So yeah, the progress on making my own teeny weeny arcade machine has not been going too smoothly. I thought I lucked out when I found a Fire 7 2019 on Woot! for ten bucks (twenty minus a ten dollar "please come back!" discount), but it turns out Jeff Bezos really locked this thing down tight. There are ways to jailbreak it and run a non-annoying operating system, but there are two methods, hardware and software. Software is only for users who actually bought this thing in 2019... if you bought it recently and have it turned on long enough to make it actually do anything, the new hack-proof Amazon operating system will have already been pushed to it, and you'll be stuck with Fire OS. Fire Toolkit mitigates this to some degree, but Fire OS 2019 even manages to block some of ITS features. And that sucks.
Oh, but wait, it gets better. RetroArch will still run on the Kindle Fire, but adjusting settings on this emulator is like wrestling with a rabid bear, and it's quite insistent on ignoring controllers it doesn't like. Take for instance the palm-sized New Wave Street Fighter II arcade stick I chose specifically for this project. Sometimes RetroArch will see it! Sometimes it will rename the buttons without your knowledge or consent! (What the hell kind of button assignment is "plus six?") Sometimes it will forget it's there, forcing you to reconnect and wait until, "oh, hey, there's a controller in me that I didn't notice before. I wonder how that happened?" The ways to fix this problem are strange and arcane, like making a witch's brew, and they rarely ever work. This doubly sucks.
So now I have to figure out a workaround if the project is to continue. Who makes tiny joysticks that use the XInput standard RetroArch actually recognizes? Am I actually going to have to craft my OWN tiny joystick with tiny buttons that fits into the cabinet I made and connect a zero-delay encoder to it? The buttons are no problem- you can find them as small as 16mm on Amazon, but the tiny joysticks are typically designed for wheelchairs and industrial applications, and they're often annoyingly expensive. At that point, I may as well just scrap the whole doomed project and buy an Arcade1UP cabinet instead.
A joystick adapter is also a possibility... I have several lying around, and one of these disguised the New Wave mini-stick as an Xbox 360 controller, which was detectable by both RetroArch and its remedial school cousin Lemuroid. I just couldn't get out of a game after I started it, which is, yanno, gonna be kind of a problem.
It's unfortunate, because the Fire 7 2019 (as wimpy as it is compared to other tablets of the time) is well suited to emulating old arcade games. It's pretty much torn through everything I've thrown at it, including games that were too much for the Namco Museum cabinet or my Playstation Vita to handle. Plus the games (vertical games especially) look great on that screen, strengthening my resolve to finish this project. Oh yes, ten dollar Android tablet, you will become my tiny arcade cabinet. It is your destiny. It's only a matter of time before you bend to my will...