My MAME Hyperspin Dynamic Active Marquee project

[evh347]

Also posted on the Hyperspin forum...Enjoy!

[AGarv]

Very cool - what LCD are you using for the marquee?

[evh347]

Very cool - what LCD are you using for the marquee?

It's a 29" LG M2900 stretch marquee.  I got mine for the unbelievably low price of $499 as a refurb at:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LG-M2900S-BN-29-Commercial-Monitor-/370602699223?pt=Computer_Monitors&hash=item5649a469d7#ht_4767wt_781

They have 5 left, act now because they don't get much lower than that.

[elkameleon]

Oh man i'm jealous... I wish they were a little bit smaller though. That thing looks pretty wide.

[markc74]

Congrats EVH347 - this is exactly what I'm trying to do in my next build

Am I right in thinking that you're creating a layout file (in a zip) for every game you're running, i.e. there's no way to create a generic layout which just references a marquee folder?

I was also looking at doing this as have recently got a monitor that I intend to use for a marquee. I had been looking at using mamehooker to do it but am wondering whether the method you have used is better?

Any help/guidance appreciated!

[evh347]

Yeah, I had to zip up a lay file and a marquee in .png format for each game.  I took a lay file I got from Mr Do's site and made a minor edit to it until I got the result I wanted.

I couldn't get Mamehooker or Marquee Magician working the way I wanted it to so I went this route. 

Right now, I only have this working for Mame games (somewhere around 1000 & always adding more) & not other emulators.  Eventually, somebody will write a script that works with all emulators (maybe along with Hyperspin 2.0).

If you're a Hyperspin gold member, you can download all my work so far.  A great majority of my marquees are high def.  Set your mame .ini file to two displays, drop my game specific files into your mame/artwork folder and its done.  There are instructions with the files and its not hard.

The hardest thing is finding high quality arcade marquee art that isn't copywrited with some crap on the graphic.

I have made some really great improvements to my rig since posting that video last year and I'm eventually going to get around to posting some new videos in the next couple weeks here. 

It probably wouldn't be hard to take the default lay script and add to other emulators so you could get a general system marquee to display depending on the system you're emulating, but my focus has been on creating the artwork files with mame as the priority.

[markc74]

Thanks for the reply - I think that sounds like the best route to take at the moment.  And yes I'll definitely become a hyperspin member so I can download your work - that's a great help!