Picade

Picade is an arcade machine you build yourself which uses a raspberry pi as the brains. It is available from Pimoroni.

I really built this in 2024 as a fun object to sit in my office - and I must say it’s lived up to that and more on video calls I’ve done. Total time to assemble was about 3 hours, and I really enjoyed the process.

The main pieces are:

• Cabinet - all the wooden sides, top and bottom
• Perspex - all the plastic to cover the “see-through” areas like the title at the top and the button shelf.
• Raspberry Pi 5 with Picade Hat - Picade Hat handles all the interaction with sound and button hardware
• Joystick - for all the motion
• Buttons - all the gaming buttons! (plus on/off)
• Speaker - for the sound of nostalgia
• Pico-8 license so you can build your own games

The instructions are very well written and clear. All the parts are well packed. The only parts I felt were fiddly were the plastic hinges for the cabinet (you need to get your hands in to tight spaces to tie down the screws) and the button order. It’s easy to mix up which button is connected where - so with this and installing the joystick/top plate the joystick attaches to I would take your time.

Frustrations I had:

• RetroPie (the linux distribution) is not plug and play - I had various issues controlling sound
• Not clear to me how the consoles appear (turns out games working with emulators have file extensions, Picade picks this up and will know to launch .snes with SNES)
• Loading games on was tedious until I installed and shared games directory with Samba
• Mapping buttons for so many different emulators and systems is a nightmare - I was hoping someone would have just put in sensible defaults!

Later, I ordered the fancy illuminated buttons after because for me, this is partly about playing and partly about a really nice object to talk about.

Overall this was a super fun project and getting to play some great games at the end was rewarding!!