Pi 4 Dynamic Marquee using secondary HDMI output

Thorvald

I just finally got my Pi 4 and was highly disappointed to find out almost all of my marquees PNG flies throw and error when trying to view them, even with image viewer on the Pi OS desktop. Indicates they are corrupt but of course the work fine on Windows.

I have mame 206 installed and am just getting the multi monitor support going to display the marquee on the second monitor while playing the game. It’s an easy trick where you use the artwork file to add a marquee section and force them to always be displayed on the second display.

Attractmode always had support to display the marquee on the second monitor but I’ve only done it on Windows, will see how Linux handles it.

—-

That method above is nice thought! I’ll have a play with that as well.

fuzznuzzbit

@losernator Could you let us know what hardware you are using for the marquee display?

WeirdH

@fuzznuzzbit This might be an answer in another thread (haven't read it, though).

EDIT: Yes, it is.

DorkVonWaterfall

Could be cool to merge this amazing project with this , I mean too use a ledpanel instead of lcdscreen:

nat601

@fuzznuzzbit I'm about to try this out using this display:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000398514060.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.2b2d711eAI8PUg&algo_pvid=e3a86007-72f9-402d-a3cd-852fad8314e8&algo_expid=e3a86007-72f9-402d-a3cd-852fad8314e8-2&btsid=0b0a187b15971846167752144e0b52&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_

It's going in a bartop with a tiny marquee, around 75mm height so this will fit perfectly. the resolution is 1920x480 so I'm going to have to create a bunch of marquees to fill the space, but it looks like it might do the trick, mini hdmi in and powered by microusb.

janderclander14

@nat601 Did you got any success with that screen? I have the same one and I'm not able to display anything on it, even after setting custom timing settings in the config.txt file...

solrac21

@losernator awesome work on the pimarquee but I'm having an issue with pi4 and 1/3 1920 x 1080 lcd panel. I cannot get the marquees to fill the screen. They are cut off and I've tried resizing the marquees but nothing see to work....any ideas?

myboydash

I have just started using piemarquee2, its amazing! I'm
doing a custom build on a cab, and the only issue i seem to be having is I can't get piemarquee2 to associate with roms that aren't in my arcade folder. (Well, mostly. Ie... roms that reside in Atomiswave or Naomi) a couple roms will link to the instruction.png , or nothing at all. I'm trying to setup a marquee.png and instruction.png and its working for the roms in the arcade folder without issue. But not for the others and I'm not finding a way to make that happen. Cheers! Any advice is appreciated

myboydash

So I've gotten a little headway, but think its dumb luck.

I've created a custom txt for each rom that isn't in my arcade folder.

One of them I've managed to get to show the marquee image and the instruction image. The others will only show whatever i put as the first line. And when I swapped the one that does work (as shown below) and put the marquee image first and instruction image second it didn't show both.

Ive tried each of these both ways and only this one shows both images.

/home/pi/PieMarquee2/marquee/instruction/mbaa.png
/home/pi/PieMarquee2/marquee/naomi/mbaa.png

SgtJimmyRustles

I've seen one of these really cool setups with Pixelcade

https://pixelcade.org/pi-install/

It's a really nice LCD marquee that does more of a pixelized marquees.

JZackMan

I am having an overscan issue with black bars displaying bottom and top above my Marquee Image.

query monitor displays:
fbset -fb /dev/fb0 -g 1280 1024 1280 1024 8

I am using the following hardware.

Raspberry Pi 4
Main Display 1280x1024 is standard 5:4
Secondary 14.9" LCD Marquee
HDMI+VGA+DVI Controller Board kit with 14.9inch LCD Screen LTA149B780F 1280x390

What changes should I try to resolve my issue?

JZackMan

@JZackMan I found that the marquee images have to be resized to 1920X1080 to fill the screen.
Here is my autostart.sh file:
fbset -fb /dev/fb0 -g 1920 1080 1920 1080 16
isdual=tvservice -l |grep "2 attached device" |wc -l
if [[ $isdual == "1" ]]; then
/usr/bin/python /home/pi/PieMarquee2/PieMarquee2/PieMarquee2.py &
fi
##/home/pi/scripts/themerandom.sh
emulationstation --no-splash auto

dmmarti

For those that run dual monitors on a Pi 4 .... @losernator has been updating his PieMarquee2 script with better refinements, etc.

https://github.com/losernator/PieMarquee2

It's easy now to have a boot up intro video and default marquee video along with static game PNG marquees. His Github repo has all the information to add to any existing Pi 4 base RetroPie build.

I'm in the process of building a new dual monitor arcade cab and found his new revisions a lot simpler to get setup with both PNG and MP4 files.

majikill

@losernator would it be possible to change the file paths to lead to the info scraped by skyscraper? most if not all users already downloaded these files, would be a tad redundant to have multiple copies of the same files. just a thought.

darkmage

Anyone know the format for Daphne to work? naming it rom.png or rom.jpg does not work since Daphne's folder setup is a bit different than most of the other systems. Thanks.

losernator

@darkmage
you can make symbolic link to scraped image path.

eg: ln -s /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/nes /home/pi/PieMarquee2/marquee/nes

petrisi

Hello,

I took an inspiration from PieMarquee2 and created a script which utilized Skyscraper cache for live marquees on the second display, so that you only need to scrape once and both the retropie and marquee will use the same data.

Also the omxiv-marquee was flickering on my cabinet, so I modified the mechanism a bit how the image data is transferred from the script to omxiv and it seems to work quite nicely now without killing and restarting the viewer.

If anyone is still interested in this (utilizing Skyscraper resources), please let me know and I can package these and write short instructions how to use - should these scripts work for you as well.

Thanks.

BritX

@petrisi i would love to use what you have please!
i have been trying to get the LCD panels working using a Adafruit RGB hat and failing...im no coder and only got a pi 2 months ago so its all new lots of errors but im learning!

I have managed to get the great work by Losernator working on a second screen but the screens are expensive.

Having a RGB hat and 2 32x64 panels cost less that $50 :-)
https://www.adafruit.com/product/2345

Im hoping someone on this forum can maybe add to the work Losernator has done and add support for the RGB Hat?
or even @losernator Losernator can chime in? :-)

Im happy to put to work in if people can guide? ill even donate a rgb hat and screen?

thanks in advance for any help
Brit

https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix

BritX

@britx
hey all...anyone willing to help get this working on a Pi3 with single HDMI and using a RGB matrix instead of the expensive LCD?

I have been trying with no experience. Managed to get a gif playing on start but no im at a loss?
@losernator i read you had this working on a single HDMI? would you share the script please?
great work! also......

hookbeak

I’ve installed following the instructions - everything’s there - but no marquees show on the second monitor.

Can anyone tell me how i even begin to start troubleshooting?

My second screen is definitely working, i see loading screens - but just remains blank where there should be a marquee - i don’t even know where to start…