Author Topic: that "new" LED marquee cabinet (Read 7512 times)

rampy · « **on:** January 13, 2003, 09:24:24 am »

http://tipovers.org/pictures/arcade-machine/ as posted on the front page (yesterday?)

Pretty cool idea. Just a note : I had seen a bunch of cheap LED scrollie text thingies on sale at kaybee toy stores after christmas (like 20 - 30 bucks, if I recall correctly) just thought I'd point that out if anyone else wanted to try something similiar.

(it's not my machine btw, i'm just commenting on it)

rampy

Chris · « **Reply #1 on:** January 13, 2003, 09:42:24 am »

That looks better than I would have thought it would.

Dave_K. · « **Reply #2 on:** January 13, 2003, 04:27:44 pm »

Quote from: rampy on January 13, 2003, 09:24:24 am

I had seen a bunch of cheap LED scrollie text thingies on sale at kaybee toy stores after christmas (like 20 - 30 bucks, if I recall correctly) just thought I'd point that out if anyone else wanted to try something similiar.

I doubt kaybee has anything this nice looking. I'm curious if you can find more into through.

I have a color Beta Brite (almost exactly like the one in this guys cabinet). They are not cheap (run over $100 used on ebay). I use it as an animated clock with scolling msgs for my gameroom. If you buy one of these, make sure it comes with the remote and AC adapter, or you are SCREWED. You would be surpirised how much a 7VAC (not DC) stepdown adapter costs.

rampy · « **Reply #3 on:** January 13, 2003, 04:32:14 pm »

Quote from: Dave_K. on January 13, 2003, 04:27:44 pm

Quote from: rampy on January 13, 2003, 09:24:24 am
I had seen a bunch of cheap LED scrollie text thingies on sale at kaybee toy stores after christmas (like 20 - 30 bucks, if I recall correctly) just thought I'd point that out if anyone else wanted to try something similiar.
I doubt kaybee has anything this nice looking. I'm curious if you can find more into through.

I have a color Beta Brite (almost exactly like the one in this guys cabinet). They are not cheap (run over $100 used on ebay). I use it as an animated clock with scolling msgs for my gameroom. If you buy one of these, make sure it comes with the remote and AC adapter, or you are SCREWED. You would be surpirised how much a 7VAC (not DC) stepdown adapter costs.

well that's true.. the kaybee one was red led's only and was moderately cheezy but for the price, eh... *shrug*

rampy

Brax · « **Reply #4 on:** January 13, 2003, 07:18:36 pm »

Its neat but most game titles are way longer..... it would be annoying to go through that work and expense and it doesn't even work for half your games.

rampy · « **Reply #5 on:** January 13, 2003, 07:29:43 pm »

Quote from: Brax on January 13, 2003, 07:18:36 pm

Its neat but most game titles are way longer..... it would be annoying to go through that work and expense and it doesn't even work for half your games.

well for long games It could continuously scroll (I almost want to do the super annoying "marquee" tag to illustrate, but wont)

or use license plate style abbreviations/short hand so you wouldn't be sure exactly which game was playing =P anyone up for some strtftr 2 chmpin ed

*Shrug* what the hell do i know?
rampy

Brax · « **Reply #6 on:** January 13, 2003, 08:19:32 pm »

scrolling would work..... but ewww.

It would only be cool if it were located in a stock exchange

Howard_Casto · « **Reply #7 on:** January 13, 2003, 08:25:41 pm »

I think the dot count on even his sign is much too low. imho Just displaying the game name is kinda lame. Now some graphics (perhaps a monochrome, low-res version of the game's marquee) would be much better. It looks very nasdaq to me as well.

Xphile · « **Reply #8 on:** January 13, 2003, 09:04:57 pm »

Quote from: rampy on January 13, 2003, 07:29:43 pm

well for long games It could continuously scroll (I almost want to do the super annoying "marquee" tag to illustrate, but wont)

or use license plate style abbreviations/short hand so you wouldn't be sure exactly which game was playing =P anyone up for some strtftr 2 chmpin ed

*Shrug* what the hell do i know?
rampy

heck, use the ROM names, really screw your friends up..."galxwart" right..:-)

<bfg;->

1UP · « **Reply #9 on:** January 14, 2003, 01:33:31 am »

What I would like to know is, how is this set up? The cabinet owner has no info on his site regarding the hardware required, and does not make it clear if Mame32 has the LED functionality built in already, or if it is a custom compile. Anyone?

REBIRTH · « **Reply #10 on:** January 14, 2003, 07:53:39 am »

I can't imagine there being anything within MAME32 to handle this. I've sent the guy an email asking how he did it, along with a link to this topic. If he doesn't reply right in here, I'll post his reply to me (if he replies at all).

Wade · « **Reply #11 on:** January 14, 2003, 10:58:50 am »

Now what would be REALLY cool (and REALLY expensive) would be a huge color backlit LCD that took up the entire marquee area, which displayed the actual scanned marquee of the current game!

Wade

REBIRTH · « **Reply #12 on:** January 14, 2003, 11:31:58 am »

No kidding. Since I saw the LED thing yesterday, I'v been racking my brain for a way to do some sort of LCD thing with "real" marquee art on it - at least a way to do it cheap enough so that I won't be forced to sell my youngest child. You could have 2 or 3 small flat screen monitors/TV's and split the marquee picture into 2/3 parts. I was at an Islander game on Saturday and they have a 2 foot high LCD looking thing that rings the entire arena, flashing random advertising and team pictures and such. Maybe I could climb up a rafter and steal a 7"x30" piece for my marquee.

TazMan · « **Reply #13 on:** January 14, 2003, 11:45:27 am »

Apparently this cabinet was made by the programmer who brought us mame32.

http://tipovers.org/

eightbit · « **Reply #14 on:** January 14, 2003, 12:00:53 pm »

Quote from: REBIRTH on January 14, 2003, 07:53:39 am

I can't imagine there being anything within MAME32 to handle this. I've sent the guy an email asking how he did it, along with a link to this topic. If he doesn't reply right in here, I'll post his reply to me (if he replies at all).

Check this thread- http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=3793;start=0
Apparently the software part of sending the image isn't the hard part.

These guys are trying to show instruction cards and control layouts thats where they claim the hang up is. Perhaps you could contact one of them to find out how they are planning to send the image out.

REBIRTH · « **Reply #15 on:** January 14, 2003, 02:12:15 pm »

They explain it in the thread actually, albeit it without much detail...

I'll be writing this in DOS. I already use a small launcher program between Game Launcher and MAME which sets the appropriate mouse driver and MAME version; I only need to modify this launcher to send the image definition to the laptop, wait for the laptop to respond with what images it doesn't have, then transmit those images. The image definition would consist of one or more image overlays along with text labels I can steal most of that from the skinning code I'm writing for DOSCab Jukebox.

ckirmse · « **Reply #16 on:** January 14, 2003, 03:15:23 pm »

Hey all--I'm glad you're enjoying my machine. As to how it works:

- in MAME32, under Interface Options, I added the "Broadcast selected game to all windows" option. This creates a windows "Atom" which is just a string that any application can read, and sends a message to all desktop windows with this string (the game name). Since I created MAME32 and still maintain it with the team, this was no big deal.

- I created a separate program which listens for these Atoms and reads the string. It then parses the string and puts as many words on a "page", where a page is the width of the LED sign.

This program communicates with the LED sign over a serial port connection, using a simple text protocol that the LED understands (www.pro-lite.com is where I got the sign, and they will send you the protocol if you ask).

The sign supports a few colors (green, red, orange, yellow), as well as various effects, such as scrolling long messages, displaying each page one after the next, as well as a few other interesting animations such as unfold from the middle, scroll in from the top, etc.

I'd be happy to post this program if other people are interested.

- The sign does support custom graphics, although I haven't used it much, since my sign is old and only supports 300 baud (all their new ones support 9600 baud). The idea of making really low-res versions of real marquees is really cool, but this sign might be just too low-res for it to look good.

Chris

REBIRTH · « **Reply #17 on:** January 14, 2003, 03:27:51 pm »

That is really clever. Looks like the Tru-Color 2 which would be the size of a marquee (it is 28'' x 4.25'') is $299 for, or $199 each if 6 or more are ordered. Not very authentic for an arcade machine, though allot of pinball games have them. It's a cool idea though... $299 is a bit more than I wanted to spend on the marquee... though if I could get 5 other people to buy one for $199 each..............

Thanks for the info!

Doug

eightbit · « **Reply #18 on:** January 14, 2003, 04:03:56 pm »

Quote from: ckirmse on January 14, 2003, 03:15:23 pm

Hey all--I'm glad you're enjoying my machine. As to how it works:

- in MAME32, under Interface Options, I added the "Broadcast selected game to all windows" option. This creates a windows "Atom" which is just a string that any application can read, and sends a message to all desktop windows with this string (the game name). Since I created MAME32 and still maintain it with the team, this was no big deal.

- I created a separate program which listens for these Atoms and reads the string. It then parses the string and puts as many words on a "page", where a page is the width of the LED sign.

This program communicates with the LED sign over a serial port connection, using a simple text protocol that the LED understands (www.pro-lite.com is where I got the sign, and they will send you the protocol if you ask).

The sign supports a few colors (green, red, orange, yellow), as well as various effects, such as scrolling long messages, displaying each page one after the next, as well as a few other interesting animations such as unfold from the middle, scroll in from the top, etc.

I'd be happy to post this program if other people are interested.

- The sign does support custom graphics, although I haven't used it much, since my sign is old and only supports 300 baud (all their new ones support 9600 baud). The idea of making really low-res versions of real marquees is really cool, but this sign might be just too low-res for it to look good.

Chris

I always wondered what that option did. I know there are guys working on instruction cards but think it would also be pretty cool for a small laptop sized Marquee. I'm no programmer so I don't even know where to start but if any of you out there could write a program to send this to a laptop I've got some extra 486 laptops that I could send out (for the cost of shipping) so that you would have something to work on. This also goes for the guys working on the instruction cards.

creepfactory · « **Reply #19 on:** January 14, 2003, 04:05:52 pm »

How about getting it to work with the display from Pinmame? Seems like that could work?

Howard_Casto · « **Reply #20 on:** January 14, 2003, 06:53:06 pm »

Actually that probably wouldn't work... at least using the method we are working on. The guy working on the dos end fo rthe laptop wants to use a serial connection and a serial connection isn't fast enough to send images at 60fps or even 15 fps for that matter.

Wade · « **Reply #21 on:** January 15, 2003, 01:03:28 pm »

It would be really easy to do (software-wise) with 2 or 3 older notebooks, but a real mess hardware wise. Also, it would be best if an LCD could be found that is close to the right dims instead of putting 2 or 3 LCDs together. The division of the screens would really detract from an otherwise really cool marquee.

Wade

darkmanx · « **Reply #22 on:** January 15, 2003, 01:23:46 pm »

Quote from: eightbit on January 14, 2003, 04:03:56 pm

I always wondered what that option did. I know there are guys working on instruction cards but think it would also be pretty cool for a small laptop sized Marquee. I'm no programmer so I don't even know where to start but if any of you out there could write a program to send this to a laptop I've got some extra 486 laptops that I could send out (for the cost of shipping) so that you would have something to work on. This also goes for the guys working on the instruction cards.

actually that sounds pretty sweet. i could probably get something like that going for the marquees and other uses also. how much you think it would be to ship one of those 486's to kenosha, WI?

eightbit · « **Reply #23 on:** January 15, 2003, 02:43:13 pm »

Quote from: Wade on January 15, 2003, 01:03:28 pm

It would be really easy to do (software-wise) with 2 or 3 older notebooks, but a real mess hardware wise. Also, it would be best if an LCD could be found that is close to the right dims instead of putting 2 or 3 LCDs together. The division of the screens would really detract from an otherwise really cool marquee.

I wasn't envisioning marquee width, though if that could be done it would be sweet.

What I was thinking was mounting a single LCD in the middle of the Marquee with changing graphics. Screen shots, instruction sets, marquees, cabinet pictures, whatever you wanted and it would be based on the game being played. Then fill in each side with graphics or arcade characters or just blank it out.

We're not talking anything close to arcade authentic, this is beyound authenticity, this would be evolutionary.

gmillerd · « **Reply #24 on:** January 15, 2003, 11:34:37 pm »

beats my LCDPROC


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