Picocade - Native PICO-8 Arcade Cabinet

The Picocade is an arcade cabinet that natively runs the PICO-8 fantasy console, a modern cross-platform game engine with retro aesthetics and limitations. We're all huge fans of PICO-8 here at the hackerspace and lots of us have developed and released games for the PICO-8 platform, so after looking around for "real hardware" that runs PICO-8 and finding it all to be either handheld consoles or very basic arcade cabinets with old computer monitors as the display, we realised we could do better.

This has been a multi-year group-project by a bunch of our members to develop an entirely unique arcade cabinet from the ground up. This isn't an old computer monitor and a Pi running Picocade on the desktop, it's a custom RGB LED display with the perfect native 1:1 PICO-8 resolution with custom Linux display drivers and lots lots more, giving the ultimate "real" PICO-8 experience in an arcacde cabinet format.

The ultimate goal for this project is to be an open-source hardware kit people can build themselves either by downloading the schematics/plans and building it from scratch or buying a flat-pack kit from us and assembling it Ikea-style, without soldering/etc. We currently have multiple working prototypes and are now just ironing out the final bits and pieces before we will release everything to the public, along with a dedicated website with more information.