My first build: "Mimic"

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blueznl:
Wow. Just... wow.

:notworthy:

How did you set it up software wise? The partial screen just might cause havoc with non-mame stuff, or was it pretty easy?

Laythe:
Thanks!

Software wise, it's not too bad - I wrote my own front end, but not because of the weird screen setup.

I'd say it's reasonably easy. I'm running AAE and Nebula in addition to Mame, and a few PC games like Hammerwatch on it, and they all work great.

If your vid card will let you define a 1080x1080 custom resolution, that's most ideal for things working out of the box. My nvidia drivers would let me run it as far down as 1080x1440, so I did that. Windows sees it as a portrait-oriented 1080x1440 display. I happen to be running Win XP, but I suspect it'd work the same on 7.

Many games want to display a 4:3 or 16:9 landscape view, and if they find a portrait monitor they center that view vertically and letterbox black above and below it. That works out fine.

The only gotcha I can think of is, if at all possible try to physically design it around being able to use the center of the screen, because that's where stuff you haven't configured is more likely to land.

Taekwonjudo:
Sorry to resurrect an old post, but I've been away a long time!

Laythe this is simply spectacular work! Kudos to you for this. I was hoping you might be willing to direct me where to get some instruction on controlling 2 monitors... like your marquee.

My current build (which *cough* I finally got back to after *cough* almost a decade) has 2 monitors and the original idea I had for the 2nd monitor is exactly what you've done here. (The difference is I'm using a repurposed Golden Tee machine so I'll have a LOT of photoshop work ahead of me for the marquee's I'm sure).

Laythe:
Thanks, taekwonjudo! Glad you like it.

I don't know of an instructional resource to recommend, but I'm happy to talk about multiple monitor setups a bit. I didn't find it terribly difficult to get working, I just tinkered around with it until it did what I wanted.

Most video cards support two monitors out of the box these days, so the physical wiring is straightforward. I configure my multiple-screen arcade builds as a standard multi-monitor windows desktop. Mame set to run fullscreen will generally go to whichever monitor you've selected the "use this as my primary display" checkbox on, so you'll want that to be your main game screen, with the marquee panel being the one you extended your desktop onto.

I wrote my own front-end software, so I'm just displaying the marquee image at the screen origin coordinates of monitor 2 before starting mame, and then swapping it back to the Mimic title art afterward. Depending on what front end software you are using, you might find built in support in something like BigBox, or a helper program like HyperMarquee that could help.

Re: having a lot of photoshop ahead of you, haha yeah - tracking down and formatting the art for the marquees is, I think, more difficult than getting it all working. What resolution is your 2nd monitor? I ended up at 1366x480 on mine, and if that's close then I might be able to give you a head start on processed images... but if you're doing 1920x??? then you'll have to do the whole quest from scratch.

Token's Moonshot! is a Golden Tee with the same sort of main screen orientation that Mimic uses to get the dynamic bezels going. You might be interested to see that, if you hadn't found it yet.

Taekwonjudo:
Awesome! Thanks Laythe. That actually helps a lot. I have it setup right now to use launchbox as a frontend for now until I get things all setup at which point I think the transition to BigBox will be easiest. (Since I don't have anywhere near your capability as far as creating my own frontend lol That's probably the safest route right now).

As far as the 2nd monitor, it's the LCD that was in the machine back in the day. Running at 1024x768. Thanks for the offer of file help if its close... I may still take you up on that as time goes but it looks like I'll still need to edit a fair bit.

I'll definitely check out Moonshot as well! Thanks for the heads up on that one!

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