Note: there's no flicker in real life, these are just difficult to film!
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.
Power supply -- 5V 10A works well, you could go for an even higher wattage supply if you need to brighten the screen a lot more than the default project settings.
Frame
SANNAHED frame from IKEA. It comes in a few colors to match your decor.
PICO-8 Fantasy Console
The PICO-8 Fantasy Console cost about $15. This includes all future versions, and is cross-platform so you can install it on your Windows, Mac, Linux, and Raspberry Pi machines.
Controllers
You'll want some generic wired USB gamepads such as these SNES-styled ones.
Or you can go with some wireless Bluetooth gamepads such as these.
Keyboards and mice may be used with Pico-8 games that support them and with "devkit mode" enabled, wireless keyboard and/or mouse may be preferable so you aren't running more wires behind the frame.
Page last edited August 20, 2025
Text editor powered by tinymce.
