Recalbox can drive a small second screen, connected to the GPIO header of a Raspberry Pi, to display the artwork and videos of your games — the equivalent of the lit marquee of an arcade cabinet. This feature is independent of the main screen, which stays on the HDMI output.
This feature is for Raspberry Pi boards. It does not exist on PC nor on handheld consoles.
SPI TFT screens are declared through an overlay in the recalbox-user-config.txt file of the [RECALBOX] partition. The overlays of the Waveshare 3.5 inch screens ship with Recalbox (waveshare35a, waveshare35b, waveshare35b-v2, waveshare35c); the Raspberry Pi system overlays (PiTFT and compatible) are available too.
Add to recalbox-user-config.txt the line enabling the SPI bus, then the one for your screen, for instance:
dtparam=spi=on
dtoverlay=waveshare35a:rotate=270,speed=27000000
Refer to your screen documentation for the exact overlay name and its parameters (rotation, bus speed).
The SPI and DPI buses use GPIO pins. If you use GPIO controllers or a Recalbox RGB Dual board, the pins conflict: the two cannot coexist.
recalbox.confOpen the recalbox.conf file and fill in the TFT SECONDARY SCREEN section:
## Required: enables the second screen
system.secondminitft.enabled=1
## Required: screen type
## overlay = screen declared by a dtoverlay in recalbox-user-config.txt
system.secondminitft.type=overlay
## Required: screen resolution
## 320x240 -> 240p, 480x320 -> 320p
system.secondminitft.resolution=320p
## Required: artwork scaling (1 = enabled, 0 = disabled)
system.secondminitft.imagestretchenabled=1
system.secondminitft.imageenlargeenabled=0
system.secondminitft.imagealphaenabled=0
system.secondminitft.imageignoreaspectenabled=1
The four image options combine: imagestretch resizes the artwork to fit the screen, imageenlarge enlarges it to fill the whole screen, imageignoreaspect ignores its proportions and imagealpha uses its transparency.
Reboot: your second screen displays the artwork of scraped games.
## Stop playing scraped videos in the interface (second screen only)
system.secondminitft.disablevideoines=1
## GPIO pin of the backlight PWM control
## On Raspberry Pi, PWM is incompatible with jack sound output:
## leave this line commented out if you use the jack output.
;system.secondminitft.backlightcontrol=18
## Turn the backlight off in sleep mode (1) or keep it on (0)
system.secondminitft.sleepenabled=0
## Show a dedicated marquee during the game instead of the game artwork
system.secondminitft.usemarquee=0
With system.secondminitft.usemarquee=1, Recalbox displays a specific image during the game instead of the scraped artwork. Create a marquees folder next to the images and videos folders of your media, and drop images bearing the same names as the ones in the images folder:
┣ 📁 roms
┃ ┣ 📁 neogeo
┃ ┃ ┣ 📁 media
┃ ┃ ┃ ┣ 📁 images
┃ ┃ ┃ ┃ ┣ 🗒 alpham2.png
┃ ┃ ┃ ┣ 📁 marquees
┃ ┃ ┃ ┃ ┣ 🗒 alpham2.png
system.secondminitft.enabled=1 and the value of system.secondminitft.resolution.dtparam=spi=on in recalbox-user-config.txt.backlightcontrol — PWM and the jack output cannot coexist on a Raspberry Pi.Need help? Join the Recalbox Discord with the exact model of your screen.