Adding A Digital Marquee To my Mame Cab

TheDaddy

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A few better images as the others had shine from the Garage light !!!

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A bit closer :-

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Looks alot better without that damn light interfering with it.

Dave.
 

Funhouse71

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I don't have a Mame machine but that looks great Dave! (y)

Like others have mentioned i'ts a shame there isn't an option to make a non Windows, compact version like running off an arduino type device using an LCD shield as a front end then you can navigate through the list of games on the shield to display the correct marquee which is stored on an external storage device like a SD card.

Obviously this set up would be too clunky for mame with thousands of games to navigate and select from, but for us guys with maybe 50 odd games in our pcb collection that would like a changeable digital marquee this might be acceptable option.
 

TheDaddy

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I don't have a Mame machine but that looks great Dave! (y)

Like others have mentioned i'ts a shame there isn't an option to make a non Windows, compact version like running off an arduino type device using an LCD shield as a front end then you can navigate through the list of games on the shield to display the correct marquee which is stored on an external storage device like a SD card.

Obviously this set up would be too clunky for mame with thousands of games to navigate and select from, but for us guys with maybe 50 odd games in our pcb collection that would like a changeable digital marquee this might be acceptable option.

HI Mate , Yeh to be fair the software was only written for me (Selfish i know !) and was never meant for release so I wrote it for windows as thats what my cab is. Only said folk could have it after they requested , This thread was just realy to document my marquee upgrade for others in case they wanted to do the same. And i can well recommend it as it looks great !

I have around 140 games on mine and you can select categories (Fully editible , IE you can assign any category name to your games like "Shooting" , "Platform" ect and you games will show when you select the category. Categories already have there own pre assigned if you want to use them. Would be hard if you have to go through the entire list is one menu when you have lots of games) by using joystick left / right to go through the menu. The first menu is ALL but you dont need to stick with that. Provided you have a half decent system the average load time of 40000 games is around 2 seconds so load time is not realy and issue.

Dave.
 
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Funhouse71

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HI Mate , Yeh to be fair the software was only written for me (Selfish i know !) and was never meant for release so I wrote it for windows as thats what my cab is. Only said folk could have it after they requested , This thread was just realy to document my marquee upgrade for others in case they wanted to do the same. And i can well recommend it as it looks great !

I have around 140 games on mine and you can select categories (Fully editible , IE you can assign any category name to your games like "Shooting" , "Platform" ect and you games will show when you select the category. Categories already have there own pre assigned if you want to use them. Would be hard if you have to go through the entire list is one menu when you have lots of games) by using joystick left / right to go through the menu. The first menu is ALL but you dont need to stick with that. Provided you had a half decent system the average load time of 40000 games is around 2 seconds so load time is not realy and issue.

Dave.
It's great what you have done Dave and you weren't selfish just writing this for your Mame machine as this is what you needed and the only other thing out there I have seen is Pixelcade which is very expensive so your digital marquee sotware is a very effective, cheaper option plus you have been kind enought to share it in the community (y)

I was only referring it was a shame there isn't something out there to be able to have a more compact, standalone option rather than a windows machine being used just to change a marquee for us people who are still changing out PCB's in their cabs.
 

Sbdesign

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So if running a Crt with a pc like I do….
Can I get another graphics card and output to the lcd?

I think when I got the pc from 2human he didnt know or have time to investigate being able to kick out the 15khz and a different res to lcd

This cab I’m thinking of doing is. 4p GAUNLET LEGENDS. Marquee is funnily enough pretty much 16:9

I bought it years ago, stripped of all art, and they come with. Tri sync.

Reference photo from google:

1691231742628.jpeg
 

TheDaddy

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So if running a Crt with a pc like I do….
Can I get another graphics card and output to the lcd?

I think when I got the pc from 2human he didnt know or have time to investigate being able to kick out the 15khz and a different res to lcd

This cab I’m thinking of doing is. 4p GAUNLET LEGENDS. Marquee is funnily enough pretty much 16:9

I bought it years ago, stripped of all art, and they come with. Tri sync.

Reference photo from google:

View attachment 7923
In truth with yours , I am unsure. I have never used an CRT in mine. Does the graphics card have 2 ports ?? If it does and can feed a CRT and a LCD/LED Your only other issues if you wanted to us my software is the scaling as I can only test to 800 x 600 and past that it starts to go off. I could rescale for the smaller res but hard as unable to test.

Dave.
 

Wahoobies

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There are a couple mame frontend distros that do this quite well with either 2 monitors, or a single monitor in portrait alignment. The one called Coinops has a really nifty set of themes too, subtly animated marquees included
 

TheDaddy

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There are a couple mame frontend distros that do this quite well with either 2 monitors, or a single monitor in portrait alignment. The one called Coinops has a really nifty set of themes too, subtly animated marquees included

I wrote my own , Works well. Last time i powered it on the marquee screen didnt look correct and I think the screen has broke ! Arghhhh !

Dave.
 
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Chihiro

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Works nice on the Artax community image 1.3:

No set-up required just worked the video bit came as total surprise needs a bit of work but great for day 1.
 

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CMYKhazi-Dan

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Any 12v PSU , I used the PC one in my MAME cab. You can use the 12v inside the cab as well they dont need to much to run them.

Dave.
What about the connection thing? The round plug thing? I'll see if I can post a pic. Brought it here rather than WhatsApp so it may help the uninformed like me 😆💪🧜🏻‍♀️
 

Chihiro

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Also handy for making a workshop clock thanks to @yosai for writing the code in Python clock on Pi3B+, HDMI to VGA adaptor.

I will post the file later if needed.
 

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