My Raspberry Pi is feeling too standard, so a really cool mod that could be done for under $5 is adding a mini marquee. The marquee can be configured to display what game you are running or what system you are playing on. We’ll be using rpi-mini-marquee for this task.

Bill of Materials

1x 128x32 OLED Screen (Available at Banggood)

Circuit

The circuit is super simple, connect the four pins of the screen to the Pi as follows:

Software

Open a terminal and run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/IgniparousTempest/rpi-mini-marquee
cd rpi-mini-marquee
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

This will install the rpi-mini-marquee tool and the necessary scripts to change the marquee when a game starts, a game ends, the system starts up, or the system shuts down.

The installation files can now be removed by running these commands in the same window:

cd ..
rm -rf rpi-mini-marquee

The tool will be run automatically, but you can also access it by typing rpi-mini-marquee on the command line.

You are now done.

Configuring

By default the screen will display the system when the game stars, and switch off when the Pi goes off. These can be altered.

Keep screen on when Pi is off

We can make the screen display something, e.g. retopie logo, when the Pi is off:

sudo nano /etc/init.d/rpimm.sh

You should see the following lines:

stop () {
    /usr/bin/rpi-mini-marquee clear
    return
}

To make it display the retropie logo when we switch off the pi, change it to:

stop () {
    /usr/bin/rpi-mini-marquee retropie
    return
}

Once you are done editing, run the following to reload the service:

restart service

Display game logo instead of system

We can make the screen display the game logo, instead of the system logo, when a game is launched.

sudo nano /opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onstart.sh

Change the line /usr/bin/rpi-mini-marquee -f $1 to:

/usr/bin/rpi-mini-marquee -f $(basename $3)

You should create your own game marquees and put them in:

/usr/share/rpi-mini-marquee/marquees/black_white

Name your game marquees accordingly.