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   Coin Ops
   August 28th, 2022
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   Written offline on my phone
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  Yesterday I finished building my Picade [1]. I am quite happy about
  the outcome, but I think I still have mixed feelings about how easy 
  it was.
  
  On the one hand, I feel a bit guilty about how things went: I recently
  saw a Twitter user posting about his new Picade and the fact it was 
  on sale with a 40% discount; I had been watching that item for a
  while, so I basically just connected to the website and bought it 
  (together with a few more things which were on sale). The price was,
  in my opinion, reasonable (actually after building it I’d say it is
  definitely worth it!), but I still think I should have waited for
  some special occasion before buying me this kind of gift.
  
  On the other hand, yesterday afternoon I had a blast building it.
  It was super funny and I think the step-by-step instructions were
  amazing. I never had, during the whole process, that feeling of 
  "what if I am screwing it up now" that sometimes you get when 
  building anything that comes with instructions, nor the "oh fuck I
  screwed everything up" feeling you get some other times. Everything
  just worked fine and now I own a Picade.
  
  Is this the first emulation rig I have? Hell no, I think I emulated
  stuff since when emulators were around. I still remember my uni 
  friend Ettore [2] working on Vice in the late 90s, and me playing
  with it on my Pentium. My latest rig was a raspi 3 (btw the same one
  I used for the Picade) which I used to connect to TVs and play with
  my kids.
  
  Do I feel happy as a kid for having an emulator running in a cabinet
  now? Hell yeah. Saying I always wanted one is not an understatement, 
  and while I gave up my hope on ever owning a full-sized cabinet (not
  true... Maybe I'll still have a chance in my 80s), the tabletop 
  experience is close enough for me to get SO excited... Thus, 
  regardless of the fact I have already played the very same games 
  with emulators, doing it again on a tabletop, while feeling the ball
  top joystick's microswitches and listening to 8-bit music coming 
  from a crappy speaker, fills me with joy.
  
  
  [1] https://pimoroni.com/picade
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Perazzoli