Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: tony.silveira on January 17, 2018, 08:55:40 pm
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anyone have a really good walk thru on how to get mame to display marquees on a second monitor?
i see the part in the ini with something like //./display2 or something like that. question, i have a total of 5 screens plugged into this machine, the screen for the marquees is shown as screen 5 in my display settings. so, would that ini line be //./display5 for the monitor number?
the screen i got is a cut in half 1920x1080 so real world it is 1920x540. i adjusted one marquee to display correctly. basically, i have to resize the marquee art to 1920x540, save. then i have to paste that onto a black square (top half) that is 1920x1080 and save again.
obviously i don't want to do this for 3,000 marquees. i'm willing to pay someone to write me a script that will automate the process. any takers? :)
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5 screens?
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5 screens?
i know right?
main - arcade
2nd - desktop 2560x1080 so i can use it as a workstation
3rd - outputs to a TV in the room
4th - extended hdmi over cat-5 to front room so i can play on the 70"
5th - new marquee monitor
for the most part, only monitors main and 5 will only be used, the others are used rarely
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I would personally have two monitors, the main screen going to a video splitter that spits out to all the other ones and the marquee. To answer your legit question about a batch file to automate your marquee dilemma I cannot help.
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To resize the marquees, you can use ImageMagick (https://www.imagemagick.org/index.php).
Copy this into resize.bat, in the directory you have the marquees in, and double click it. It will run through all the .jpg files in the directory, and create .png files in an "output" directory. The marquees will keep their original aspect ratio, so you might end up with black borders on the sides or bottom. If your input files are in a format other than .jpg, or you need the output to be a format other than .png, just change those extensions.
mkdir output
for %%f in (*.jpg) do (
magick %%~nf.jpg -resize "1920x540" -background Black -gravity North -extent "1920x1080" output\%%~nf.png
)
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To resize the marquees, you can use ImageMagick (https://www.imagemagick.org/index.php).
Copy this into resize.bat, in the directory you have the marquees in, and double click it. It will run through all the .jpg files in the directory, and create .png files in an "output" directory. The marquees will keep their original aspect ratio, so you might end up with black borders on the sides or bottom. If your input files are in a format other than .jpg, or you need the output to be a format other than .png, just change those extensions.
mkdir output
for %%f in (*.jpg) do (
magick %%~nf.jpg -resize "1920x540" -background Black -gravity North -extent "1920x1080" output\%%~nf.png
)
I’m giving this a try the momen5 I get home tomorrow from work, thank you so much!
If it works, can I buy you pint or two via PayPal?
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You might give Marquee Magician (https://emumovies.com/files/file/603-marquee-magician/ (https://emumovies.com/files/file/603-marquee-magician/)) a try. This program lets you create windows in additional monitors that images can be displayed in. It works in conjunction with another program called IrfanView to resize the images that fit in those windows. It's a pretty awesome program if you can get it working properly. It does take some effort to set it all up though.
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I’m giving this a try the momen5 I get home tomorrow from work, thank you so much!
If it works, can I buy you pint or two via PayPal?
No money needed. I've done almost exactly this same task at work, so I had a pretty good idea of what to do.
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well what can I say but thank you! script is running, churning out marquees and the ones I have tested al look great up there on that second screen.
hopefully this weekend i'll get a chance to figure out the automation.
if anyone has any tips/links, etc. I am all ears. FWIW, I am running hyperspin in case there is anything that makes it simple with that FE.
thanks again man, I really appreciate it!
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Google Hyperspin Helper... its been several years, but I used that with Hyperspin and it worked like a charm. Sorry, I do not have much more info than that... ;D
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I’m giving this a try the momen5 I get home tomorrow from work, thank you so much!
If it works, can I buy you pint or two via PayPal?
No money needed. I've done almost exactly this same task at work, so I had a pretty good idea of what to do.
hey slickam,
i may have spoke to soon...
i just checked a marquee that the batch converted and it isn't laid out correctly. here are two files, "robotron1" which i converted manually and "robotron" which the batch file converted.
you can see that in the manual conversion, the marquee takes up the top half of the image size.
what is odd is that a few other marquees i checked after the batch file seemed to be OK.
Anyways, i will spot check some more files and report back. wondering if you might have any thoughts?
thank you again, this will save me a ton of work :)
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I’m giving this a try the momen5 I get home tomorrow from work, thank you so much!
If it works, can I buy you pint or two via PayPal?
No money needed. I've done almost exactly this same task at work, so I had a pretty good idea of what to do.
hey slickam,
i may have spoke to soon...
i just checked a marquee that the batch converted and it isn't laid out correctly. here are two files, "robotron1" which i converted manually and "robotron" which the batch file converted.
you can see that in the manual conversion, the marquee takes up the top half of the image size.
what is odd is that a few other marquees i checked after the batch file seemed to be OK.
Anyways, i will spot check some more files and report back. wondering if you might have any thoughts?
thank you again, this will save me a ton of work :)
I don't. I tried converting the robotron.png file, and it came out how it's supposed to. If you run just the "magick" command in a command prompt, does it give you any errors?
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Never mind bud, it was late and I wasn’t looking in the “output” folder... idiot!
I am stuck on hyper spin helper. HSH launches fine and even displays the generic arcade classic marquee that it comes with. But that marquee stays there no matter what game is started.
I’m soooooo close to getting this to work.
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Im sorry I am not able to be more helpful...I no longer have that particular set up.
Where are your marquee images? I believe HSH looks in the Hyperspin Media folders and not your Mame artwork folders? Where is the generic arcade marquee image at?
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no worries, you have helped a lot!
fyi, i have tried the "marquees" folder in numerous places, mame folder, root of hyper spin, in the hyper spin media folder, in the hyper spin media/mame folder, still to no avail.
the generic "arcade classics" marquee is in the hyper spin helper/images/misc folder
For those new to this topic because of the new bounty, please help me get hyper spin helper to display the correct marquee and I will PayPal you $50!!!!
one other thing about hyper spin helper, when I exit the game, it exits back to the games page in hyper spin but it is frozen, hyper spin helper still has the focus of the machine. I have to click on the game page in order too get focus back to hyper spin.
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Silly question. Can't you just position a borderless window as the marquee, and do a scale-to-fit on the graphic? I used this method and it works fine. Not perfect, but if the aspect bothers you, dynamically resize the window to the proper aspect ratio for the graphic you are loading.
Are you not doing this with code? It's a lot easier if you do.
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yeah randy, all up and running. i didn’t realize HM did dynamic resizing so it’s back to my unaltered marquees.
all up and running, bounty is off! :)