Okay, it's April 1, so you take things with a grain of salt…but would our friends at ThinkGeek lie to us? They're showing the new iCade, an iPad arcade cabinet that gives realistic arcade controls to class games running on the iPad.
In their own words, "Knowing that many of our loyal geeky customers would eventually get their retractable claws on an iPad at some point, we knew we needed to take it to the next level. What cool things could we do with the iPad that you, our lovely geek customers, would squee over? A few brainstorming sessions later, the idea of a MAME cabinet came up and we knew we'd struck gold. How cool would it be to slide your iPad into a desktop-sized arcade cabinet and rock it old school with some Pac-Man or Space Invaders?"
The cabinet is designed to allow an iPad to slide in firmly and dock into a standard 30-pin connector at the bottom. It includes a power adapter for uninterrupted gaming, but can also be used without one. The iCade software, which allows the use of the joystick and game buttons, is free and should be available in the iTunes app store by Saturday.
A couple of caveats to the story, however; a search of the iTunes store revealed no hint of an iCade, and ThinkGeek's site lists its availability as "80's." Regardless, the MAME software is quite real.
