Can someone develop a stepmania thumb drive not unlike a chromecast that has usb input to plug our pads in and charge us $100 for?
No, it can't be done because we can't sell music licensing rights or graphic rights for the music videos / backgrounds / banners.
However I plan to see if StepMania will run through the new Raspberry Pi 2, it can run Windows 10 and is a bit more powerful than previous versions of Raspberry Pi. I plan to make that an option if it works well enough so that just putting in a flash drive into the RPi2 with all the data will boot straight into StepMania and play on the TV. Power through USB, video through HDMI, audio through the 3.5mm audio cable, the pad will connect to the RPi2 inside the box and you will be able to plug the box straight into the dance pad. That would be an epic Plug and Play dance pad, I believe it will work.
However I plan to see if StepMania will run through the new Raspberry Pi 2, it can run Windows 10 and is a bit more powerful than previous versions of Raspberry Pi. I plan to make that an option if it works well enough so that just putting in a flash drive into the RPi2 with all the data will boot straight into StepMania and play on the TV. Power through USB, video through HDMI, audio through the 3.5mm audio cable, the pad will connect to the RPi2 inside the box and you will be able to plug the box straight into the dance pad. That would be an epic Plug and Play dance pad, I believe it will work.
Nevermind, apparently it's going to run Win 10 ARM which won't support X86 programs. No dice.
hmm nope
Well the problem with SM and RPi (or any other ARM based minicomputer) is not ARM, but a missing GLES renderer. Also the performance probably would be quite well.... not good...