GroovyMame with secondary LCD for Active Marquees...is this optimal?

[electricd]

Hello-

I am working on updating my Mame cabinet (thanks for all the previous help), and one thing that has changed since I built mine is the ability to show the marquees on a secondary LCD screen...so cool!  I am able to source a stretched LCD screen for this purpose but am looking for advice on the size/resoltion for optimal display.  I also have a Radeon R9 380 to drive my CRT for gameplay and hopefully this LCD for marquee.  Anyway in another post someone said a good setting is 3.25:1 ratio for the resolution of the marquee LCD.  My LCD supplier says they can make me an LCD that will fit my marquee space (with some modification from me) that will do 1920*590 resolution.  This is pretty darn near exactly 3.25:1.  The LCD is pretty expensive, so I want to be sure I am getting this right.  It has HDMI for its input and the Radeon card does have an HDMI output.  I am expecting to use DVI-I to output to my WG D9200 for game, and HDMI to output to my Marquee.  Anything else I should be aware of or check on before I drop a bunch of money on a custom LCD that i can't use for anything else?  Thanks again!   So great to be back in the hobby!

ED7

[Calamity]

Hi electricd,

This is the kind of endeavour one has to take with a pioneer spirit, assuming you might waste some cash and fail. Others have tried already with different degrees of success.

It shouldn't be difficult to configure your hdmi output to use that screen. One problem though is that by doing so, Windows will likely set your default/primary screen to the hdmi instead of the dvi-i. This may result in a challenge for some software that is written by guys who have never used more than one screen and think that anything else isn't expected.

MAME is excellent on targeting any screen that's attached to your pc, deterministically. We can't say the same for other programs, frontends specially. Also, even if MAME is great knowing where to draw, its scaling options weren't meant to be applied per screen, so you may have problems achieving 1:1 mapping on the marquee when applying some fancy scaling on the CRT at the same time (e.g. super resolutions).

To circumvent that, there's always a temptation to use some external program to draw on the marquee LCD while the emulator is rendering on the main screen, without thinking if this is a good idea at all.

In short, it can be done, you'll face some problems, there are solutions but with some compromises.

[Endprodukt]

I'm glad I read this before jumping into it

[PL1]

What if the marquee monitor video generation was not handled by GroovyMAME or Windows?

It is possible to make a serial connection between a Raspberry Pi and a Windows computer.

With the right software on both ends, it seems like it would be possible to pass a command via a serial connection telling the Ras Pi to display whatever image/animation/video file you want on the marquee monitor.
- I figure the hardware would have to include an SD card reader, a USB port, and video out which would probably rule out using an Arduino.

Am I missing anything here? . . . other than the programming skill to implement this concept.      


Scott

[markc74]

I have a similar setup using groovymame on my cab. I used to do dynamic marquees with layout files but now I just display them via attract mode frontend. Bonus is that it works for any emulator. I can take a look tomorrow which settings I used if your interested?

[electricd]

Thanks all for all the feedback and advice.  I think I will focus on bringing my old cab back from the dead using GroovyMame and the new display driver before focusing any attention or cash on the active marquee. 

[pakoman]

I's suggest to do some tests with an old spare LCD before buying the real thing?

[2huwman]

I've spent a few hours trying to make this work, and it's much more difficult than I expected! I'm using win7 and crtemudriver with an HD4350. The DVI on the GPU goes to the CRT and the HDMI on the GPU goes to the LCD. I'm using attractmode as the front end and @haynor666's groovymame build.

I tried using mame to output to the secondary monitor first. This works, but makes groovymame stutter badly on the CRT, and the sound is all 'wobbly'.

Then I tried using attractmode to handle the secondary monitor. This works fine in attractmode, but the artwork on the secondary monitor disappears when I start a game! I read that this was due to a conflict between mame and attractmode, and a suggestion was to make mame use opengl rather than d3d. So I changed my mame.ini settings to use opengl, and this did work - the artwork remains on the secondary monitor while the game plays on the CRT. The only problem is that switchres is no longer active, so all games are in 480i on the CRT!

So my question is - can groovymame use opengl with switchres working properly? If so, how do I set this up in my ini file?

I like the idea about using a pi to run the secondary monitor, as this would remove all the conflicts.

[2huwman]

Nevermind, I got it to work with mame hooker.