Play all your favourite retrogaming titles on this mini Picade cabinet! The Pimoroni Picade kit for the Raspberry Pi has real arcade controls with a nice 8" or 10" screen (1024 x 768 resolution). It can be built in a few hours using just a screwdriver and pliers. It comes with clear instructions on a poster, and you can follow along with the online video. From Arcade, Atari, NES, Gameboy, and more, with the RetroPie software, you can experience a ton of genuine old console and arcade games - not just limited to a fixed sample.
Although it is definitely great to cut and build your own cabinet, and source an interface board to connect controls, a screen, and audio amp - there's a number of reasons that a kit could be the way to go. You may have bought a Raspberry Pi 3B with the intention of one day making a mini cabinet with controls, and due to lack of knowledge or tools, just never got started. Or maybe you got started, ran it up on your tv with a keyboard and mouse, and got bogged down with a bunch of details getting things to work. Some of us may have got stalled with the cabinet, or just never got that glass cover for the bezel. Well, this kit has all of that sorted, so you just have to provide the ROMs and, if you feel inclined, customise the look of the buttons and cabinet!
This is an updated version of the earlier Picade model and includes a simpler build with easier connections, a power button, and an updated cabinet and interfaces. There's easy access to the internals too.
The kit is designed to run the RetroPie suite of software, which are built on Raspberry Pi's Raspbian Linux-based operating system. There's a community of support for RetroPie, in the form of the wiki and forums, with clear instructions for each emulator, right down to where to put the ROMs for each emulator, how to keep your software updated using the slick graphical interface menus. As for the Picade itself, Pimoroni have some great expertise available in their forums, or live discord chat.