The Picocade is an arcade cabinet that natively runs the PICO-8 fantasy console, a "virtual console" which is basically 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 your typical modern arcade cabinet with 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 arcade cabinet format.
The end 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, with all the parts already cut/printed/packaged and ready to assemble. 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.
Build Log
We first had to validate the idea and see whether we could even get PICO-8 to display on an RGB LED matrix.
Once we had figured out the basics of getting it working, we wanted to create a design for the cabinet that properly represented our love of PICO-8. There was many months of effort in this step alone... dialling in every visual line and angle, aesthetics of the profile, controller board angle and ergonomics, and so on. This isn't a copy of any existing arcade cabinet, and was started with pencil and paper and honed in over hundreds of iterations/renders until we were truly proud with what we created.
The internals is an area that is still in progress but is at a functional state. We are discussing building a custom PCB to handle the power delivery and HUB75 panel driver but it currently works with some hackiness.
A big part of the recent work has been all the quality-of-life user-facing stuff. PICO-8 is really designed to be used on a computer/laptop and therefore depends a lot on OS controls for things like screen brightness or volume or actually shutting down or restarting. None of this stuff works when your only inputs are the gamepad/controller inputs, so we actually programmed a custom shim that injects itself into the running code and inserts a new graphical layer on top of the PICO-8 graphics output while tapping into the IO to pick up button presses and add new features.
A full technical write-up will be coming soon as long as releasing the code for other PICO-8 hardware projects, but the general idea is that we detect when the player holds the menu button instead of just clicking it, and then overlay our own graphical UI over the screen. While that menu button is being hold we intercept joystick inputs and let the user browse our own custom Settings menu with controls for brightness/volume or shutdown/restart, which when activated will do the appropriate commands in the Linux back-end.
We're at the stage now where we're doing some final polish, building a BOM and validating it, writing documentation/instructions for assembly, and cleaning up all the files. We've built 2 fully functional cabinets that are in regular daily use over the last year or so, and that has let us fine a few bits that needed addressing, but they're pretty much ready to start putting together a few kits.
We think a good way to do this will be an in-person workshop where you pay for the cost of the parts + a small fee for the workshop (like our other workshops) and we take you through assembling your own Picocade. We may also sell flat-pack-style kits outright, and/or build them on demand. Full details and pricing will be out very soon, but in the meantime if you're interested in any of this contact us via any of our methods or drop in for a chat.
Reminder that this page is a living document and gets updated. It was last updated on 1 October 2026.
