One cool thing about Raspberry Pis is that they're so small, you can install one pretty much anywhere. This has led to people creating what's called "magic mirrors," which are screens placed on a wall with a Pi installed in the back. This lets you add a central hub for a smart home, a dashboard to get your emails and weather forecasts, or just about anything you can think of.

Some avid gamers use their magic mirrors to play games. It makes a ton of sense; if you've got a screen sitting around doing nothing, you might as well put some games on it. However, one person went the extra mile and made their gaming screen look extra snazzy.

The Raspberry Pi Pico-8 wall arcade is a set piece and a console in one

In a post on Adafruit, the Pico-8 wall arcade is a mix of a console and an art piece. Pick up a controller and you can game on it, and when it's time to do something else, you can put on an appeasing light show for some nice eye candy.

The bill of materials includes a Pico-8 fantasy console that runs off a Raspberry Pi and only costs around $15. Then it was just a case of making it all come together:

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.

If you like the concept of turning a screen into a hub, check out that one time our own Daniel Allen turned an old tablet into a smart home dashboard.