bradical

I don't think I ever got it working crystal clear, but I got it to stop stretching it to a standard resolution. I know I used a program called custom resolution utility to change the resolution to the actual size of the LCD. I had problems getting CRU to work at first and I don't remember what I did to fix it. It wasn't perfect as the picture on it was kind of compressed looking, but looked fine for Marquee images in bigbox. Overall, I was happy with it when I tested it but I haven't actually used it in a cabinet build like I was planning to yet. Sorry if this wasn't the response you were looking for.

Thanks for the response. I had stumbled upon that thread a while back before I was even having issues, but it seemed to more address the alignment of the image, since the custom cut lcds only utilize part of the former screen it was cut from. Still there might be something I can figure out from it. At the moment though, I seem to have solved the issue within windows using CRU. Seems it does not like being run from the user folder because it's working now from the root of the hard drive. Sometimes it is the smallest things... Anyway, marquee images are looking fantastic now.

Hi everyone, I am building an arcade cabinet, and after discovering Launchbox, I have decided to use Big Box as the front end. Part of the reason I loved Big Box was because I can use another monitor as a marquee screen and added that to my idea for the next build. So now that I'm getting parts for that build, I found a screen cheap enough that was close to the size I needed for the build and grabbed it off ebay. The problem is, physically it is a really weird proportion compared to most monitors, 1280x390. Windows 10 defaults to 1280x720 for this monitor and the only other options are 1024x600 and 800x600 as far as it is concerned. This obviously looks really bad on it, 1280 pixels are fine but vertically, it's basically compressing 720 lines down to 390 actual lines smashing the whole image. My first action was to get a program called CRU ( Custom Resolution Utility). Didn't work. Tried messing around in the windows registry. Didn't do anything at all, nothing changed. Looked up the controller board for the screen, no documentation of changing resolutions, and as far as windows cares, it's just a regular VGA input, has no idea it's supposed to be a thin little lcd for showing old marquees. Of course, this isn't a Bigbox problem, but I was hoping it could be a solution. The only goal for the screen is to get it to display an image on Bigbox that looks good, I really don't care what actual resolution it is at. Is there any way I can edit a theme or something to do that?

Laby, I just started using Launchbox as well, but I think I can answer some of your questions because I have ran into some of the same stuff. 1. Did you copy the files over from a Mac at any point? Because I ran into the same problem and I think it's because Mac's spotlight indexes every file and basically duplicates it as a new hidden file starting with an underscore. I had to show hidden files within Windows as I copied all my roms over and just manually deleted all the hidden stuff and then I was good to go. 2. I've already built a small 2 player bartop based with a Raspberry Pi, so this is more just opinion, but it depends on how big you want it to be and exactly what games you want to play. I originally planned to have 6 buttons per player plus a start and select(coin) for each. I couldn't fit it all onto the control board and ended up just using 4 for the second player and in the end it's all still a little too close together for 2 actual adults to play. I'm just going with 4 for each on my current build, and that's because the extra 2 just never got used on the last cabinet I built. If you are into arcade fighting games then I would consider it, but if your just adding them to try to convert the shoulder buttons or triggers from N64 or Playstation into an arcade setup your wasting the buttons, because those games aren't meant to be played that way. That's not to mention the lack of analog joystick. Just use a controller for those systems. 3. Sort of. I use Retroarch for the basics like NES, SNES, Genesis and so on, and in a Raspberry Pi setup I use it for MAME using some really old roms. That said, once I discovered Launchbox and decided to use a PC for an cabinet build I started using the current version of MAME with the standalone emulator, you might see a lot more games that work, and also a lot more support from that particular community. Also, I find Dolphin to run a lot better standalone, but that could be the age of the PC I am using for this. N64, I still haven't decided on yet. I am running Project64 because I remember it working way better around 10 years ago than what you can get out of a Raspberry Pi now, and I can still on a PC. But I hear better things about Mupen I just haven't experimented around with it enough yet. 5. Try the newest version of MAME maybe if you aren't already. I'm still learning that myself though and I don't really know what games are specifically meant to run on that hardware. A little more background on my build: I found a 4 year old laptop in the trash that somebody must have gave up on (I'm in the Navy, sorting trash is basically an everyday thing out to sea) and I grabbed it thinking it would be a lot more powerful than a RPi for a cabinet. Turns out the thing works perfect after a hard drive wipe and I've been messing around with doing a PC based cab ever since. I can run Gamecube games full speed, arcade classics with the latest MAME and BigBox. I've spent nothing so far and it's working out well, but play around with an older PC before you drop a bunch of money on building one.