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| My first build: "Mimic" |
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| CSL:
Great cab and great execution, that marquee is brilliant. Bit big but it works so well. |
| Laythe:
--- Quote from: Vincefaro on March 04, 2016, 07:34:58 pm ---This is just great work. After seeing this and blip I think my plans for my cab, HAVE to be changed . I just need a Dynamic Marquee . I was going with a Tron Theme, But i think I might scrap it for a more generic theme and get a dynamic marquee , It just adds so much to the cabinet. Really nice work. I guess i will save on artwork and printing, to pick up the right LCD for the marquee. --- End quote --- --- Quote from: CSL on March 04, 2016, 08:14:41 pm ---Great cab and great execution, that marquee is brilliant. Bit big but it works so well. --- End quote --- Thanks! I agree, it's a bit big. The ideal panel is the spanpixel that Blip uses... but buying one stateside would literally have cost me more than the total price of Mimic as built. I was getting numerous quotes at around $1,300 - so I decided I could live with this. One thing I'd like to say about LCD based dynamic marquees, for those who haven't seen one in person. An LCD panel isn't totally *right* replacing a CRT, and I really understand the people here who are therefore still holding the line of "CRT Or Bust". That said, an LCD is totally right as a marquee. The arcade original marquees were generally a backlit color film translucency, usually lit by flourescent tubes. This LCD monitor is, internally, a backlit color film translucency, lit by flourescent tubes. So, from any distance beyond nose-to-the-glass where you can see the pixel screendoor, it's a perfect feeling fake. At one point in my development, I had some animations going on up there. I learned that - for me, at least - it's actually a lot worse. As soon as anything MOVES up there, it's obviously an LCD screen. But as long as you only leave a static image up there, it looks like every other arcade marquee - aside from it just magically always being the correct marquee. So, if you're thinking about it, I'd highly recommend it. The effect in person is better than pictures suggest. |
| thagerty:
Beautiful build! I wondered when someone was going to use a vertical LCD TV this way. nVidia custom resolutions (via nvidia control panel) are your friend for this kind of project. Very easy to do and has been around for ages. However, you also have to check the scaling method used under "adjust desktop size and position". This may have to be changed depending on your TV and your methods. I do this to have a 21:9 resolution (3840x1640) in my UHD TV for my racing games on my simpit. I just got done setting up MAME on my virtual pinball cabinet. The playfield screen is used to play MAME games similar to how you do (42 inch vertical), but my entire screen is always exposed. I use Pinball X as my front-end. I feel your pain when it comes to "lay" files. Even with the nice bezel art out there (I collected everything I could find), there is no way to completely fill my screen with ANY bezel art. So I used Rocket Launcher to manage bezels. I use a "default" bezel / background (or a random one) that automatically works for all games while allowing the game to fill up as much of my screen as possible (with HLSL effects for scaling,etc). If there was a MAME bezel / artwork that filled the leftover space nicely enough I would use it. There is nothing normal about my setup so its never going to be perfect. I made over 2700 marquee images for the backglass screen (which acommodated the various different sizes), so I am NOT going to make hundreds of custom lay files.... especially after spending all this time making media for around 500 pinball games (1500 videos!). Not to mention I have hundereds of MAMe gameplay videos to do.... (no other source for videos available for this kind of setup for MAME, and I'm too picky) This is what I'm talking about.... its not as nice as your bezel setup, but its the best I can manage with this type of cabinet: Again, great job and beautiful execution. You have inspired me to maybe make use of my spare 42 inch TV for another project! |
| Laythe:
--- Quote from: thagerty on April 10, 2016, 04:35:53 pm ---Beautiful build! I wondered when someone was going to use a vertical LCD TV this way. --- End quote --- Thanks! Though, I'm not the first. I think Maximus might have been (with a plasma), or maybe Token if you are specifically only talking LCDs. I am probably missing some folks, I apologize - who here does have the earliest claim on slinging an oversize 16:9 display in portrait? (I owe them a :cheers:) --- Quote from: thagerty on April 10, 2016, 04:35:53 pm ---I feel your pain when it comes to "lay" files. Even with the nice bezel art out there (I collected everything I could find), there is no way to completely fill my screen with ANY bezel art. So I used Rocket Launcher to manage bezels. I use a "default" bezel / background (or a random one) that automatically works for all games while allowing the game to fill up as much of my screen as possible (with HLSL effects for scaling,etc). If there was a MAME bezel / artwork that filled the leftover space nicely enough I would use it. There is nothing normal about my setup so its never going to be perfect. --- End quote --- I've got just a few more bezels to go, my target is for every game in my list to have a custom .lay layout and bezel and I'm maybe 98% there. I have to manually adjust the bezels anyway from Mr. Do's excellent work, because I want the screen portion to be integer scaled so I can line the scanlines up correctly, I dim them way down so they look more like cardboard instead of glowing CRT phosphor, I paint vignetting and scanlines on the monitor area directly in the .PNG (which is almost free as compared to HLSL effects), and I'm frequently thinning the bezels down a great deal to look right aesthetically on my setup. The square "screen" is pretty easy to fill completely, which is nice. In a lot of cases I've had to paint my own incorrect homage bezels - many cabinets simply never had bezel art, so for them I'm remixing the control panel overlay art into bezel art. Otherwise, the often cool control panel art would go unused, because I just could not figure out a way to give Mimic a dynamic control panel overlay. I wanted to. I thought of a lot of half baked ideas. Tight grid-packed LED lighting with missing elements to make holes for the controls to go through... retroreflective glass bead screen material CPO with a topside projector in the speaker panel under the marquee monitor... back projection from the foot of the cabinet shooting up onto a translucent CP and an insanely clean wiring job to avoid shadows... no. None of it was going to work well. Defining my own custom colors for RGB lighting the controls per game was as close as I could get. Maybe someday we'll have scissor-cuttable OLED film and somebody can do it then. |
| RetroGreg:
Wow, Laythe. This is really an impressive cab. The screens are gorgeous and I really like your control panel. Great job with the software. The amount of work you put into configuring it really shows. Shout out for the cool admin panel too :cheers:. |
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