“This is a great bit of kit and not only is great for educational value, teaching kids how machines are physically built, it's great to give it a hammering for some games too!
Stick the latest Raspberry Pi board in too and you can use bluetooth to add a second controller too.
In some places the instructions were a bit unclear as to what exactly you had to do until you managed to do it but that's all part of the fun of building things from scratch I guess!
It's a great little project to build. once you've built the machine, the software bit is where it gets interesting!”
“This is beautiful. It was very therapeutic and relaxing to build. Not too tricky and not too easy. All of the components had clearly been well thought through during design and the clicky joystick is like catnip to any gamer.”
“a cheap but expertly engineered, designed and crafted kit for the ultimate retro arcade gamer. detailed and sensible instructions make building it a breeze.”
“Very nice design that was not too difficult to build. You need to pay close attention to which screws are to be used. The instructions do say to use M3, M2.5 or the flat head screws, but again you need to pay attention.
I did have to manually edit the /boot/config.txt file to force the use of the HDMI otherwise I had a blank screen. Perhaps an errata sheet should be included that talks about that. However, a quick Google search did provide the fix.
It also took me some time poking around in Retropie to figure out how to lower the volume. I am still confused over how to configure the buttons on the Picade in Retropie. Retropie has dozens (if not more) of functions that can be programmed, but there are only 12 buttons on the Picade available so I'm unsure what the optimal configuration would be.
Finally, I noticed that the power button on my unit doesn't light up. I was expecting that since there was an LED connection to the power button that the button would light up when powered on. I did try reversing the polarity of the LED connection but that cause the unit to not power up at all or at least that was my experience.
Also, I found connecting a Wireless RII Keyboard useful in setting up the WiFi. I guess even a wired keyboard would also work.
All-in-all I really like my Picade. I need to now experiment with the various emulators that Retropie provides. We have Galaga working so my wife is happy.”
