Main > Project Announcements
Nova BigScreen MAME cabinet
skr:
--- Quote from: bobbyb13 on September 17, 2025, 04:54:44 pm ---[...]
Arcade machines are a cheap hobby relative to horses.
:laugh2:
[...]
--- End quote ---
So true.
Horses are my wife's hobby - that been said I seldom have any discussions about the costs of my hobbies :cheers:
Zebidee:
--- Quote from: skr on September 18, 2025, 05:37:49 am ---Horses are my wife's hobby - that been said I seldom have any discussions about the costs of my hobbies :cheers:
--- End quote ---
I had a girlfriend who was into horses. Like, waaaay too obsessively into them. Anyway, she'd always steal my nice warm coat when going to the horse paddocks :dunno
Then I got giardia - a nasty gut parasite rare in humans, passed among animals by faecal-oral route. She'd gotten ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- on my coat and it made me sick, really sick :puke
Then my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend ripped my coat on a gate or fence or something :angry:
I really miss that coat.
skr:
Back on topic - rest assured that horses will have no further role than using a horse trailer for transportation of the cabinet :)
The marquee 1/2
After arrival of all the parts (panels, Pi, a decent power supply) I started hooking up the two 64x32 panel and got the Raspberry Pi ready (DietPi) and loaded it with the needed libraries (rpi-rgb-led-matrix, Python, etc). Sounded straight forward, but actually took quite some time to sort out dependencies and get the panels working.
In the end, after fiddling around with the python example scripts for showing images or animations (.gif) it worked really well.
In the meantime I found out that Pixelcade is selling the Artpacks (images/animations) separately, so I figured spending 20$ would be the easiest way to get my hands on some material to be shown on the panels.
I then tried the windows scripts provided by the guy who showed the alterntive on youtube (see above and a huge thanks for sharing this!), but unfortunately they did not work for my out of the box. Might be due to being a few years old and me using the latest mame build, but after changing the script a bit and fixing a bug I actually got what I was looking for: the panels showing an image (the marquee) with the samel filename as the game loaded in mame :notworthy:
But. Having purchased the artpack I also had a lot of beautiful animations specific for a lot of games which had to be used somehow. I figured that it would be awesome if it could somehow be done that the marquee (image) is shown when starting the game and if there is an animation (or even more than one) that the image and the animation are shown alternating. To get this working meant I had to get into pyhton scripting - new territory... :)
It took some weeks of using the spare time in the evenings to figure it out, but now I have a script that, if being feeded with the game name looks if there is an image with that name, shows it, looks if there are animations with that name (xyz, xyz_01, xyz_02,...), choosed one randomly and shows it and this alternates between the image and the animation - and I am proud of it :D
I then created a "standard" animation that is shown when the cabinet is started up, or when there is now artwork available for the game.
And here a video of how all of this looks like (never mind the sound, just background noise... sorry):
https://youtube.com/shorts/D06dET3z80g
I will cover the installation in the cabinet in another post :)
skr:
Marquee 2/2
After having the hard- and software side of the LED panels working the next step was fitting the panels to the cabinet.
While the width was no issue, the P4 panels are a bit too high to fit the marquee space in the cabinet without slight adaptation. But first things first - to fit the panels together and to screw them in the cabinet, I constructed and 3D-printed some parts:
Also a holder for the Pi was printed:
The needed space was removed from the board:
Panels fitted and to finish the look painted the board and the screws black:
After running the cabinet for a few hours the temperature of the Pi was a bit high, so I fitted heatsinks and printed a holder for a small fan to cool the Pi - no heat issue afterwards anymore :)
And finally a tinted acrylic glass was fitted to finish the marquee:
Done with this part :)
Zebidee:
Sorry but for some reason, your dropbox images don't seem to be coming up properly in the thread. Can still see them if I open the image in a new tab though.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version