Ghetto Marquee?

[t3naci0us]

Hey I dont know if I have just had an epiphany or just had too many ciders at this time of night, but Ill quickly explain..

I have built a mame bartop cabinet a few years ago, and love it its been a bit battered by the kids and it might be time for a rejuve and hardware upgrade which will inevitabley lead to weeks of head scratching setting up Hyperspin, but something I have always wanted to add is a lcd to display marquees for each game, but if you know anything about custom LCD sizes, they are expensive.

so I been thinking if I could get away with physically cutting edges off an lcd down to size, I have admitted that its a bad idea, and continued brainstorming and come up with this...



Looking at the pic if you can imagine this is the top sideview of a cabinets marquee area, and by placing a small monitor behind the roof of player viewing area facing upwards you should be able to mount a right size mirror at an angle to reflect the area of the screen displaying the marquee that can be viewed perfectly by the user?

am I not thinking of some stupid hurdle or have I just started a kickstarter project?! LOL

[thomas_surles]

I'm interested in seeing that worked out. You might need to flip the marquee images as they will read backwards in the mirror.

[t3naci0us]

yes i did imagine the image would have to be flipped, I didnt think this would be a problem, I havent ever messed about with a second display in any of my emulation builds but if this was such a problem then for my personal use I could just modify the images myself..

[thomas_surles]

Maybe if there was a program to flip them all without having to do each one individually it would be easy. Or a way to have the monitor flipped horizontally.

[thomas_surles]

You should do a cardboard mockup and post some pics. Also there is the idea of a mini projector. They run about $30 dollars, but I doubt they can project at the dimensions of a marquee.

[yamatetsu]

Maybe if there was a program to flip them all without having to do each one individually it would be easy. Or a way to have the monitor flipped horizontally.

Irfanview is a free graphics viewer which can do batch conversions. It can do horizontal and vertical flips.

[leapinlew]

Seems the viewing angle and monitor bezel could cause lots of issues. Like, someone slightly higher than level with the bezel will see the monitor underneath. It'll also give the marquee a parallax effect and make it look further away.

[t3naci0us]

leapinlew I agree this could cause issues, but I think if you could get the monitor and mirror as far forward as possible the angle shouldnt be too bad, it would have a distance effect that might look a bit holographic, having it somehow projected onto a screen would be better, but thats making this idea seem rubbish lol, I think now im sober it wasnt such a good idea

[thomas_surles]

Like I said make a cardboard mockup and see how it looks (with pictures here of course)

[big10p]

Interesting idea. I'd like to see how it works out. I think if you have the mirror at exactly 45 degrees to the monitor, you won't get any distortion/keystone effect when looking at it straight on - which is what the player will see. Who cares what people looking from the side, see. 

[Titchgamer]

Great idea!
Dont think it would work practically but I would love to see a mock up and be proved wrong.
You could get over the invert by using a 2nd mirror and turning it  into a periscope.

[paigeoliver]

You are going to have way too many different viewing angles on a bartop to mame that feasible. Although you can solve the "I can see the bezel" problem with a piece of smoked plexi.

But, you have a bartop, just toss the shell out and make a new one, it isn't like you have much to lose.

Then build it more like this.

[leapinlew]

You are going to have way too many different viewing angles on a bartop to mame that feasible. Although you can solve the "I can see the bezel" problem with a piece of smoked plexi.

But, you have a bartop, just toss the shell out and make a new one, it isn't like you have much to lose.

Then build it more like this.

lol! Nice Paige.

Work smarter, not harder.

[Laythe]

That's an interesting notion.

I think the up-firing screen with mirror you sketched would work better for a full size machine that is tall enough for the marquee to be above you, so your eye level is never above the actual marquee screen. 

For a bartop, I agree with Titchgamer; flip the whole thing over, down-firing screen at the very top, and a periscope type mirror, since your eye level should never be below the actual marquee screen.

It won't ever look like a conventional marquee, but, it might be a really cool effect.  (A couple full size original cabinets did internal mirror bounces on the main screen just because it's a cool effect.)

I'd say mock it up in a manner such that you can tune the mirror angle to hunt for the sweet spot.  It won't necessarily be exactly 45', if your natural eye height to the machine isn't exactly level.  (And if you do mock it up, please shoot some video for us of moving around it and what it looks like.)

[slickam]

Maybe if there was a program to flip them all without having to do each one individually it would be easy. Or a way to have the monitor flipped horizontally.

Irfanview is a free graphics viewer which can do batch conversions. It can do horizontal and vertical flips.

It's also possible to do batch conversions with ImageMagick from the command line.

[yotsuya]

I think now im sober it wasnt such a good idea

I agree with what you wrote.

[t3naci0us]

You are going to have way too many different viewing angles on a bartop to mame that feasible. Although you can solve the "I can see the bezel" problem with a piece of smoked plexi.

But, you have a bartop, just toss the shell out and make a new one, it isn't like you have much to lose.

Then build it more like this.

yup that will work lol, I dont think I have the space in my current cab to be bouncing mirrors about so would have considered a new cab build and implement my idea, but this idea would work perfectly, only problem for me is I like the overhang marquee shaped cab. im not sure I would be happy having no overhang, but I think I might look more into that design..

If I had enough space I would at least give it a go, but when I did this build shaping was by eye and I didnt consider the lost height when placing the top and bottom horizontal panels in, so therefore my viewable area would be very skinny.

[Laythe]

I played with some raytraced animations on this concept. 

It's interesting.

You'll see a lot of the interior structure of the marquee box, both before and after the mirror, so you won't want corner batons or anything in there.  You'll probably want something like black flocking or velvet, to make it as much of a light hole as you can manage.

The result approximates a vertical marquee hung on the -back- wall of the cabinet, instead of the usual flush to the front edge.  If you are careful about minimizing the overhangs and setting the mirror as close to the front as possible, the result I'm getting looks like a vertical marquee hung roughly in the center of a full-depth cabinet.

The effect is somewhat broken when you cross the plane of the monitor, when you can see the screen as well as the mirror.  But, the monitor doesn't have to be mounted flat.  For the up-firing solution, you can roll the monitor back toward the angle of the speaker plate, to make it harder to spot.  (This makes the reflected marquee non-vertical.)

I think a cool cabinet could be built around it.

[NickG]

You are going to have way too many different viewing angles on a bartop to mame that feasible. Although you can solve the "I can see the bezel" problem with a piece of smoked plexi.

But, you have a bartop, just toss the shell out and make a new one, it isn't like you have much to lose.

Then build it more like this.

yup that will work lol, I dont think I have the space in my current cab to be bouncing mirrors about so would have considered a new cab build and implement my idea, but this idea would work perfectly, only problem for me is I like the overhang marquee shaped cab. im not sure I would be happy having no overhang, but I think I might look more into that design..

If I had enough space I would at least give it a go, but when I did this build shaping was by eye and I didnt consider the lost height when placing the top and bottom horizontal panels in, so therefore my viewable area would be very skinny.

With so much lost height, you would be stretching most classic marquee images if you wanted the full width showing just marquee art. Instead , adding a smaller mini-marquee lcd behind a cut-out portion of the existing marquee may be a another good option for that cabinet. You could probably even fit two small lcd in there and have one show controls/instructions or other information, without compositing.

[thomas_surles]

Have you considered just using one monitor vertical from the display all the way up to the marquee area. I've seen that done before.
You just use the top portion of the screen to display the marquees.

[t3naci0us]

I played with some raytraced animations on this concept. 

It's interesting.

You'll see a lot of the interior structure of the marquee box, both before and after the mirror, so you won't want corner batons or anything in there.  You'll probably want something like black flocking or velvet, to make it as much of a light hole as you can manage.

The result approximates a vertical marquee hung on the -back- wall of the cabinet, instead of the usual flush to the front edge.  If you are careful about minimizing the overhangs and setting the mirror as close to the front as possible, the result I'm getting looks like a vertical marquee hung roughly in the center of a full-depth cabinet.

The effect is somewhat broken when you cross the plane of the monitor, when you can see the screen as well as the mirror.  But, the monitor doesn't have to be mounted flat.  For the up-firing solution, you can roll the monitor back toward the angle of the speaker plate, to make it harder to spot.  (This makes the reflected marquee non-vertical.)

I think a cool cabinet could be built around it.

Interesting that you had same idea, did you keep any of the renders? as I highly doubt I will dedicate building my next cabinet around this idea, as I do think it would have a cool effect, but I just dont think I would be as happy as having a dedicated area for an LCD.

I also like the idea for using a widescreen monitor mounted vertically and trimming spaces out of the bezel to give the illusion of two screens, but im not sure how I would design the rest of my cab around that as its a new thought for me thanks for that.

[Laythe]

Interesting that you had same idea, did you keep any of the renders? as I highly doubt I will dedicate building my next cabinet around this idea, as I do think it would have a cool effect, but I just dont think I would be as happy as having a dedicated area for an LCD.

Oh, apologies, I was unclear.  I didn't have the same idea - I was researching your idea, to see if I thought that it would work.  I wasn't going to spitball whether I thought it would work without doing a little research.

Apologies for the poor quality on these, it wasn't something I was intending to show, just a quick test for my own purposes...

The diagram shows the layout of my mockup.  The speaker shelf is in blue, the mirror in green, and an up-firing TV in white.  I didn't bother putting a display or a control panel or anything on it. 

The (crude, crude) rendering has a Galaga marquee on the upper third of the 16:9 TV display.  I started the animation above the do-not-cross plane so you could see what the TV looks like if you are too tall for the illusion, then rendered a drop to normal eye height, and a move across it so you could see the perceived depth.  My test mirror has a blue tint so you can see the edge of it, presuming the glass wouldn't be perfect in reality.

[Laythe]

Disclaimers:

If anybody were actually going to do this, you wouldn't want that upslope I put on the nose of the speaker panel in my mockup.  I did it thinking it would hide the TV a little better, but it turns out it has bad effects on seeing the marquee when in a playing position in front of the machine.  Keep the nose flat to the front edge, and keep all the overhangs as short as you can.  I also think there's probably better alignment for the mirror and display possible,  I didn't play exhaustively with rotating them. 

I just wanted to see what it would look like, and this was good enough to satisfy that curiosity.