Flatscreen as dynamic marquee?

[Martoon]

Just curious if anyone's ever gone way over the top by using a flatscreen (or any other type of screen) as a sort of dynamic marquee in the top of their cabinet.  Then you could display the appropriate marquee art for whichever game the emu is running.

Alternatively, I suppose you could mount a widescreen tv vertically, have a horizontally oriented monitor bezel reveal the lower part as your main display, and make another bezel to reveal a strip across the top for your marqee display.  Of course, it would probably look pretty obvious that you had done this, and your screen wouldn't be angled back nicely like a real arcade cabinet.

I'm sure someone's done something like this, but I did a quick search and couldn't seem to turn up anything.  I would just be curious to see some pictures.

  --Marty

[alphasqorner]

Yea, I would like to see this!  Kind of a waste of money/flatscreen just for marquee art but somepeople of the paper to burn.  Please post pics if anyone has this setup!!!

[Lilwolf]

I considered doing it with one of those digital picture frames..  They where about 60 bucks or less a while ago..

but they are too small.  And you would have to write custom code to send the picture to them...

But it would be sweet!  

[paigeoliver]

Probably be easiest and cheapest to instead use a 486 era laptop that was remote controlled via network somehow.

Of course then you totally run into the problem that flatscreens have very limited viewing areas, thus your marquee would be dumb because no one could see it from an angle.

[Brad Lee]

You can regularly find 5-7" LCD displays on ebay for about 100$. Theyre usually marketed as in-car displays, or headrest displays. Ive seen em with vga inputs, rca type video-in, or other connecters.

Im sure it wouldnt be too unreasonable to make your frontend, instead of calling hte mame executable directly, call a batch file that loads up the top display with the marquee or instrucions or whatever and then the mame executable

[Carsten Carlos]

I thought about that for instruction cards - unfortunately the viewing-angle would make it impossible to read them properly on an upright cab.   Otherwise, this would be the perfect solution to explain everyone how the game and exiting game works!

Now you can go ahead and "steal" this idea, would love to see something like this in action!  

edit: By the way, I guess the viewing angle wouldn't be that bad for a marquee. Like most of us here (I guess) I can look straight to my marquee!

[gprime]

i would expect lcd screen for mini vans and such to be viewable from almost any angle

[Carsten Carlos]

i would expect lcd screen for mini vans and such to be viewable from almost any angle

Might be worth a check at my electronic-dealer - but since my newborn son arrived, I've currently no time for such huge projects anyway!  

[gork]

I have one of these type of 7" displays in my car pc project. The screen is 16:9 aspect ratio 7" diagonal with VGA or composite inputs. The native resolution is 800x480 pixels. Viewing angle and brightness are good enough that you could VERY easily use this as a custom instruction card or (albeit small) custom marquee.

I am replacing the car screen with a brighter model because it's a little bit dim when sunlight strikes the screen directly, so depending on what I get on my mind to do next, I'll look at appropriating my current screen for use in the mame cab...

The screen also has a touchscreen, so that opens up some possibilities for doing some very very fun things on a mame cabinet. For instance, you could have a tournament bracket program running on the small screen, or you could use it to queue up players with a more high-tech approach than putting your quarters on the monitor glass *sigh* if I only had the time!

[Carsten Carlos]

With the touchscreen, you could even choose the current game you wanna play - no need for dedicated escape- or shift-buttons anymore! Okay, just dreaming - maybe one day someone will do it.  

[SirPoonga]

my flash fe was going to be toughscreen friendly.  Dragon King might as I believe he put in lightgun support for selecting games.  Not sure on that though  It might have been an idea.


This dynamic marquee idea has been floating around for along time.  I don't think anyone has done it (other than that text marqueee) because o the price.

I want to do something like this with a 6" screen for instruction cards.