| Main > Project Announcements |
| My first build: "Mimic" |
| << < (19/29) > >> |
| Laythe:
--- Quote from: Pixelhugger on January 14, 2017, 01:55:22 am ---Ive been away from the forums for a while, and stumbled onto this. My god this is just incredible. Just unbelievably cool. --- End quote --- Thank you! Mission Control is one of the most amazing cabinets ever made, so that carries a lot of weight. I greatly admire your work. You and Ond, markc74, vwalbridge, and others, who have built things that I would be proud of had they been mine, are inspirational. The kind words in this thread about my project from many of the people here that I respect the most, are just a heck of a thing. :o (I guess that may sound like a circlejerk to some, but it's significant to me.) So, thanks. In the spirit of the awesome flyers you did for MC: |
| gdonovan:
Crazy workmanship! Inspires me to aim high on my own projects! Gary |
| Pixelhugger:
I can't stop thinking about this project. There is just somehting about the cabinet itself becoming part of the emulation of the game I just can't get over. I was telling my wife about it at Target yesterday and I think she got scared. >:D How did you handle the differing aspect ratios of the marquees? I know you created art for non existent bezels... did you have to extend artwork to avoid strectching/scaling issues for the marquees as well? Did I miss that in the thread? Love the flyer! It totally reminds me of those Matchbox car storage cases from the 70s I always wanted but my mom would never buy. BTW thanks for the compliments. It goes both ways. |
| Laythe:
--- Quote from: gdonovan on January 14, 2017, 06:56:43 pm ---Crazy workmanship! Inspires me to aim high on my own projects! Gary --- End quote --- Thanks! I've always believed that a beginner can make something as nice as a pro - the difference is that the pro can do it a whole lot faster. Not knowing which parts will matter and which parts will show, the beginner just has to be careful about everything, whereas the pro knows which corners they can safely cut. Take your time, have fun, and you'll do fine. :cheers: --- Quote from: Pixelhugger on January 16, 2017, 12:05:22 am ---My god, I can't stop thinking about this project. There is just somehting about the cabinet itself becoming part of the emulation of the game I just can't get over. I was telling my wife about it at Target yesterday and I think she got scared. >:D How did you handle the differing aspect ratios of the marquees? I know you created art for non existent bezels... did you have to extend artwork to avoid strectching/scaling issues for the marquees as well? Did I miss that in the thread? Love the flyer! It totally reminds me of those Matchbox car storage cases from the 70s I always wanted but my mom would never buy. BTW thanks for the compliments. It goes both ways. --- End quote --- Haha, thanks. Blip similarly just wouldn't let go of me after I saw the pictures of it, I know the feeling. :) The marquee panel I've got is 1366x480 - I think the 1366x384 like Blip uses is a little more optimal. There's no one standard aspect on marquee art on original cabs, but the average is a little shorter than this. (There's plenty of exceptions. Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters and Super Puzzle Fighter are much too tall.) So about 1/3rd of the marquees I find fit just perfect, the other 2/3rds of them, the panel is too tall / the art is too wide. I've done a lot of tinkering on the marquee artwork to reformat it to fit. Sometimes I can get away with a little squish, sometimes I'm cropping in a little closer and discarding the left and right edges, sometimes I'm rearranging the art to kill some deadspace to crowd it together a little tighter, sometimes I'm extending the artwork vertically. Occasionally I just have to leave black deadbands top and bottom, or add a colored stripe. Frequently, it's a little bit of all of the above simultaneously. If I do a good job, most can't tell I did anything unless they see the original side by side. I take comfort knowing operators did similar surgery and worse when converting real cabinets back in the day. Neo-Geo games are kind of a pain, because the strictly historically correct thing to do with the marquee panel - mostly red with the little mini-marquee - just ends up looking like a cop-out in my menu. :D So I end up taking liberties with many of those. It's also a project just to hunt down high res marquee source art for everything. I've got my set mostly complete, there's a few that maybe could be better quality, but nothing is still out and out bad anymore. Overall, this approach leads to a different feel for the cabinet, I think. Mission Control has a big strong identity to it - no matter what you're playing on it, it's Mission Control and there's nothing else like it. Mimic fades out like a chameleon - it feels like a Joust when it's being a Joust. I think there's value on both sides of that; the magic to me is that I feel like I've almost got an entire arcade of dedicated machines in one 29"x18" footprint, but there really is something to be said for a machine that has a bold character and presence of it's own. I don't think it's possible to achieve both outcomes at the same time from the same cabinet. |
| gdonovan:
--- Quote from: Laythe on January 16, 2017, 04:16:33 am --- I think there's value on both sides of that; the magic to me is that I feel like I've almost got an entire arcade of dedicated machines in one 29"x18" footprint, but there really is something to be said for a machine that has a bold character and presence of it's own. --- End quote --- This. One thing that bugs me about about MAME machines are the fact that they have no clear personality and this is coming from the perspective of a grey-beard that spent lots of time in arcades growing up. When you walked in you could spot the Pac Man game, the Space Invaders game, the Donkey Kong game, etc. The cabinets and artwork themselves had personality that was part of the experience! Maybe the younger crowd feels this less since most of their gaming is/was done on consoles which <cough old ---fudgesicle--- cough> in my day even the consoles had only one game in them for a time! Mimic is a lovely attempt to address this and I salute you! |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |