Ryan McDonough

Founder, Sometime Artist

CFO and co-founder @Accompany, acquired by @Cisco. Turnaround CFO @Ning, sold to Glam Media. Former seed VC. McKinsey trained. @Wharton School and @Haas School of Business.

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TINKERING

LEGOcade Mini

From E-Waste to Arcade: Upcycling an iPhone 5 Inside a LEGO Cabinet

Some builds start as nostalgia projects, others as hacks. This one is both. I took LEGO’s Arcade Machine (40805) set, combined it with an old iPhone 5 running iOS 10, and ended up with a mini-arcade that plays videos of 1980s classics. The only non-standard LEGO kit elements? A black 16×8 plate to anchor the phone and a handful of 1×2 and 1×1 bricks.

LEGOcade Mini

LEGOcade Mini: Turning an Old iPhone 5 into a Retro Arcade Machine Some builds start as nostalgia projects, others as hacks. This one is both. I took LEGO’s Arcade Machine (40805) set, combined it with an old iPhone 5 running iOS 10, and ended up with a working mini-arcade that plays 1980s classics. The only non-standard LEGO kit elements? A black 16×8 plate to anchor the phone and a handful of misc. bricks to make the fit snug.

 

From E-Waste to Arcade Machine

The iPhone 5 was collecting dust, unable to handle modern web browsing and too old for most apps. Instead of recycling it, I decided to repurpose it. At slightly smaller than a 16×8 stud plate, the iPhone slides neatly into the LEGO cabinet with only minimal adjustments.


The result is a little arcade with a screen that:

  • Loops nostalgic arcade gameplay videos (80s/90s hits like Pac-Man, Galaga, Street Fighter).
  • Runs Ms. Pac-Man for iOS 10 (still available from Bandai Namco).
  • Stays powered with a 180-degree Lightning-to-USB cable routed through the side.
AirDrop still works perfectly on iOS 10, which makes it dead simple to beam new gameplay clips over. With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth disabled, the device is secure, distraction-free, and dedicated to being a nostalgia box.

Technical Notes: Getting the Video Right

The challenge was video alignment. In portrait mode, the iPhone 5 tends to center videos vertically, which meant awkward black bars both above and below. I wanted gameplay clips pinned to the top of the screen, like a real arcade monitor.

Enter FFmpeg. Using Terminal on macOS, I scaled each video to fit the 640-pixel width, then padded it to the iPhone’s native 640×1136 portrait resolution, aligning to the top.

Here’s the simple one-liner:

				
					ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=640:-1,pad=640:1136:0:0:black" -c:a copy output.mp4

And here’s a drag-and-drop script to automate it (so I can prep dozens of arcade videos at once):

				
					#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

for INPATH in "$@"; do
  STEM="${INPATH%.*}"
  ffmpeg -y -i "$INPATH" \
    -vf "scale=iw*min(640/iw\,1136/ih):ih*min(640/iw\,1136/ih),pad=640:1136:0:0:black,setsar=1" \
    -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset medium -crf 20 \
    -c:a aac -b:a 160k -movflags +faststart \
    "${STEM}-padded.mp4"
done
💡 Pro tip: Run conversions from your Downloads folder. On macOS, Terminal doesn’t automatically have permission to access Documents/Desktop without explicit approval, but Downloads works out of the box.

LEGO Meets Nostalgia

The magic of this build isn’t just the LEGO shell or the retro video loops—it’s the feeling of bringing two eras together. A decade-old iPhone, no longer “useful” by modern standards, finds new life inside a LEGO model that itself was designed as a nod to arcade nostalgia.

 

All for zero incremental cost: no Raspberry Pi, no display driver boards, no 3D printing. Just LEGO bricks, a forgotten iPhone, and a bit of code.

Closing Thoughts

Projects like this remind me why I tinker: not everything needs to be new to feel magical. Sometimes the best builds come from re-imagining the hardware you already have.

 

LEGOcade Mini is now a permanent member of my Nostalgia Machine family—looping arcade classics, chiming 8-bit soundtracks, and standing as proof that an iPhone 5 can still make you smile in 2025.