dynamic digital marquee using regular lcd hidden in cab?

[aldub516]

Hey all. Im coming up on the last day or two on my new build. Basically just speakers, marquee and somethings. As i started working on art for the marquee, i was staring at this lcd tv sitting here doing nothing, and remembered a few people rigging them up to use as changing dynamic marquees.. basically just hiding the monitor in a way, and setting the marquee to only display on the top portion of the tv, or whatever is showing.. I cant seem to find the few articles or projects that used this, only discussions on the super expensive wide screen lcds. Anyone familiar with, or can point me towards perhaps using a standards wide screen tv as a dynamic marquee? it looks like i can easily slip the tv in and frame it out if i can get the programming to work. I remember mame hooker used to be involved, but i believe hyperspin has their own hypermarquee? or something of the sort. What is the current status of dynamic marquee options

[JDFan]

markc74's cube build is using one -- ( http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,151654.40.html )

[SlyBlueFox]

This one maybe?

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,70840.0.htmlj

[velcrobomb]

I wish there were more of a market for these because I can't believe they would be that expensive to manufacture.  I was researching this a few weeks ago because I love the idea of a dynamic marquee.  I ended up searching different keywords just in case you change your mind and want to throw $300 at a marquee:  Ultra Wide Stretched LCD, Stretched (Cut) displays, Stretched Bar Panel

I'm not crazy about the protruding monitor on top of the cabinet but it definitely would be the cheapest way to go.

[Laythe]

I think there are, at this time, a couple options for dynamic marquees on regular LCDs. 

You can hide most any kind of screen, if you put the marquee down in the cabaret area like Cube does.

You can run a big regular 16:9 LCD in portrait, use the bottom as the game screen and the top part for dynamic marquees via mame layout files or similar, optionally using cabinet design to disguise that it's all one screen, like some of the unused concepts for Blip did.

You can pocket the bottom part of a regular size screen as your marquee area, and stick the rest out the top of the cabinet like a topper, but that's kind of awkward looking.  If you had low ceilings in your arcade and a tall cabinet, maybe you could hide it through the ceiling...

You can form a sort of T-joint, with your main screen laid back, resting against the midpoint of the marquee montior, and the top half of the marquee monitor exposed above it, if you don't mind that driving a kind of weird shape to your cabinet profile and a bit of an odd lean on the marquee - there was a bartop here that did that a while back and it worked pretty well. 

It miiiight be possible to do something zany with mirrors, but I'm pretty sure it'd look weird.  Similarly, it miiiight be possible to do something with a back-projection screen and a projector inside the machine, maybe bouncing off a mirror for throw length, but it's also going to be experimental and probably expensive territory.

Or you can shell out for a weird aspect ratio LCD panel for the marquee.

It's possible to cut LCD panels and have them still work afterward, but the equipment to do it or the shop costs of having it done are astronomical - that's actually the origin of most of the weird aspect ratio LCDs you see commercially.  They did it in bulk, and the result is STILL spendy.

[aldub516]

wow thanks for all the different feedback.. to clarify a few things. i in no way intend on sticking a monitor out of the top of the machine or anything like that. This particular build would allow me to drop a 28-32" monitor, right behind the main 32" monitor, and have it line up exactly, or close to, where the marquee would be. I would put a speaker on each side with a nice grill as well to fill up the space. I guess my main question was, how easy or how can i, use a standard wide screen, and program the marquees to show up say on the top half of the marquee monitor. Since i posted i simply went to mame hookers page, and ive found mame hooker and documentation which APPEARS TO be super simple programming, including directory to the marquee pngs, and .ini to adjust display size and location.

[aldub516]

so i installed mame hooker, followed the short tutorial here http://dragonking.arcadecontrols.com/static.php?page=mhdismarquee

and nothing yet.. im calling it a night, but tomorow i shall start fresh. hopefully there will be a few good pointers here. thanks again, and as someone said, i wish there was more demand.. some call it a flashy unneccessary gimmick.. i think its one of the ultimate upgrades

[aldub516]

So I'm currently somewhat focusing on hypermarquee hoping it will offer an easy transition into hyper spin. I'm stuck between "this should be easy to figure out"
And "this is going to take a year to have it running perfect". I see it uses third party apps to launch other apps, etc. and I tend to believe the more moving parts,
The more trouble. Deciding on trying to make this work, or just printing up a normal marquee and calling it a day. Ideally I would want my name games to have marquees, and then just a static marquee image for different consoles.

[Laythe]

Coming up with decent high res artwork for all the marquees you want will be a project as well.  There are collections out there, but they're all incomplete.

I can't help much on the "how to display them" side in software, as I didn't use an existing software package for mine.  I wrote my own frontend, and putting the marquee image up on the second monitor is one of the things it does when you select a game; it leaves it there until that process ends, then flips back to the name of the cabinet when you return to the menu.

I imagine there's a lot of ways to get there.  For instance, one could probably call a windows wallpaper changing script from your frontend, and have all your marquee art preformatted for that so it appears in the right spot on the other monitor.  Hypermarquee might be a way to get there too, but I don't know the details as I really dislike Hyperspin.

The finished effect of a dynamic marquee is nice though.  It's one of my favorite parts about my build, it makes me happy every time I start a game.  I think it's worth the trouble.

[aldub516]

I agree, the dynamic marquee is one of the coolest things, but for your exact, reasoning, i have backed away from this endeavor for now. I already saw the obsessive rabbit hole i was crawling into lol.. "WHY DO 5000 MARQUEES WORK AND THIS ONE DOESNT!!" I shall revisit that down the line for sure, but im not about to jump into it right now. I see it being another 50 hours of my life