Picade newbie here. Looking at the PIcade Cabinet as a father/son (11 YO) project and this one seemed to be the simplest/cheapest.
The building of the kit seems straightforward. But I didn’t see any walkthroughs of how to get the Raspberry Pi set up and connected to the Picade.
Have an engineering background and not afraid of flashing f/w, dealing w/ an IDE, reading schematics, etc. But it’s been a while since I played w/ the Arduino boards (back before Raspberry was a term) and not sure what needs to get loaded and how.
This is a first project for my son so I’d prefer to have easy to follow stuff so he can take the lead and not get too frustrated.
- From my quick search, it does look like we can use the Raspberry Pi 3, correct?
- Once I have an RPi board, what do I need to load (aside from ROMs) to have it work with Picade?
I found something like this:
But I’m not entirely sure how I’d configure it for the Picade controller.
I’m more than happy to read any/all links you can provide that will show us how to get started. Then I can curate the simplest/easiest ones for him to follow. Thanks in advance!
We’ve got plenty of Picade enthusiasts here who will help you to the nth degree :D
But for the time being, yes you’d use a Raspberry Pi 3, and the distribution most people use is RetroPie. You’ll need an SD card for that- it can either be big to fit your ROMs, or small with the ROMs stored on a USB memory stick (so you can remove it and load them easily).
Grab the version of RetroPie for the Pi 2/3: https://retropie.org.uk/download/
Use Etcher to copy the RetroPie image to your SD card: https://etcher.io/
And see here for details on copying ROMs: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Transferring-Roms
RetroPie/EmulationStation gives you a config menu to setup the Picade controls upon first boot. It should be pretty straight forward, although some people have trouble in MAME- that’s beyond my level of expertise though, I don’t get enough time to play :(
There is one important thing to do after installing retropie if you´re using the standard screen shipped with the picade. As mentioned here http://sandyjmacdonald.github.io/2015/09/08/picade/ you have to edit the /boot/config.txt file and uncomment the line hdmi_force_hotplug=1. If you forget this the screen will stay black and might cause hours of frustrating search for what went wrong … . Have fun with the picade.
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Thanks seeberc. That would be an easy and mind-numbingly frustrating thing to debug.