One small thing that might be nice on the control front, would be to have the knob also able to control the direction of the little dude, similar to the game 'Snake' on some Nokia mobile phones.

On that game, you can use keys in a very similar way as on the remote control, but (on supporting phones, i.e. 7110) you can also use the wheel or up/down buttons. On the empeg, this would translate to a turn to the left making the little dude turn left *from his point of perspective*, and the same for the right turn.

To make this a bit clearer, if you click the knob once left, you would get:

Dude travelling up: turns left
Dude travelling left: turns down
Dude travelling down: turns right
Dude travelling right: turns up

This would be a nice touch, especially as in some vehicle setups, using the four keys on the left could cause your hand to obscure much of the screen.

On a more technical note, and I have not much of a clue on this front, would it be possible to create a 50k partition that could be left mounted RW - something so small that it would take virtually no time to fsck (is that the right word?) on startup. empacman, or any other program, could mount this rw at the start of a game, and ro at the end, and this could be used to save high-score tables or similar. On the offchance of a power-down during play, the tiny partition size would mean a barely noticable delay to the next bootup. Could this work?

Cheers,

A.