Spent about two days assembling the Adafruit Cupcade as a gift for a friend. Some soldering and fiddling around with the command line is required. I ordered the kit online. You have to provide the Raspberry Pi though, more specifically a Model One Revision B. I had an old one lying around that I bought a few years ago so I used that. The kit costs USD120 but the shipping to Singapore cost me USD30. I then installed the Cupcade Linux distribution that supported the NES emulator so I could play games like Mario Brothers, TMNT, Contra, Mega-man, Castlevania etc. Yeah those 8-bit games on the very first Nintendo NES system, the ones that came in cartridges that you had to blow onto sometimes to get it to work. The Cupcade is very cute to look at and you can actually use the knob and buttons, but it is not a serious nor practical gaming platform. More of a nostalgic toy that brings back memories of my childhood.
All part of the kit minus the RasPi. An 8-ohm speaker is included, together with a 2.8 inch TFT touch display, an interface breakout board for the knob and buttons and a ribbon cable for the display to the RasPi.
Also part of the kit. I though the design is very thoughtful and detailed. It was a bit difficult to assemble when you had to align many screws at once but the end result is a clean finished look with no ugly exposed screws or holes.
The display has a resolution of 320 x 240. It is quite low res but it boasts a resistive touch screen, although the touch feature is not used in this setup.
The speaker is mounted behind the slits. You can see the suspended nut in the “t” slot held in place by a screw. This method is used to hold the external parts of the frame together.
The red buttons emulate the A and B buttons on the Nintendo console. The black buttons are the coin slot and 1-player buttons. I improvised using blue tac to secure the RasPi onto the bottom base because I was using the older Model B Revision One. The Revision Two had screw mounts on the RasPi.
This is what it looks like after connecting all the wires and cables.
You can peep into the insides through the slit behind. There is also a bottom slit for the micro-usb power cord and to access the sd card which sticks out next to the cord.
lohjianhui 