Painfully Obvious.

Let’s make the poor‐man’s version of LEDBlinky: a way to light up specific buttons for specific games using a Pac‐Drive and some shell scripts.

How to wire up a hardware knob that controls the Pi’s software volume level via GPIO.

I wanted an easy way to power the system on or off without going through a menu. I managed to do it with a hardware add‐on and a simple Python script.

All the stuff I wish I’d known about RetroPie and MAME that wasn’t written down in one specific place.

Before your attention flags, I want to wrap up the hardware portion of this series and move into the software. But first I need to cover some odds and ends.

Last time I told you a story of how I built an arcade cabinet out of a couple sheets of MDF. The part I left out was the making of the control panel — the MDF board that will hold the buttons, joysticks, and other controls.

In part one of a too‐many‐parted series, learn how I turned a couple of sheets of MDF into an arcade cabinet with several pounds of sawdust as by‐product.

I don’t have the patience to learn new skills for their own sake. Most of what I know about computers, including everything I do at my day job, was something I learned because I needed it to do something cool. In 2001 I needed to learn PHP to make a…