External Marquee

Phaesic

Hi folks, first post. Be gentle with me. I've done some searching on the forum and haven't for sure found an answer for this, I apologize in advance if I've overlooked the answer. I'm looking at making my first arcade system after owning a few cabinets for a while. I was just curious if there was any kind of support for outputting a marquee graphic to an external display while in game.

LED signboards have come a long ways, and many can produce low quality graphics. I was thinking a nice touch for a cabinet might be to have a games Marquee output to one while playing, like this I see on ebay. (Sorry, I haven't been able to find a more suitable reasonably priced display like what I had in mind.)

Are there any resources for such a thing in Retropie? Better implementations you all have seen? Thanks.

hardin81

Hi!

I'm also looking for a solution to make it work. Maybe it's not possile to add a second monitor, but this has to be solved in one way or another with EmulationStation.

Maybe it requires an another networking computer just to run the Marquee info from the Retropie?

Each game has a Marquee image.. if missing it shows the system Marquee.. if that's also is missing it shows a generic Marquee.

I would be awesome, and it's highest on my wishlist in EmulationStation developing right now.

XVO

Wow, that looks awesome. Especially with the buttons lights that changes from game to game.
Can that be done on a rpi3 and maybe an arduino?

Lurker

@xvo said in External Marquee:

Wow, that looks awesome. Especially with the buttons lights that changes from game to game.
Can that be done on a rpi3 and maybe an arduino?

As far as I can tell, the various models of Pi do not support two video outputs, so you would need something to "feed" the marque. I presume a second Pi or similar. I'm new to the pi so am not sure how easy it is to chain them together.

You would then need a data base of images in the second pie and I suppose an xml reference list. The difficult part at least the one beyond my skills would be to code the emulation station or the #1 pi to send a status update to #2Pi of what game is being played. A Matching ID number or something that #2pi references in the xml list.

That would be a theoretical guess on how one could do it.

I really like the configurable button light idea. That you can do with an arduino. The arduio would control the button LED only. The button action would still run to the Pi. Again the piece I am not sure of how to build would be the script or code that would run as the game loads to tell the arduino what button layout to light up.

backstander

@obsidianspider did a 2nd screen just showing a static picture in his Pi in a Super Famicom Build using runcommand-onstart.sh. I believe here was an early version of his script.

obsidianspider

@backstander Heh, people really love that second screen. I'm surprised more people haven't done it.

Clyde

@xvo said in External Marquee:

Wow, that looks awesome. Especially with the buttons lights that changes from game to game.
Can that be done on a rpi3 and maybe an arduino?

Dynamic button lights can be done with Ultimarc's Pac-Drive. See HOWTO: LED control with a Pac-Drive (the third post links to a demonstration video) or RGBcommander, the "official" linux software for the Pac-Drive (i.e. linked to on Ultimarc's website).

I don't have any practical knowledge yet, as I'm just going to build a PacDrive into my arcade cabinet, and I don't know if I want to go further with it than just permanently lighting my buttons.

ronlaws86

@lurker It can be done. A lot of people jump to the direct GPU which cannot be done, however the Displayotron Hat LCD panels you can get for the Pi which run over the GPIO interface use a frambuffer which runs independently from the GPU, so terrible framerates overall but for displaying 2D graphics.static images it is perfectly acceptable. All you need is a display of similar construction with an SPI interface to send the image to.