Pimoroni's Picade Bartop Arcade Kit Goes Big with the Raspberry Pi 5-Powered Picade Max
Available to pre-order as a "Beta Edition," the Picade Max is bigger, bolder, and now two-player-ready.
Sheffield-based hobbyist electronics firm Pimoroni has unveiled the next generation of its Picade, the build-it-yourself Raspberry Pi-powered bartop arcade cabinet kit: a massive two-player variant, boasting a 19" display and powered by a Raspberry Pi 5, dubbed the Picade Max.
"We've had a lot of requests to make a bigger, more versatile, two player version of Picade and after a lot of work we're very excited to share it," the company says of today's unveiling. "Picade Max sports a trio of custom-designed, dedicated, boards that augment your Raspberry Pi 5 by providing the power, audio, and control handling features."
Those three custom-designed daughterboards are: the Picade Max Power HAT, which accepts a 12V DC input and powers both the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer and display; the Picade Max USB Controller Board, which converts the two-player control panel to USB and can be expanded to handle two four-way digital or analog joystick inputs and up to 30 arcade buttons; and the Picade Max USB Audio Board, a dual-channel 3W amplifier and I2S audio card. The latter two include their own coprocessors, in the form of Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontrollers.
As with earlier Picade models, the Picade Max is supplied as a kit with powder-coated MDF panels making up the body of the arcade cabinet. All the parts you need are included in the bundle, bar the Raspberry Pi itself and a suitable microSD card — including the new display, a large-format 19" 5:4 IPS panel with a 1280×1024 resolution.
While Pimoroni is taking pre-orders for the Picade Max ahead of early August delivery, though, the company is limiting it to one per customer as part of a small initial production run. "Picade Max is a complex kit with plenty of moving parts and we anticipate that there may be aspects of it that we'll want to tweak once it's in the wild," the company explains of what it calls the "Beta Edition" of the kit. "As such we're releasing a small first batch as a beta, at a very special introductory price — save £100 [around $129]!"
The Picade Max Beta Edition is currently available to pre-order on the Pimoroni store, priced at $418.05 including a 20 percent beta discount.