TCADE, the arcade cabinet that brings your iPad back to life
A bartop cabinet with a real joystick and buttons, designed for that iPad you haven’t used in years. We saw it at Retro Barcelona and it won us over.
Almost all of us have an old iPad in a drawer. It works, but it no longer gets updates, it can’t run today’s apps and nobody uses it. TCADE starts from that simple idea: turn it into the screen of a tabletop arcade cabinet.
The cabinet is a classic bartop, the kind that fits on a table or a shelf: marquee on top, angled control panel below and vinyl artwork straight out of an eighties arcade. The iPad slots into the screen opening, and the panel has a real arcade joystick and buttons, the kind that go clack, connected to the tablet so you can play any game that supports a controller.
What we saw at Retro Barcelona
We came across the project, and its creator, at the last Retro Barcelona. They had the prototype set up and running, and the queue to try it never got any shorter. Playing a beat ’em up on it with the joystick in your hand has something a bare iPad will never have: the movement, the stance, the sound of the buttons. It’s a really cool project, made with brains and with heart, the kind you want to get behind.
We’re already looking forward to the launch. There’s no official price yet, but at the fair they mentioned something around 100 euros, without the iPad, of course. As soon as the date and price are confirmed, we’ll share them here.
In the meantime, they have a great website where you can follow the project: tcade.com.
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