My first build: "Mimic"

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Grasshopper:

--- Quote from: Laythe on February 06, 2016, 04:30:56 pm ---Here's an image out of my plans that better illustrates how Mimic fits together internally, in case anyone is considering a similar approach. Screens are highlighted green, and the centered viewable 1080x1080 area of the main screen is shown in blue.

--- End quote ---

One thing that occurs to me is that maybe you could have somehow projected the hidden top section of the TV onto the marquee using something like a fresnel lens, and thus avoided the need for a second monitor.

Laythe:
Thanks, Grasshopper! Appreciate the kind words.

I'm really happy with the machine, and I think people should consider this sort of masked-off portrait-oriented 16:9 screen if they're going to go LCD anyway - it works really well.

I thought about ways to try to project or offset the marquee portion of the image to look like it was further forward using that unused real estate. An enormous bundle of coherently laid parallel fiber optic strands would do it, or a crystal that has a similar internal structure - but neither of those would be cheaper or easier than just sourcing the weird aspect ratio second panel. (You could also give up on the marquee being on a separate plane, redesign the machine to maybe be more Viewlix shaped or Tempest shaped or something. Some of the unused Blip designs did that, and a Nintendo bartop project did too - it'll work.) Any tricks with mirrors I could come up with actually make it look further -back-, not further forward, by increasing the light path distance. I think that a fresnel might make it bigger but I don't think it'd make it look closer - though I might be wrong there.

Speaking of fiber optics, I also thought about running bundles of fiber optic strands taped up against the lower screen area, emerging cut off flush at various places on the control panel - you could have a huge number of fully RGB "lights" that were actually just light pipes that you drive by putting color splotches on unused parts of the screen in your mame layout file, kind of for free. Decided against it, but, it's a thing a person could easily do if your build has unused TV real estate hidden in the cabinet like this.

morton:
The button indication lights on this are so slick... and just everything else... Makes me wanna make my cab over again. Looks so clean and non-obtrusive. :notworthy:

80sarcadegames:
This has to be the best "stretch LCD" marquee build I have ever seen!
A+!!!!!!
What was your logic and reasoning for making the top part of the cabinet separate and not seamless with the rest of the cabinet?

Laythe:

--- Quote from: morton on January 07, 2018, 11:27:27 am ---The button indication lights on this are so slick... and just everything else... Makes me wanna make my cab over again. Looks so clean and non-obtrusive. :notworthy:

--- End quote ---

Thanks! Lot of people seem to get tired of their first cab and want to do it over, that's a comment sentiment around here. Mimic is still a machine in the corner that just makes me happy - I haven't wanted to redo it, and I think I'm in the minority in that. I haven't gotten the bug to start collecting real arcade machines either, so something's probably wrong with me. :laugh:

--- Quote from: 80sarcadegames on January 16, 2018, 10:54:29 am ---This has to be the best "stretch LCD" marquee build I have ever seen!
A+!!!!!!
What was your logic and reasoning for making the top part of the cabinet separate and not seamless with the rest of the cabinet?

--- End quote ---

Thanks!

The top part of the cabinet will slide off the front on rails, if I ever need to service or replace the marquee LCD panel. But mostly, my design does that because I don't want the main cabinet to be any wider than it is - it's already too wide to be perfectly authentic. (I'm a bit wider than I was when I spent my childhood in arcades, too, so it's still reasonably proportional.) I don't really like the aesthetic of cabinets that cram a big 16:9 screen in conventional orientation, and are then just a mile wide to fit it in, like a stretch limo or something.

So, the marquee ear overhangs were my compromise - the top absolutely has to be that wide. The marquee monitor is that wide. But I can at least slim up the machine underneath it a little. When you look at it, you'd guess you are looking at a monitor between 3/4" thick plywood panels with T-molding on them - you aren't, it's hollowed out razor thin up there. The marquee monitor is 30.125" wide by itself and the whole -exterior- of the top of the cabinet is 30.250" wide counting laminate. The T-molding you see is debarbed and actually in front of the marquee monitor, not beside it. Making the marquee sides seamless would have required making the whole cabinet 1.5" wider, and that looked worse to me. 28 3/4" outside width for the main body looked about right, 30 1/4" looked fat - and you also start noticing the gaps where the main screen bezel art doesn't quite go edge to edge in the cabinet, the wider you make the main body.

I kinda like the resulting accent lines of T-molding that the top got, it's an interesting shape. It's not authentically any actual cabinet, but I think it doesn't look wholly unlike something that could have been at an arcade in the day. Or so I think.

To do it perfectly... well, that's Blip. Or an LCD TV slung like this in a cabinet like Blip, if you like dynamic bezel art more than CRT authenticity.

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