The beginnings of some experiments with Decker on my Raspberry Pi

So, I have a dream. A dream of a Decker console where you can just insert a floppy disk and run a deck and it all feels nice and neat and it tickles my brain in a fun way.

It seems to me the logical way to achieve this is with a Raspberry Pi. So I've been doing some experiments with the Pi 400 (basically a Raspberry Pi 4 in a different form factor with a built-in keyboard) I have set up in my bedroom.

Can it handle a USB floppy drive? Yep, at least the one I have on hand (some old TEAC thingy). CD drives may draw too much power for it but it looks like it can handle an FDD. I stick a disk in and it automounts and all that.

How about running a Deck? First thing I tried was just running an HTML deck through the Chromium that comes in Raspberry Pi OS. And short version is this is really not at all very performant. Most transitions chug pretty badly. So we're going with native Decker, which we can build pretty easily for Pi (although I found recently that for some reason the default OS image doesn't include the standard Unix xdd utility that Decker needs to build so that tripped me up for a bit). And native Decker runs pretty well, although high-processing tasks like jankytunes do make it chug a bit (but then jankytunes and native decker have yet to really be good friends anyway).

So basically after a bit of experimentation I worked up a shell script that'll auto-launch Decker in fullscreen reading whatever .html file happens to be on the mounted floppy disk. And this works for my zine disks just fine.

Now I have future thoughts

• Automounting of floppy disks in Raspberry Pi seems a bit finicky, like I am not sure what triggers it trying to mount. It looks like from this article you can disable the automount and make them mount manually - so maybe I'll want to do something like that.
• Can I strip down the OS such that I just have a "run deck off disk" button without the other OS cruft? I've never really done anything like this before but surely, right?
• Would a Pi 5 give me significant enough performance boosts to help some of the performance issues?
• What of the times when Decker has had to break compatibility? Like, my older stuff that predates the "nil" value may not work since some modules had to be upgraded for that. And there was similarly a change in grids at one point that meant I had to update jankytunes, so anything with an older version baked in won't work.
• Some things I'm filing under too complicated, like multiple decks per disk. In practice with an FDD you're not likely to fit more than one. But I've had a few that exceed what a floppy holds, so I wonder if some sort of zip handling would be handy.
• The monitor I have handy is a 1280x1024 that I've had hanging around for almost two decades now. But it occurs to me if I can get something that's 1024x768 that fits a 2x scaled deck much more neatly.

I definitely am not enough of a Linux Girl to know how to set some of this stuff up neatly but maybe I'll keep experimenting because the idea of a Deck Kiosk with disks you can just insert and play makes me happy.