About

This project is aimed at those who want to set up a lightweight Linux machine dedicated to running StepMania or ITGMania. It will set up a fresh Debian install to automatically run StepMania on boot. As soon as StepMania is closed, it will immediately restart it. Additionally, compared to a regular Debian install:

• The USB polling rate is set to 1000 Hz, giving better performance to JPACs and USB input cards
• Latency is reduced by only handling audio playback with ALSA instead of PulseAudio
• Efficient use of system resources due to lack of desktop environment and unneeded processes, making this ideal for older, weaker hardware

After installation, the stepmania user will be available to connect over SCP to push files

Prerequisites

• Debian 13 base system (minimal, no desktop environment)

• python3.11 openssh-server (installed in the target system)

• An internet connection on the target system

• Being able to SSH as root/sudoers user to the target system

Installation

1. Clone this repository onto your host

2. Install a Debian minimal OS into your target system:

• When creating the first user, make sure its username is not stepmania
• At the last steps of the installation process, check the box to install the SSH server

3. Set the IP address or hostname of your target system into the inventory file

4. Set the password for the stepmania user inside the stepmania_password variable of the inventory file

5. Run the Ansible playbook: ansible-playbook install_stepmania.yaml

6. When the playbook has finished, the target system will reboot and Stepmania will automatically start!

Using containers

You can run step #5 directly in your host. Alternatively, you can install Podman or Docker and run it containerized:

podman run -it  docker.io/alpine/ansible:2.20.0 bash

# Check that you can access your device
ssh youruser@yourdevice exit

cd
wget https://github.com/sergioperez/stepmania-cabinet-tools/new/release.zip
unzip release.zip
cd stepmania-cabinet-tools-release

ansible-playbook install_stepmania.yaml

• Note: If you prefer to use Docker, just write "docker" instead of "podman"

ARM boards

1. Install a minimal Debian 12 based distribution for your board, as could be Raspberry Pi OS Lite, Armbian Server, Debian 12 itself, or other.

2. Follow the same steps specified in Installation steps, but this time, run the playbook as:

ansible-playbook install_stepmania.yaml -e arch=arm64 --skip-tags grub

Raspberry Pi

Using a Raspberry Pi for ITGMania can be a quite interesting idea, as:

• It allows us to standardize the hardware we use (available almost anywhere)

• The boards are available in the market for long (although there are better options when it comes to LTS hardware, as Radxa or NanoPi)

• It easily supports 15khz resolutions, for CRT cabinets.

For 15khz interlaced modes in Raspberry Pi 5, see: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/how-we-added-interlaced-video-to-raspberry-pi-5/

For 1khz USB polling rate, set the parameters usbhid.kbpoll=1, usbhid.jspoll=1 and usbhid.mousepoll=1 to /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

Implementation details

The set of available StepMania/ITGMania versions are defined under group_vars/all.

Credits

Thanks to Enrico Zini for writing nodm and a LightDM configuration guide: https://www.enricozini.org/blog/2019/himblick/x-autologin/