Are you a fan of retrogaming? And do you like DIY? That’s good, so are we. That’s why at Clubic, we fell in love with Picade by Pimoroni. And we bet you’ll love it as much as we do.
Until December 24, Clubic opens a sound box for you every day advent calendar 2022 : the opportunity to discover unusual or practical gadgets, gift ideas for oneself or for loved ones.
Indulging in the simple joys of retrogaming can be done in a number of ways. You can just install an emulator on a PC or on a smartphone, then manage with the virtual joystick, touch controls or a compatible controller. You can also choose the comfort above and play with a console that you plug into a TV, or with its pocket equivalent, equipped with an integrated screen. But Pimoroni goes further…
Step by step assembly
With Picade, the English Pimoroni offers a solution that is original to say the least. It is quite simply an arcade cabinet equipped with an 8 or 10 inch screen (respectively at 188.50 and 240.70 euros) to be assembled yourself.
Buy Picade 10 inch on Amazon
Rest assured: this is not about making welds or handling a saw. The Picade kit includes everything except a Raspberry Pi, its power supply, a micro SD card and a USB keyboard for initial setup.
Normally, the famous nano-computer is quite easily found on the Net. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the shortage of components, it is much less obvious, and its price tends to fly away… Unless you have one at the bottom of a drawer, it is better to opt for the kit of 10 inches which includes a Raspberry Pi 4 8 GB (319 euros), only available on the Pimoroni site.
Picade comes in a nice box that includes three boxes. These contain the various elements of the machine, the electronic cards and all the hardware. The kit is accompanied by a poster detailing the assembly steps. You can also go to the Pimoroni site which details the assembly instructions. Depending on your Picade model, you will have access to a video tutorial or an illustrated manual with many photos. Both are however in English and not translated into French.
The 10-inch Picade we got required the text version of the guide. If you are not fluent in English, we cannot advise you enough to use the DeepL automatic translator.
It took us two short evenings to complete the hardware assembly. The steps are not very complex, but care must be taken to follow them scrupulously. Most of the bollard is made of stained wood and Plexiglas. In our opinion, the trickiest part of the build is connecting the cables from the joystick and game buttons to the Raspberry. Fortunately, it is possible to check that everything is in place before screwing all the elements of the frame.
Pimoroni has provided for the possibility of customizing its mini arcade cabinet (illustrations of the plate, the surround of the monitor and the front face). To do this, you will need to download the blank template available on the site, then add your own images to it before printing it. Depending on your talent, the result will be more or less convincing…
An automatic setting (or almost)
The installation of the software part is also not very complicated. Simply download the emulator image file, then transfer it to the micro SD card using a utility like balenaEtcher or Raspberry Pi Imager. Then, you have to turn on the machine after placing the micro SD in its slot. Then it is necessary to change the layout of the keyboard (unless you have a QWERTY), to configure the Wi-Fi connection and possibly to pair a second Bluetooth joystick to be able to play with several people.
Last step: installing the drivers, essential for the correct operation of Picade. These are in an online “repository”, and the installation is done automatically by entering a single command line. On our side, not everything went as well as expected, because our joystick was not recognized. Fortunately, we were able to find the solution on the Pimoroni help forums.
Finally, it remains to copy the games to the micro SD after having extracted them from an original cartridge using a tool like this or having acquired them legally. Any other source is piracy, which is severely punished in France: we cannot strongly advise against illegal download sites.
Honestly, we had a hard time getting out of our Picade to write this article! The gaming experience is excellent, and the RetroPie frontend is intuitive to use. Our next challenge will be to make Recalbox work on our arcade terminal, this distribution made in France being, in our opinion, more efficient.
Buy Picade 10 inch on Amazon
Find our selection of the Advent calendar!
For the fourth consecutive year, Clubic is happy to offer you its Advent calendar.
We have selected for you products that are often unusual, sometimes amusing, but always original and which seem to us worthy of interest for any geek and his entourage. As in previous years, they have all passed through our hands, without exception. We have used them and loved them. Otherwise, we would not present them to you.
And for more unusual gift ideas, we remind you that the 2019, 2020 and 2021 Advent calendars are still online!
- 1er December: Paper Shoot is a camera as simple as it is attractive. With him, you will (re)discover photography without frills!
- December 2: Using a 360° camera to produce “flat” footage has many advantages. You do not believe in it ? It’s that you haven’t seen the Insta360 X3…
- December 3: do you like wild animals and unicorns? Then, the polygonal creations of Papertrophy will keep you busy during the long winter evenings…
- December 4: Limbo is a spinning top that spins nonstop for hours. Surely this is hiding something…
- December 5: with GB Operator, GameBoy game cartridges can now be used on a computer… which will not help the productivity of some people.
- December 6: two London cyclists with no sense of direction created Velo 2, a smart gadget halfway between GPS and compass.
- December 7: the Eiffel Tower, a rollercoaster and an Atari console in LEGO, would you like it? At Clubic, we loved them.
- December 8: the start-up Ellipse markets the E1, its first electric city bike. And it’s worth it (if you live in town).
- December 9: better than a terrarium, EcoSphere will bring a little more life to your home.
The 2022 Christmas shopping guide is finally ready! Like every year, the Clubic editorial team has scoured the best merchant sites on the Web to unearth the finest deals from the high-tech departments.
Read more
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