Is a second display for the Marquee possible?

stanti · 2020-07-08T00:51:25+00:00

Hi all, I’ve started upon building my own arcade machine. I came across Pixelcade’s LED marquee which got me looking into if it was possible to have the mar...

opxonline

I would love to know this as well. I have several arcade cabinets running batocera, But I am building one with an LCD marquee.
I know retropie has a build for the rpi4 that supports the 2nd HDMI for a marquee, But the rpi4 is limited compared to a PC.

pdapice

not sure if anyone figure this out yet, but i am working on it and making progress using a pi as the marquee display. it’s a pretty simple process and so far it works. I need to wait for my actual marquee lcd to come in so i can fine tune the resolution, etc but it seems to be working as intended.
will post details once i have it more finalized.

UncleSlim

pdapice Is it something you wanna share ?

i also have a PC running Batocera and would love to have a second screen showing the marquee.

I can see that Batocera 33 will get support for Pixelcade Arcade Marquee display, but i guess that doesn’t work on a normal LCD Screen, since the Pixelcade communicates over USB.

The pixelcade are also way to expensive for my project :)

jon

UncleSlim

I’ve been waiting for this announcement since 2017… and I was already proposing it at that time ^^.

Where did you read that a USB port was needed for the “ledmarque”?

Because if I read the “pixelcade” site correctly, it is only an open source program that works under linux or windows… and that you must download and link to your software.
Nowhere do I read that it fakes a usb input ….
You use whatever you want as an input I guess, for me it would make sense to think of a second hdmi or vga socket rather than a usb… (transferring a video frame rate by usb it’s definitely not cleanest…) …. or switch to dual display with a laptop ^^

anyway I am delighted and amazed by this release 33.
And I’ll take a look at it all

pdapice

UncleSlim I did workout a way to get this working using a pi3 (would also work with most any version of pi) as the driver of the secondary display.

if you are interested in having a pi running in tandem with your PC, i can put together a post about what i did and include all the relevant pieces.
basically it uses scripts on the batocera machine to communicate over a network connection (wifi or ethernet) and sends commands to the pi which then displays the marquee on the secondary screen.

Atari

jon I believe pixelcade displays work by just communicating via USB the image it should display. It doesn’t send the actual video signal, the marquee itself is a small computer that interprets the data and then sends it to the display itself. ie. it’s at no CPU cost to the host machine. That has both its benefits and disadvantages.
A genuine secondary display can probably be salvaged out of the OGST_screen.sh script: https://wiki.batocera.org/launch_a_script

jon

Atari

no usb for me….because transmission signal video

the website pixelmarque even explains to you, download section of the site, how to install it, in the same way as retropie and here in batocera or other software.

Moreover there is no reason to release a free open source software if it is to have to buy super expensive lcd panels, the project would not be of much use.

And if I believe my view, it’s a copy-paste of the existing software under retropie for rpi 4 (with 2 hdmi outputs …..and no with usb)

Atari

It’s the driver you use for the product which you buy from them. It’s strange to expect it to do something else other than be a driver for the product it intends to support.
It being open-sourced was the sole reason Batocera was able to integrate its support.

jon

Atari
not strange…
Normal according to the video of ETA Prime…
(2 simple screens to connect to the rpi4 in hdmi….and an open source program behind that does the job, with a simple open source code to type in somewhere…better and just as simple, we don’t know how).

It’s not like the Pintodmd which asks for a paid software and paid tiles, here it’s just an open source prog which allows ANY screen (or almost) to work on batocera.

==> In the video we even see two possibilities to put different screens there..
(we can clearly see a screen + 1 lcd connected in hdmi
and then have clearly seen 2 hdmi screen connect in hdmi).

I remain convinced of what I say, I intend to investigate anyway

Edit:
technically speaking you cannot transmit a video signal from one source to another via a usb input for several reasons such as:

absent and/or too thin cables that are in a usb cable
also because a vga/usb cable or an hdmi/usb cable does not exist
because a usb is not provided at the base for this work, otherwise a lot of material would be useless (CG, carte video acquisition ect ect)

UncleSlim

pdapice

Sorry for the late answer :) That would be pretty awesome …

Atari

UncleSlim He’s already made the posts, and I’ve gone and put it on the wiki as well, check it out.

jthemad

Atari hi! Is it possible to use it on pc with 2 hdmi? Like the pi4 solution, but on pc..

thanks

UncleSlim

Atari

Found it .. just a shame that i need to upgrade from v32 to v33 for this to work.

Because all the .info files i have in the same directory as the Bezels for the arcade systems stops working when upgrading.

pdapice

jthemad not yet. I wanted to run this on a mini PC and was able to get it to work somewhat but the problem was that any time i displayed artwork on the marquee, it would take the “focus” away from the controller. so if i selected a game, it would display the artwork and then the controllers would no longer respond unless i force quit the artwork, then everything would return to normal. this was only an issue with emulation station though. if i launched a game, the artwork would display fine and the game would work as normal.

I may revisit this again when i have some extra time - but so far i have been unable to figure out how to get around this.

checksum

I began something using the webserver on the last version.
It is a work in progress but can simplify a lot using another pi for marquee…
And you can install/test it in 5 minutes…
-Now it shows all info about the current game, next step … get a real marquee and add 2 led panels 64×16 or large monitor on a raspberry zero w… (or an esp32??)
https://github.com/checksummaster/batocera_webstuff

smcgann99

checksum Did you take this any further ?

Did you try setting up a browser on pi zero - I’m not sure if it would be powerfull enough ?

This has a LOT of potential for a custom marquee setup, I would still prefer a 2 monitor solution on the Pi4, but have had no luck getting anything to display on 2nd monitor in v35 😦

Do you think it would be feasable to run a kiosk broswer on the 2nd hdmi port of Pi4, or would that kill performance of Batocera ?

Atari

UncleSlim Having to pick the lesser of the two poisons… have you considered trying to find a solution to your issue with the bezels instead of giving up and going back to v32?

UncleSlim

Atari

I tried v33 (just to test out the Mega Bezels reflection shaders, which do not work on my hardware) before i knew this was possible, so i didn’t spend so much time on it. i will look at it again.

UncleSlim

It seems like i am back on track. It was a resolution issue. changed the resolution from 1920×1080 to 1920×1200 and did the same on all the .info files and now it all looks good again.

Next step dual screen test :)

checksum

I looked at what pixelcade does and it is similar to my solution.
They use script game-select.sh and system-select.sh of emulationstation to make a post (HTTP) to their device.
My solution is using the same script to generate a JSON file and make it available under the new emulationstation HTTP server + some web page to use it.

Now for good marquees, I found some on coin-ops distribution but it take 1.8gb on the SD cart.

Atari

checksum Considering the Pixelcade installation takes up around 1.5GB I don’t think that’s too huge a burden.

jthemad

checksum hi checkasum! Does your script use the ‘marquee’ artwork previously scraped for every game? Or have I to download something else? Thanks

UncleSlim

jthemad If you look at the wikipage, you have the option to download a “samples pack” then you can see the naming and see if it matches your own.