A PSX Is the Perfect Raspberry Pi Enclosure

Raspberry Pi is famous for their single-board computers (SBCs) and those are complete computers —just connect a power supply and stick in an SD card and they’ll run in headless mode. But notable exceptions (such as the Raspberry Pi 400) aside, they don’t include cases. To protect the bare board, most users buy or 3D-print cases for their Raspberry Pi computers. Redditor Accurate-Donkey5789 found an even better solution: a Sony PSX console.

The original Sony PlayStation (often referred to by its “PSX” development codename) is almost 20 years old and its blocky gray enclosure hits many of us hard in the nostalgia lobes of our brains. Accurate-Donkey5789 intended to use their Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to run RetroPie for game emulation, so the PlayStation seemed like the perfect case. We imagine that they also get a kind of twisted satisfaction from running Nintendo 64 games on a PlayStation—something that will either amuse or infuriate just about anyone that sees it in action.

The best part is the fact that almost everything still works. The power switch does, indeed, control power to the Raspberry Pi. The lid button works and provides access to the Pi’s GPIO pins, additional USB ports, and better airflow. A 3D-printed cover plate sits where the disc tray used to be, so it looks nice when open. A PlayStation memory card holds the slot for the Raspberry Pi’s SD card and Accurate-Donkey5789 even got this working with real PlayStation controllers plugged into the original ports.

That last feature was possible because there is an adapter inside the enclosure that converts the PlayStation controller inputs into USB. The wiring for the adapter is internal, so everything looks normal from the outside.

Accurate-Donkey5789 also put a wireless USB keyboard dongle inside to make it easier to tweak settings on the Raspberry Pi. That was a good idea, because they overclocked the Pi to help it handle certain games (N64 games, in particular) better.

Accurate-Donkey5789 reports that this works very well and, frankly, we’re pretty jealous.