picocade: The PICO-8 Arcade Controller

I designed and build an Arcade Controller to play PICO-8 games!

As many, I also dream of playing PICO-8 with real hardware. And, as a first step, I designed the picocade. It is also Open Source, so you can build your own!

The list of parts, circuit design and code are here: See on GitHub

Features:

• An esc and splore button to find and select PICO-8 games from the controller (no keyboard needed)!
• O and X buttons for gameplay (can be customize with Python)
• USB-C connection (can be replace with a different type of USB port)
• Power LED that indicates the controllers is on/off

The controller connects to the computer to play the games. Plug and play, no configuration needed!

If you like the project, please give it a star on GitHub. :)

Hope someone builds it and finds it fun!

~isaac

Looks really good. If I understand correctly, it presents itself as a keyboard to the computer, right ? What happens when you plug two ?
About "customize with Python", how do you set up the directional keys ?
Ideally, I'd love an on the fly controller shortcut to change the controlled player, like "splore+Pause+direction+release Pause" to select one of the 8 players controlled.

Thank you @RealShadowCaster

Correct. The controller shows up just as a keyboard. You can connect two; you'd have to modify the second one to send different keys for a second player.

The directional keys works by sending these constants from the controller:

keys = [
    Keycode.UP_ARROW,
    Keycode.DOWN_ARROW,
    Keycode.RIGHT_ARROW,
    Keycode.LEFT_ARROW,

See full code: https://github.com/isacben/picocade/blob/main/firmware/code.py

Yes, it also possible to have the controller send a sequence of keys just by executing the key press for "spore", then the one for "pause", then the "direction" and then the function releaseAll().

Looks well made!
Put a Raspberry pi in that and and you'd have a Pico 8 console.
(or Picotron console if/when that is available for Pi devices)
*could also then plug a mouse/keyboard in for more functionality.

Thanks, @EDcreative

Yeah, that could be a new version! It is currently powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico board (RP2040 microcontroller).