are a sample only. You must define your own games list and emulator command patterns.