I have an Allwinner A10 Android tablet (Cortex A8, single core).
First of all - you will want to go with USB gamepads - don’t even think about going with Bluetooth because it will be a severe CPU hog and your CPU (and OS) absolutely can’t hope to handle that with adequate speeds - having a singlecore CPU on Android is already asking for trouble.
Second, Android itself is a bad fit for emulators. ARM Linux would be much preferable - I haven’t yet tried it but all of the pitfalls we are dealing with on Android (like a garbage collector that screws up performance willy-nilly) would be non-existent on ARM Linux.
The reason you might have gotten worse performance on ARM Linux vs. RetroArch Android is probably because the ‘binary Android GPU drivers’ don’t really work well with your particular ARM Linux flavor - I can’t really state with absolute certainty what the case there is - it’s probably all still very experimental.
Anyways, the screen shouldn’t randomly black out on RetroArch Android and ‘key sticking’ is also not supposed to happen. So I’d say these are configuration problems more than anything.
I know this is not what people often want to hear - but the ‘best devices’ for RetroArch usually happen to be the devices that require a jailbreak, ie. a PS3, a Wii or an iOS device.
The whole situation with the ‘cheap disposable hardware’ that these ARM thingies represent is that the biggest piece of ‘bloatware’ on them - Android - is the biggest impediment to decent performance you can get on these things. Then you have underperforming hardware and - frankly - a 1.6GHz ARM Android tablet still has no chance of even matching a 729MHz Nintendo Wii in terms of CPU power - we have done the comparisons and it’s very clear that the Wii performs better than a Cortex A9-powered LG Lucid.
