Hi All,
I’ve been a silent ‘pirate’ (pimoroni pirate, not the other one) for a while now and have decided to share some of my setup here which may become useful for others that want to try the same.
I always wanted to see if it’s possible to setup two Picade and have them linked up for two players. The answer is yes. It is possible:
You will need a couple of things to get this to work. One of the things I had to research on was to get a hdmi splitter which has the capability to downscale to 1024x768 for my ten inch screen but i also wanted it to have a headphone jack output on the splitter (since your primary picade is probably configured to have sound coming out of its speaker, therefore I’ve changed the sound output to hdmi so I can connect external speakers from the splitter’s headphone jack output).
If in case anyone is wondering which splitter worked for me, it was this one:
The splitter uses its own power supply so it won’t drain more power from your pi which is probably at max if you have the pimoroni plasma led kit. But no brainier here, you’ll need to connect the source hdmi to the splitter and then from the two hdmi outputs avail, you will route the hdmi to your primary picade and the second output to your second picade
Once that’s done, your second picade unit will need a Player X USB module, this is what you will connect your second picade unit arcade controls into
Once configured, find yourself the thinnest micro usb cable so you can route the wire to the primary picade unit and connect it in one of the spare USB ports.
I plan to update this post with further updates and maybe some videos to show it working. But the important thing is, yes its not too hard to get two player linkup