Build a wall mounted arcade that's a low-resolution work of art! You can play PICO-8 games on it, or just run sweet demoscene code for a retro-tech bit of eye candy.

This project uses a Raspberry Pi 5 running Piomatter to drive a 128x128 pixel display made of four RGB LED matrices. A deep frame from IKEA plus some 3D printed brackets makes it straighforward to assemble.

The way this works is that PICO-8 is launched against XVFB (a virtual X framebuffer) so it thinks it's running on a really tiny monitor. But in reality, a python script (virtualdisplay.py) will grab that framebuffer and feed it to the LED matrices via Piomatter.

Parts