The goal of Mimic has been to reach what I considered the largest subset of most playable games with the minimum necessary compromises, and, to be as much of a visual chameleon as I can tastefully manage while doing it.
The main display is a 16:9 Samsung LCD/LED HDTV, 1920x1080, oriented in portrait. I'm borrowing a page from Marvel Versus Capcom: Revolution v2 here, and using a 1080x1080 rotated display area in the center to make a 32.5" diagonal 1:1 aspect ratio square screen, upon which I can render horizontal or vertical games at correct aspect ratio without mechanical rotation. 32.5" is way too big for a game screen - but gives me enough room for bezel art around a roughly-correct sized game screen. The cabinet design wraps quite tightly around the TV. Only this center square display area is at all visible from the front, touched by the speaker panel and by the control panel. The TV just almost sticks out the top of the cabinet, hidden behind the speaker panel and marquee box - and goes down way behind the control panel on the bottom to rest on the CPU shelf.
All of the weirdness of the top marquee box, is to support an LG 29" M2900S-BN 1366x480 stretch LCD panel. It's not as svelte as that gorgeous Spanpixel that Blip uses, but it is much closer to the right aspect ratio than the 21:9 monitors are, and I was able to find a factory refurb LG for about a quarter of the $1200 a Spanpixel was going to cost me.
(Oh, and speaking of Blip, man, my respects to markc74 - of all the great machines I've seen build threads on here, it is my favorite. Just in case the influence on mine wasn't, like, totally obvious. Thank you for the inspiration.)
The LG top panel drove a lot of the dimensions of the design - the M2900 is 30.13" wide, and decasing it buys you basically
nothing. By sandwiching only 0.065" of aluminum and laminate over it, I was able to get the overall outside width of the cabinet down to 30.25" while hiding a lot of the inert area of the monitor under the structure and T-mold. I'm skinning the spine off the T-molding that runs over the aluminum flanges and lays over the front and top of the monitor, making it all appear about 1.5" narrower than it actually is. It looks like it nests between full 3/4" width plywood - in actuality, the monitor is pocketed so deep that the exterior laminate actually gets slightly warm from the heat of the backlight.
I wanted to pack all this into as close to a normal sized cabinet as I could manage, which is why the top box steps out one plywood thickness; that gets the main interior width between verticals down to 27.25", which is a little over the traditional 24" but not TOO monstrously oversized. This is all absolutely as narrow as I could possibly get things, given the 30.13" top panel.
So, with both screens in, from front and back:
(Pardon the right-side storage door sitting on the floor instead of in it's frame in this shot - it does actually fit correctly.)
You can see the degree to which the thing is designed around the TV. The deep control panel helps match the tall marquee box and gives me the space I need to hide the inert ends of the television that I am not using. The TV is set for a 20 degree lean back, and the top edge of it almost touches the wall, leaving a half inch slot for warm exhaust air to blow out the top of the machine. That set the overall depth limit on how slim the machine could be.
Here's how the machine looks, when turned off, with the screens installed and the T-molding in place. (This picture is from prior to glass installation - there are still to be glass panels over both the TV and the marquee monitor, with black paint on the back of them everywhere but the display areas, to prevent you seeing past the sides of the main screen, and to hide the badges on the display cases.)
I agree wholly with markc74 - if you are going to go the chameleon route with a dynamic marquee, a conservative black and white cabinet is a great way to keep it from clashing colors between the game and the cabinet. Mimic takes all it's colors from the control panel lights, the dynamic bezel art and the changing marquee, and that's really enough for it I think.
The resulting chameleon effect, with a few games:
vwalbridge -
THAT is why the name, Mimic.
After installing the glass to hide the edges and badges, here's a player's eye view of a few games:
And, finally, as wall-mounted in the alcove in my house:
On the software side:
I wrote my own front end software for it from scratch. My custom front end talks to the Ultimarc servostiks to switch 4-way or 8-way as appropriate, and talks to the Ipac Ultimate I/O that controls the RGB LEDs per game. It either displays my Mimic logo (when in the menus), or the appropriate game marquee, on the upper panel. Then either fires up MAME, Nebula or AAE, depending on the game. I'm running a game list of about a hundred.
I'm using the marquee art, as the menu selection art, which I think works well. Up and down on the P1 stick scrolls through the list; left and right jump one letter at a time through it. The list is shown as the marquee art, and when you select a game (via just about any button) that jumps up to the marquee.
I've spent a lot of time touching up and reformatting marquees and bezels to work optimally with this setup. I have done a whole bunch of photoshop work cleaning up 1366x480 marquee art. An awful lot of games turn out to have no original bezel art at all - in those cases I've adapted the art and instructions from the CPO of the original machine to form a bezel. 1080x1080 is just enough resolution that all the instruction cards on bezels are readable. I have reformatted all the bezels so that the game display is an integer scaling of the original game resolution, which fixes one of the common LCD display problems of uneven resampling. I've also painted my scanlines directly into this bezel art, translucent black, which fixes another. It helps to turn the contrast and brightness on the bezel art WAY down - it's supposed to be cardboard, after all, not the emissive phosphor of the CRT that would have been next to it. If the game display is very bright, and the bezel art is very dim and washed out, the pairing really tricks the eye in person.
I'd like to thank you guys for the ideas I've borrowed from other projects, and for the nudge that made me decide to give this whole project a try.