Picade Alternate Firmware

Ahoy Picade owners, old and new. I’ve been cooking up some alternate firmwares and at this stage I’m pretty confident that on both the Kickstarter Edition and new Picade PCBs we’ll have:

  • Playstation 3 Support
  • HID Joystick Support

I’m hoping to also get PS4 compatibility, but I don’t have one to test against so this wont happen quickly.

Unfortunately Xbox 360 support is currently impossible, so I’m shelving that for now.

Please take care when flashing your Picade with my crazy prototype firmwares.

Playstation 3 Experimental Firmware

( new only, still need to come up with sensible bindings for the Kickstarter edition which I think I’ve got wired up all wrong )

You can download the experimental firmware to make the new Picade PCB behave like an Playstation 3 controller here: http://pi.gadgetoid.com/picade_ps3.hex

To flash this firmware, name it “picade.hex” and stick it alongside the updater script from the GitHub repository: https://github.com/pimoroni/Picade-Sketch/tree/master/update

Run the updater, and your Picade should become a PS3 controller.

HID Joystick Expeirmental Firmware

Watch this space!

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Any chance to see the source on github? ps3 branch in the picade-sketch repo?

HID Joystick will help with my Speccy emulation problem. Most emulators map up / down / left and right cursor to CAPS SHIFT + 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 and most games without cursor support won’t work as the emulator catches the CAPS SHIFT first. So HID joystick would be ace.

Happy to beta test it if you need a guinea pig.

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Eventually, yes, but it wont be an Arduino-IDE-compatible sketch until I can back-port home-button support into “LeoJoy” so modifying and compiling it would require knowledge of AVR C and AVR GCC.

At the moment I’m sticking with the “I’ll open-source it later because it’s a diabolical mess” party line.

I’ll hijack this thread to thank @gadgetoid again for all the hard work. I don’t know about fitting a PS3 in the Picade, but the PS TV is perfect for these machines. And as for the mapping of the buttons on the Kickstarter edition, they’re slightly, slightly off, but completely playable. Available in this thread: Trying to get Picade to work with a PS TV

Still completely chuffed with how it turned out for my Picade:

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