Hi all, I bought a rev B Pi for the specific purpose of introducing my teenage son to some of my old favorite video games.
I successfully formatted the sd card with the recommended software, extracted the image from the zip with 7-zip and then used the win32 image writer onto a 8gb card. FYI, windows 7's built in zip handler could not extract because it saw the image as an extracted size in the petabyte range. I suspect the header for for the archive is not universal. No biggie, just heads up for anyone struggling. 7-zip worked fine.

Found a good 1800ma power plug in the cell phone drawer, an hdmi cable in the bin o' cables, and plugged the pi into the living room hdtv.

Piplay booted and took us to a menu perfectly. So impressed with the ease of getting started. Couldn't find a usb keyboard in my bin, so I ordered one of the little wireless jobs with touchpad (Logitech k400).

So here's the plan, I figure the cost and time of building a joystick box, getting a mini-pac, and the associated buttons would be close to $100. Xgaming makes their solo stick for about $70 shipped and seems to be a good solution. I'll just need to get a long usb extender for the controller to the Pi which will be up by the TV. I have read you're supposed to use a repeater type usb extender.

There's documentation here about the tankstick, I want to confirm that the solo stick jives with piplay. If anyone can verify, I'd appreciate it. It shouldn't matter as the stick masquerades as another keyboard, so I figure the main thing would be to handle the option handling to describe which keyboard is 1 and which is 2.

Thanks for all the info on this site, I'm excited to get everything setup.