Home-brew Arcade Cabinet with digital Banner Display?
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So i have this idea in my head, I am contemplating building one of those DIY Arcade cabs with Retropie at its heart (of course) and wondered:-
Would it be possible/How difficult would it be to have an LED matrix display in the upper banner behind some smokey Perspex (Normally a static backlit print) like this one
https://learn.adafruit.com/16x32-rgb-display-with-raspberry-pi-part-2 (in a row to fill the area) display the selected Emulator while using the machine?I understand this would need some way of hooking in to the launch scripts or ES some how to trigger an update script to change the display on demand to match the chosen Emu being run, I'm just wondering how far this could be taken if anywhere.. Like could it be possible to display the banner in sync with the main menu as you scroll through? or would it only be theoretically possible during launch of an actual emulator (Both outcomes acceptable tbh)
Just an idea at the moment, no purchases have been made yet, i'm going to toy with ideas for a bit and shop about more for a reasonable cabinet.
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@ronlaws86 This post seems similar: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/13684/external-marquee/7
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Yea seems i'm not the only person to come up with this idea, though nobody has thought of using the much cheaper LED Matrix panels instead of a full blown LCD
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@ronlaws86 Hello, have you advanced somehow with your idea? I would like to do it the same with the 3x Led Matrix display. But I do not know how to do it software. Do you have any idea?
https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1000001136792.html?aff_trace_key=8dc44431f16b4c72ac37302fc1e62355-1525125528302-02508-UneMJZVf&aff_short_key=UneMJZVf&aff_platform=msite -
just do the code that accepts a string from to the program yor goiing to write in python or c or whatever other language and send the emulator name to it via the launch script.
Personally if i was doing this i would connect the pi to and adrunio and send the display commands via serial so the adrunio took care of the display and anything else you wanted to send to it can be done via serial in python or c. There isint a lot too it if you can code
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I had a similar idea the other time, but instead of a LED matrix I wanted to use two 16:9 LCDs next to each other and display the original jpeg banner of the game currently playing, but no idea on how to hook them up and still retain vga666 compatibility (for 15kHz CRT monitor users).
I have used in the past a 2x16 character LCD to display text of the console and ROM currently playing. I hooked the display to an Arduino connected via USB to the raspberry pi and used simple serial send commands to send text to the LCD. Maybe what you want could be achieved in a similar fashion?
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Can you share a script that will send the current game name to the LCD matrix? I ordered 3x LCD Matrix from AliExpress, size 64x32 px (192x32). I would like to display either a text with the title of a game or a wheel-playing game.
I will try to set up the settings according to these instructions: https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix/
I use this board to connect to Raspberry GPIO : https://www.electrodragon.com/product/rgb-matrix-panel-drive-board-raspberry-pi/
LCD Matrix AliExpress : https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1-16scanning-rgb-color-smd-module-p3-support-nova-linsn-card-p3p4p5p6p2p1-5p1-9p20smd-led-module/1000001136792.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.3cb24c4dk0tdj0
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