RetroGaming

If you take up the project and decide to make my dream your reality, all I ask is that you share the code

I haven't done a deep dive into how I'm going to make it happen, my programming is rusty as all hell, and I've never tinkered too much with a pie or this kind of project

But on its surface it seems like an easy enough problem, just need to turn on the appropriate lights when an emulator starts.

Easier said than done I'm sure, I also suspect you'd probably need some kind of led controller or maybe an Arduino or something between the pie and the lights, I don't think the 3.3v it puts out from its GPIO pins would be enough for some light strips.

If someone had a lot of money to throw at the project, I imagine you could also do a pretty cool setup with smart lights like Philips Hue that would be pretty clean and require minimal tinkering with the physical electronics side of things, but you'd probably be throwing as much or more at it in bulbs as the rest of the project put together.