NEW PRODUCT – Cupcade: the Raspberry Pi-Powered Micro Arcade Cabinet Kit – Beta: Never be bored again with an adorable little arcade cabinet you can fit in your bag! This Raspberry Pi-powered kit combines our sharp PiTFT 2.8″ display, mini thumbstick, and mini arcade push buttons and a whole bunch of components to create the most adorable Arcade cabinet in the known universe.
Comes as a big kit with lots of parts including all electronic components, the laser cut case, power adapter, and blank SD card that is plug-and-play ready. You provide a Raspberry Pi model B, a soldering iron, solder, wire, basic electronic hand tools, tape, etc. This is the beta kit, which works great but is a little advanced and not good for beginners! We’ll be planning out a version with more of the circuitry pre-built in the future. For now we only recommend this project for people who have soldered before and even better, have a little Raspberry Pi/Linux hacking under their belt in case some configuration-file-editing is required. Give yourself a nice long Saturday afternoon to put together (about 4-6 hours altogether).
We played a bunch of memorable old arcade games, like Ms Pacman, Galaga, Donkey Kong, Arkanoid, DigDug, etc with squee success but some games that are more advanced might be too slow even with overclocking the Pi. There are four buttons total, two next to the joystick for “fire” and “jump” and two in front for “coin” and “start”.
Many details stand out here that show the love and care PaintYourDragon put into this kit.
- First: you can configure it for either vertical (Ms Pac-man! Arkanoid!) or horizontal screen (Joust! Qix!). The controls can be set to either joystick-in-center or to the side. We include plastic for both configurations just pick which you want during construction.
- Second: Burn a SD card comes with a text-based MAME ROM selector screen that works in either V or H mode, with nicely printed out names and joystick/button selection.
- Third: Pressing the two front buttons for three seconds simulates the Esc key, so you can quit games and safely shut down the Pi without use of a keyboard.
- Fourth: To load new ROMs, simply plug in the SD card into any computer and drag the zipped up files into the directory, no need for WiFi, logging in or any other nonsense!
- Fifth: What’s gaming without the noise? There’s a mono speaker and audio amp so you can relive all the bleeps
Don’t forget, a Raspberry Pi Model B is NOT included!
