Seriously WTF

[Drnick]

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/896069970851141/

I know some of you don't do facebook, so I'll grab some screenshots   Just $2K







I'm sure that the Idea was so much better than reality could ever have been.  It's an intriguing idea badly executed.

[shponglefan]

That's just... no. 

[yotsuya]

I blame this site.

[Osirus23]

Finally, the question on how best to arrange pushbuttons has been answered definitively.

[fallacy]

I don't think you all know what you are looking at but that's nuts. Its all displays, I think even the control panel is a display somehow. I need to see some video of this thing as you change games.

[Hoopz]

How much is the free shipping?

[Mike A]

I don't think you all know what you are looking at but that's nuts. Its all displays, I think even the control panel is a display somehow. I need to see some video of this thing as you change games.

duh.
he just stacked all of the controls on top of a display.

[arfink]

There are parts of this that are actually pretty neat ideas, but the execution isn't quite there. It is clever, but it's also a bit bizarre.

[pbj]

You have all just gotten a glimpse of 2025.

[bobbyb13]

Took me until the 3rd pic to figure out what I was really looking at- 

It looks like it took a lot of work (and $$!) to put together too.

Yeesh-

[Mike A]

Took me until the 3rd pic to figure out what I was really looking at- 

It looks like it took a lot of work (and $$!) to put together too.

Yeesh-

It looks like slapped together dog ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---.

[Howard_Casto]

It's good ideas executed terribly.  When bendable OLED displays become as cheap as regular lcds, I expect to see some of this implemented properly. 

[opt2not]

Heat generation must be insane in this cab.

[Osirus23]

Wondering what its running on. Has at least 4 displays (assuming both sides have them).

[Drnick]

Unfortunately no build log or video of this in action,  No shots of the right hand side so can't say if they did do a screen there.    I think they are doing the right thing selling it to fund their 1up obsession

[arfink]

It's good ideas executed terribly.  When bendable OLED displays become as cheap as regular lcds, I expect to see some of this implemented properly.

I want LCDs I can drill holes in, but we can't have everything.

[Mike A]

The day I would have to use an LCD for an arcade machine will be my last day in the hobby.

[Titchgamer]

That both impresses me and disturbs me in equal measure.

Like I dig the general idea, and the ingenuity involved.

But at the same time its so badly done and looks fugly as hell with a lack of consideration of control position.

[bobbyb13]

The day I would have to use an LCD for an arcade machine will be my last day in the hobby.

Making this 5 times more offensive than it had to be!

That both impresses me and disturbs me in equal measure.

Like I dig the general idea, and the ingenuity involved.

But at the same time its so badly done and looks fugly as hell with a lack of consideration of control position.

I imagine I'm not alone in thinking that trigger stick is close to pounding that screen every time it's pushed up.

[Osirus23]

But at the same time its so badly done and looks fugly as hell with a lack of consideration of control position.

I imagine I'm not alone in thinking that trigger stick is close to pounding that screen every time it's pushed up.

The entire center portion of the CP in front of the player is empty, and all the controls are placed along the edges. I don't get it.

[Titchgamer]

Yeah it just screams bad planning or a lack of knowledge of how the games are played.

[LTC]

Poorly executed, but I don't hate the idea of artwork on lcd screens on the sides. The LCD under the controls is just too much.

[shponglefan]

Poorly executed, but I don't hate the idea of artwork on lcd screens on the sides. The LCD under the controls is just too much.

Makes me wonder if there would be a feasible way to execute that though? I mean, having changeable artwork for the control panel would be pretty cool.

Just... not the way this was done.

[Howard_Casto]

It might be possible, it'd probably just cost a fortune to get made.  I've seen lcds panels cut online and if you do it with the right tools they still work.  With holes you'd probably need a lcd/OLED with a matrix running in each direction for redundancy.  I think they make those but I don't know what happens when you cut a hole in the middle. 

Now barring that there is the option of rear projection.  That'd be a lot easier but you'd run into the same problem this person has.... you can't show graphics through the bottom of the sticks.  Regular projection is also an option but your hands would be in the way (duh). 

It's a fantastic idea.... been wanting to do something like that for the past 20 years.  The tech is almost there.  I mean we could (properly) implement the side art right now.  Those screens on that cab are cheap onn screens... they are around $150 at Walmart and sometimes you can get them even cheaper.  They are super thin so if a person were to properly route out a cavity to inset them in the side of a traditional cab and maybe put plexi over the whole side to give it a nice finish it could be made to look good.  The same goes for the marquee... a tv is the wrong aspect ratio but the excess could be professionally cut off or integrated into the cabinet design somehow.  We've already seen a few mount a lcd vertically to use virtual bezels.... you just hide the extra length of the screen inside the cab.  If it's centered, windows doesn't have a problem running fullscreen games on a vertical screen these days. 

[fallacy]

Makes me wonder if there would be a feasible way to execute that though? I mean, having changeable artwork for the control panel would be pretty cool.

Change art work dude if you had a screen bezel, control panel and side screens, imagine the kind of animation you could do for every game. Example Golden Axe your control panel could be a row of medieval hunts that are all on fire with the smoke billing off and the side panels could be a barbarian chopping off heads and throwing them off to the side. For Pac Man you could have a baseball sized pac man make its way across your control panel up the bezel and around to the side panels with ghosts doing the same thing in endless loops. Basically you could be as creative as you want it to be. There would need to be some kind of screen display software that connects them all together and would allow you to render your graphics as one piece but also show you what it looks like when it is set up as an arcade cabinet… I don't know. It would also need to let you put values to scale each screen piece individually.

[pbj]

Fallacy gets it.

[Howard_Casto]

Well some of that is possible.  Can animations be added to the additional screens?  Sure.  The primary screen?  Eh... well fullscreen games make it difficult (but not impossible) to draw on them.  I know for outrun fxt I have to force the screen into windowed mode and use the video (as in mpeg) overlay in conjunction with a magenta color keyed form to insert graphics and I can't do true translucency.  It's quite taxing on the system resources as well.  Long story short the bezel would probably have to be static unless mame decides to add animation support to artwork files.  Yeah you could jerry rig a windowed instance of mame in the center, but it'd be a pain in the butt to keep everything where it should be. 

[bobbyb13]

My head still spins about the speed at which all this hardware can function.
Learning how a crt works as a result of this hobby has made me even more amazed at the whole thing in general.

Never even mind the concept of overlaying instances of separate functions on the same screen and keeping that together.

Whoa

[nitrogen_widget]

The entire center portion of the CP in front of the player is empty, and all the controls are placed along the edges. I don't get it.

probably because there is too much flex in the plexi and the bottom of the controls would hit the LCD under the CP.

[nitrogen_widget]

My head still spins about the speed at which all this hardware can function.
Learning how a crt works as a result of this hobby has made me even more amazed at the whole thing in general.

Never even mind the concept of overlaying instances of separate functions on the same screen and keeping that together.

Whoa

most of it is 2d graphics.
most 4 output video cards from the last 5 yrs that can play fortenite on medium could handle that.
if they were using shaders to emulate a CRT for the game portion of the screen..maybe you'd need more horsepower but it looks like they are just maintaining aspect using mame layouts.
people did that with one monitor on the rpi3.

[bobbyb13]

My head still spins about the speed at which all this hardware can function.
Learning how a crt works as a result of this hobby has made me even more amazed at the whole thing in general.

Never even mind the concept of overlaying instances of separate functions on the same screen and keeping that together.

Whoa

most of it is 2d graphics.
most 4 output video cards from the last 5 yrs that can play fortenite on medium could handle that.
if they were using shaders to emulate a CRT for the game portion of the screen..maybe you'd need more horsepower but it looks like they are just maintaining aspect using mame layouts.
people did that with one monitor on the rpi3.

The stuff I see looking over my son's shoulder while he is playing Nintendo Switch just blows my mind, but stunning me maybe isn't really that hard.

My last exercises in programming were Fortran 77 in my freshman year of college.
If not for the genius of others I wouldn't be pulling off any of this-

I think that control panel graphics changing on a per game basis would be even more useful than any of the other very cool ways people have integrated original artwork into/onto cabinets (marquee, bezel, side art, etc.) using LCD

Of course it needs to be done well (I feel like this machine is hardly a proof of concept piece in that way.)

And in that way, the MTV theory doesn't apply here- because sometimes too much is... too much!

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah if it were low level programming it'd be impressive, but with a modern high level language like c++  displaying graphics on multiple monitors can be done with a graphics library and a few lines of code.  Of course the trade off is there's a lot more bloat in terms of resources used but on a fairly new pc it's no big deal. 

I don't even think they wrote a custom front-end.... looks suspiciously like hyprepin/hyperspin to me. 

[DaOld Man]

 

[opt2not]

Multiple LCD’s is the new LED lighting. Builders these days are more about bling than they are about building a playable/comfortable cab. All that matters to these people is how “cool” their cabs look in their man cave. Playability be damned.

[NiN^_^NiN]

Easiest way I can see this working is the LCD is a touch screen and the buttons are modified to touch the screen as a touch screen. Can have arcade and joystick sit ont he LCD and it just touches the area when pressed or shifted.

I'm sure your seen this on mobile phones those suction cup joysticks and buttons that sit over touchscreen controls. 
 
The other option is a pico projector below the control panel that will display the image from below the only downside is you will see a wire coming from the joystick and the buttons no matter how thin you make it going to the edges.

I like the idea and in theory if you have the button for touch screen move around you could have original layouts and move the buttons into place and the spare buttons to the side

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah no.  Anyone who's played games on their phone/tablet knows that touch screens suck for gaming, even with suction cup do-dads to help out.  You just suggested to not use arcade controls on build your own arcade controls.   

[Mike A]

How about we just let a ---smurfy--- idea die a horrible death rather than coming up with even shittier ideas to perpetuate said ---smurfy--- idea.

Is that a proper sentence?

[pbj]

Could we get it to display Cindy Crawford from all angles and mount a fleshlight to it?

Asking for a  friend that is cash in hand.

[Howard_Casto]

How about we just let a ---smurfy--- idea die a horrible death rather than coming up with even shittier ideas to perpetuate said ---smurfy--- idea.

Is that a proper sentence?

Umm because it's not a ---smurfy--- idea?  The idea is great, it's just the execution is terrible.   It's just like how some of the rules to noobs don't apply to veterans... because the veterans might have the skill to actually pull it off.  I think the tech is still a few years out from this but it doesn't hurt to discuss implementation now. 

[Mike A]

No. It is a ---smurfy--- idea.