Back in November 2018, I was in Nottingham and passed a stand at the Winter Fayre. It was offering a console with 18,000 games on it for about £70. I bought one and what I got was an Orange PI with a 16 GB SD Card (all but full) and two USB joypads.

The game software used the Retro-Pie software, but the games were a massively illegal collection of games (for about ten different consoles including CBM-64, SNES, ZX Spectrum) put together by the company that supplied these “consoles”. Amazingly I found four games on there that I had written back in the 80s in this collection.

It was a bit of an odd PI. Instead of powering up through the power slot, it came with a USB to 5V connector. Looking about on the web I found it is this model in a nice acrylic case. Anyway, after three months it stopped working and it was pushed in to a drawer where it remained until today. I tried it today and it came back to life, I suspect the mains-to-USB adaptor is broken but as I’ve a drawer full of them it’s not a problem.

The reason for mentioning this is not the Orange Pi, nor the games but the joypads. I had a look on the libSDL website and I hadn’t realised that there was quite extensive support built in to SDL.  So my next task is to add game controller support for the asteroids game.