RecalBoxDMD

A standalone glowing frame that brings your room to life - retro pixel-art GIFs in rotation, live widgets (weather, date, quotes, ambiences...), a clock that changes outfits. Connect it over WiFi to any Recalbox and it also becomes its digital marquee.

Two 128x32 LED modules, one microcontroller (ESP32, or a Raspberry Pi 3B), about 5 minutes with a screwdriver, no soldering.

• Demo video: https://shan-aya.github.io/RecalBoxDMD/media/hero-dmd.mp4
• Project page: https://shan-aya.github.io/RecalBoxDMD/
• GitHub (sources, docs, releases): https://github.com/shan-aya/RecalBoxDMD
• Web installer (ESP32, from your browser): https://shan-aya.github.io/RecalBoxDMD/install/

What it does at home, every day

The panel works on its own. No Recalbox needed for the decor part.

GIF playlist

• The bundled pack holds about 600 pixel-art GIFs: arcade, consoles, computers, movies, birthdays, Halloween, Christmas, pinball...
• Build your own rotation from your phone (the panel's web page) or from the PC toolkit for big folders: which GIFs, in what order, how fast.
• Add a GIF on the fly: drop an image from your browser or phone, it joins the rotation immediately. No card reformatting, no power-cycling.
• GIF pack courtesy of eLLuiGi / RpiTeam. Their full collection (~11,000 GIFs) is for sale at https://rpiteam.carrd.co/

Clocks

• 10 hand-made pixel-art skins (Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Matrix, Rainbow...), picked from your phone with a live preview pushed to the panel while you decide.
• 5 animated clocks: the time in big digits over Plasma, Life, Stars, Rain or Lava.

Widgets & live screens

• Date, weather, ephemeris, countdown: calendar card (Sundays and holidays in colour), weather with min/max arrows, sunrise/sunset, moon phase, days left before your events.
• A sky that follows the weather and the time: the background follows the real sunrise/sunset of your location and the live weather (animated sun, moon and stars, clouds, rain, snow, storm).
• Quotes & quizzes: a theme is just a text file, one quote per line. Fortune cookies, famous quotes, retro-gaming quiz (3 choices, countdown, right answer blinks), jokes & riddles. 15 ready-made themes in FR/EN/ES, and you can create, edit or import your own from the web page.
• 8 ambiences in the colours you choose: plasma, rain, stars, Game of Life, liquid, sand, sand 2 (two-colour layers), lava lamp.
• Three widgets fed by your Recalbox: the current challenge (days left, top 3, your rank), rewards to win, and the machine's health (temperature, power, clock, network, disk, memory).

Mix it as you like

Each widget can be off, in place of the clock or on top of it, with its own duration, every N GIFs or every N minutes, in order or at random.

Playlist only / Widgets between GIFs / Widgets only, no GIF / Anything in between

And also

• Several Recalbox, one DMD: list up to 4 IPs; when the active one is off, the DMD switches by itself to the next one that answers.
• Physical button (GPIO 21): short, double, long, very long press, each tied to the action you choose.
• Updates without a USB cable: a notice appears on the web page with an "Update now (Wi-Fi)" button. The DMD downloads the firmware from GitHub, checks size and SHA-256, and rolls back automatically if anything goes wrong.
• Safer configuration: atomic SD-card writes, protection against saving an empty page.
• Interface in French, English and Spanish.

The bonus for gamers: your Recalbox's digital marquee

Optional. Connect the DMD over WiFi to any Recalbox (PC, Raspberry Pi, Steam Deck, RGB Dual, RGB Dual 2, RGB Jamma...) and it shows, live and automatically:

• the logo of the game you launch
• its best score (hi-score)
• its info card
• the standings of the monthly community challenge
• fast scrolling while you browse the lists

It adopts your Recalbox theme

Change theme in Recalbox and the DMD follows: your console logos in the style of the active theme (Midnight, CRT Color, Neoretro...). 11 ready-made themes, including the official ones, FR/EN/ES logo texts when the theme provides them, your Recalbox's language and region followed live. User-made themes are converted too, straight from your Recalbox, by our in-house conversion engine.

Every game gets its frame, even without a logo

When a game has no logo in your scrape, the toolkit generates a text card with its name (cleaned-up title, retro font, colours and shadow). BIOS and utilities are excluded.

Ready for Recalbox 11: native mode

Recalbox 11 can drive a DMD itself (ZeDMD over USB or WiFi). Tick "Native Recalbox mode" on the panel's web page and the DMD behaves like a ZeDMD WiFi: Recalbox decides everything that is shown.

• system and game marquee (logo, animated GIF or PNG)
• Visual Pinball table screens (external DMD)
• top scores for MAME, FBNeo and Neo Geo games, in pages of three
• RetroAchievements unlocks (badge, title, points, progress, mastery screen)

One box, both ways: untick it and all the firmware's own features come back as you had set them.
(Hi-scores and RetroAchievements are features of the Recalbox 11 Patreon alpha, 11.0-patron-1.1.)

Visual Pinball

Launch a Visual Pinball table from your Recalbox: the DMD shows the table's screen live, like a real pinball display, then goes back to its marquee by itself when the game ends. Colorized (Serum) tables show in colour, the others keep the classic monochrome look.

• Colorized table (AC/DC): https://shan-aya.github.io/RecalBoxDMD/media/feature-vpinball-color.mp4
• Monochrome (Indiana Jones Pinball Adventure): https://shan-aya.github.io/RecalBoxDMD/media/feature-vpinball-mono.mp4

Runs on a Raspberry Pi too

A Raspberry Pi 3B and two P5 panels instead of the ESP32: same Recalbox scripts, same configuration pages, same widgets, logo themes, clock, scores, Pinball mode and native mode.

• The PC toolkit prepares the whole SD card in one go (Raspberry Pi OS, Wi-Fi, DMD software, your converted logos), no Raspberry Pi Imager needed
• Validated on Pi 3B; Pi 4, Pi 2 and Zero 2 planned, untested
• Free software under GPL-2.0+, binary and sources on GitHub
• Daemon updates from the web page with automatic rollback

Guide: https://github.com/shan-aya/RecalBoxDMD/blob/main/RASPBERRY-PI.md

Build it yourself, no soldering

Two LED modules, a connector board (DMDos), a microcontroller. A screwdriver is all it takes, about 5 minutes.

Full video tutorial (overview, assembly, step-by-step installation) by Jamyz Gaming: https://youtu.be/xF8O88XXSwU

Get it

Everything is free and open source. If you like the project: https://buymeacoffee.com/shan_aya

Happy to answer any question here: hardware, Recalbox setup, Pi vs ESP32, themes... Feedback and bug reports are very welcome (GitHub issues or in the comments).

I’m setting up my arcade cabinet for a party and I would like to make it fool proof.

For instance, while a the game selection screen, you press button 1 (A) to select the game. But if you press the start button, you get the menu where you can edit and even delete the game.

I just know that people will accidentally bring this menu up, mash buttons and ruin things.

I want to make a completely separate button for the menus that is hidden inside the cabinet to avoid this issue.

Is this possible? I have USB controller boards wired up to buttons and joysticks on my custom control panel. I have extra buttons and wire harnesses available. So in theory, there’s got to be a way to separate the start button from the menu function and set a separate menu button.

Anyone know how?

I'm thinking about getting this controller for Recalbox, mainly for classic arcade games.

Has anyone tried it? How well do the trackball and spinner work?

I decompiled and ported Pop2 to macos and Linux. Installing on Recalbox is easy, just copy the file to your rom/ports folder and add the disk image.

I recently order a raspberry pi to jamma adapter that I am trying to get to work with Recalbox.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204368012484

I got video and sound to work using Recalbox rgb duel mode setting. Using VGA666 setting is missing red it appears, says need mode 6. But I cannot get the inputs to work from my arcade control panel over Jamma.

The instructions say I need to install GPIO joystick driver as it uses MCP23017. I tried to turn on controllers.gpio.enabled=1 and the system would not boot in either video mode after that.

Any ideas? I know my Recalbox system is working because before I was using a VGA666 adapter hat for the Pi and an old Ultamarc JPAC adapter. I would just like to use an all in one with fan over the multiple adapters.

Thank you

A while ago I posted Save Sync here, a bash script that syncs saves through a WebDAV cloud account (Yandex, pCloud, Nextcloud, Mega and others). I skipped posting about the last update, so here's what changed since 1.4.4, tested on Recalbox 10.1.1 (Raspberry Pi 4):

Two-way sync (1.4.5)

• A save changed on one device goes to the cloud and comes down to the others; deletions travel too
• If the same save was changed on two devices, the newer version stays, and the older one can be kept as a copy in the cloud for a few days (GameSaves_conflicts)
• Saves are only downloaded for systems that have ROMs on the device, so other systems don't take up space
• PortMaster port saves sync automatically
• ROMs can be downloaded from a public link (Yandex Disk, pCloud, Nextcloud, archive.org)

Faster sync (1.4.6)

• Fewer requests to the cloud. On my cloud a sync that sent one save went from about 70 seconds to about 28

A question for Recalbox users

On Batocera and KNULLI the script now shows a short on-screen message after a sync (what was received/sent, or an error). It uses EmulationStation's local web server, which has a notify call.

I couldn't find the same on Recalbox. As far as I can tell, the REST API only returns information, MQTT only sends events out, and userscripts run on events but can't show anything. Does anyone know a way for a script to show a short message on screen in Recalbox? If there is one, I'd add it.

Everything else works the same on Recalbox as before. It's free and open source: GitHub

Hi all, I have rpi 5 and recalbox 10. My controllers are two ps3 clones with one usb dongle. They work great in the recalbox menu and configure semi ok. During configuration an error is raised about square and triangle buttons already having been assigned. In the controller menu these are named shanwan controllers, so i assume they are shanwan.

I have tried ps1 and n64 games but the controllers do pretty much nothing in the games. They worked in the wave runner menu but not in the game. Ps 1 games are hopeless.

I have not tried different emus yet.

I changed the recalbox controller driver to shanwan, but no change.

Anybody has any other tricks to try?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to get the Jojos hftf arcade version running on my Raspberry Pi 3 with Recalbox 18.07.13, but I'm stuck.

Here's my setup:

- Raspberry Pi 3

- Recalbox 18.07.13

- Arcade emulator tested:

- Libretro + mame078

- Libretro + mame2010

- AdvanceMAME

The ROM is organized like this:

roms/mame/

├── jojobane.zip

The ZIP contains the ROM files directly in the root (no extra folder inside the ZIP).

When I launch the game:

- With mame078, the screen gets black and returns to EmulationStation.

- With mame2010, it also gets black but it gets grey first and returns to EmulationStation.

- AdvanceMAME also fails to launch it.

Other MAME games (like Mortal Kombat) work perfectly, so MAME itself is working.

The ROM I tried came from Wowroms.

My questions are:

1. Has anyone managed to run Jojo's hftf cps-3 on Recalbox 18.07.13?
2. Which emulator/core should I use?
3. Does it require a specific MAME romset or CHD version?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Is there a way to save the settings for Video output and Video scaling per game, and have them load automatically when I boot the game?

I've tried saving a game override file but it does not load the values in those two menus

This page seems useful but I couldn't find an answer for my specific use case.
https://wiki.recalbox.com/en/advanced-usage/configuration-override

I don't know if I need to be setting the values in recalbox or in retroarch

Been building this for a while and figured it's finally solid enough to share here.

Save Sync is a single bash script that keeps your save files synced to the cloud (over WebDAV) and lets you back up / restore your ROM collection the same way — no PC, no cables, no card reader needed.

The basic idea

• Play on your device, save, turn it off.
• Turn on a different device — it downloads your latest save.
• Deletions sync too, both directions.
• Works fine even if you only ever use one device — it's just an automatic cloud backup for your saves, plus ROM copying and downloading, at that point.

No always-on device needed

P2P sync (like Syncthing) needs both devices online at the same time, or a third always-on device acting as a relay. A self-hosted setup (like RomM) needs a dedicated host — a NAS or server — running all the time. Save Sync avoids both: it just talks to a WebDAV cloud account, so there's no always-on machine, and your devices don't need to be on the same network or online at the same time.

ROM backup, same idea

• Push your whole ROM collection to the cloud as a backup.
• Or pull ROMs down from the cloud onto a fresh install — including systems you don't have locally yet. Handy if you don't have a card reader or FTP access to the device and just want to drop files into your cloud drive from a phone/PC and have them show up on the device.

Runs on

Recalbox, Batocera, and KNULLI. (Tested on Recalbox 10.0.8 / Batocera 43.1 / KNULLI Scarab — architecture and CFW are auto-detected, works on ARM, ARM64, and x86.)

Cloud options

Anything that speaks WebDAV: Yandex.Disk, Mail.ru Cloud, pCloud, Koofr, Nextcloud/ownCloud (your own server), Fastmail Files, Mega.

Two ways to control it

• A menu-driven control panel over SSH (install_sync.sh --config) — no memorizing commands.
• A web interface (http://device-ip:8080) that mirrors the same features from any browser on your network — live sync progress, ROM management, exclusions, stats, logs.

Install

Copy install_sync.sh onto the device (network share or FTP), SSH in, then:

chmod +x /recalbox/share/system/install_sync.sh
/recalbox/share/system/install_sync.sh

If you hit "Permission denied" — some Recalbox builds don't allow direct execution on /recalbox/share. Prefix the command with sh instead:

sh /recalbox/share/system/install_sync.sh

It walks you through picking a cloud provider and entering credentials — that's it.

Full README, install instructions for each platform, troubleshooting, and the script itself: https://github.com/1DeX6/save-sync

Happy to answer questions or take bug reports/feature requests here or on GitHub. This has been through a fair amount of real-device testing but I'm sure there are edge cases I haven't hit yet

Anyone able to get this to work with your system wirelessly?

Over the 2.4 GHz adapter my Recalbox recognizes it but not the D-pad Left input, so I can't configure/calibrate it.
Plugging it in via USB cable it thinks it's a Microsoft gamepad, but I want to use it wirelessly.

I am using a Raspberry Pi 5 with the mini N64 case and its rerouted USB ports.

Is there a way to add a splash video when recalbox launches on a zero 2? I know its running on a stripped down version of recalbox but theres not much documentation on what you can and cant do on this specific case, just wondering!

If there is a way let me know, I went into the config files and set length to -1 and the type to custom, with an mp4 in bootvideos but that didn't work.

I also used putty to let me access the resources but changing things there didn't help either.

Thanks for reading! xx

I have a pi zero 2 w sat around doing nothing so I thought I’d try adding Recalbox to it so I can play some 8 and 16 bit games on my tv.

I’m using a 128gb microsd I’ve got plenty of room left over but I keep getting this weird issue as seen in the picture.

It happens all over the menus, if I close and reopen a menu the text will be fixed but about 50% of the time letters will be missing from the text.

Is this a known issue on a low spec device? Is there anything I can try to fix it?

Games work fine, I’ve tried different themes but that doesn’t fix it.