The Boffins' Lab
News, tutorials & gear
Notes from the studio: projects, how-tos, the kit I rate and the occasional experiment.
Builds
The mini Machine
A tiny one-player bartop arcade cabinet in black and red carbon fibre.
Tutorials
Build a Raspberry Pi Space Invaders Controller
Build a three-button controller on a breadboard, wire it to the Pi and play Space Invaders with it. A Cotswold Pi Jam tutorial.
Gear
Mac Pro 2019: NVMe M.2 SSD on a PCIe Card Issue
Why my Mac Pro 2019 would not see an NVMe M.2 SSD on a PCIe card, and what fixed it.
Software & Studio
Chip music on the ZX Spectrum Next: Popcorn and Axel F
Popcorn and Axel F, rebuilt on a ZX Spectrum Next using NextDAW and its three AY sound chips.
Builds
SPACEMACHINE: a Pi-powered bartop arcade
A two-player bartop arcade cabinet built from MDF, with a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie inside: the template, the carcass, the paint, the wi...
Builds
BerryBoy: a Raspberry Pi inside a Game Boy
How I squeezed a Raspberry Pi 2 running RetroPie into a broken DMG-01 Game Boy: the controls, the screen, the power and the parts.
Builds
The Machine: building a MAME arcade cabinet
How I finally built the arcade machine I’d wanted since I was a kid: a full-size MAME cabinet, started in 2005 and finished in a four-...