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Mr. RetroLust's new man/game cave


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I'm still relatively new here and build this cave within a few weeks, behind the screens I'm also helping out in moderating for the game database everyday and creating/photoshopping graphics for future releases as well as working on a theme, bezels and collecting data to expand my collection for Big Box. The cave is still not finished yet, have to do some sweet black/UV-light and arcade/retrogaming artwork from Etsy to finish it off.

Today I finally finished my mini gameroom (check it out @jaceroni), the square (check carpet boundaries) inside the small room is about 2x2 meters lol. I just installed and setup my last addition; the marquee screen. I was a bit nervous it wouldn't work out as I hoped it would but it did. My pc has only a HDMI and VGA port so I had to use the VGA port. It's a bit of a risk as the screen (the cheap 21:9, LG 25UM58-p) native resolution is 2560x1080, not possible through my VGA. I got a VGA-HDMI converter from Startech which outputs 1920x1080 max through VGA which is very nice but to get a good aspect ratio on 21:9 in 1920 you'll have to set (in my case I had to hack the registry for the old AMD HD 7660) the resolution to 1920x810 and it friggin worked! At this distance I can hardly even see the difference between 2560 and 1920 as the screen is pretty small. But for the future I'm set when switching to a different system which will support the UHD 49 inch screens resolution and the 2560 on the marquee screen. The carpet was cheap, the recliner was a second hand for 40 euro as was the media cabinet. Behind the 49 inch I placed 2 cheap led strips to get a bit of that Philips ambiance vibe.

On the screen you'll also see a theme/project I'm working on which is based on Futurestate by @Hexxxer whom very kindly gave me permission to release it in the future. It's still in a very early beta stage and I'm planning to release the theme with custom and cut out high res arcade cabinet images, as well as cut out arcade carts/pcb's and more. I'm still thinking about the theme's name, something like 'Futurestate Neon Deluxe'.

I think that covers it I guess :) I can't say it enough, everyone should have a marquee screen, it looks amazing with those beautiful high res marquee artworks out there, it really adds to the experience, there's some amazing bezels out there as well which will make the experience even more complete in my opinion, ofcourse a real cabinet is even cooler but I'm not that handy so this is my alternative path, I'm in heaven now lol :)

 

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  • 2 months later...
On 4/5/2018 at 12:39 AM, Mr. RetroLust said:

I'm still relatively new here and build this cave within a few weeks, behind the screens I'm also helping out in moderating for the game database everyday and creating/photoshopping graphics for future releases as well as working on a theme, bezels and collecting data to expand my collection for Big Box. The cave is still not finished yet, have to do some sweet black/UV-light and arcade/retrogaming artwork from Etsy to finish it off.

Today I finally finished my mini gameroom (check it out @jaceroni), the square (check carpet boundaries) inside the small room is about 2x2 meters lol. I just installed and setup my last addition; the marquee screen. I was a bit nervous it wouldn't work out as I hoped it would but it did. My pc has only a HDMI and VGA port so I had to use the VGA port. It's a bit of a risk as the screen (the cheap 21:9, LG 25UM58-p) native resolution is 2560x1080, not possible through my VGA. I got a VGA-HDMI converter from Startech which outputs 1920x1080 max through VGA which is very nice but to get a good aspect ratio on 21:9 in 1920 you'll have to set (in my case I had to hack the registry for the old AMD HD 7660) the resolution to 1920x810 and it friggin worked! At this distance I can hardly even see the difference between 2560 and 1920 as the screen is pretty small. But for the future I'm set when switching to a different system which will support the UHD 49 inch screens resolution and the 2560 on the marquee screen. The carpet was cheap, the recliner was a second hand for 40 euro as was the media cabinet. Behind the 49 inch I placed 2 cheap led strips to get a bit of that Philips ambiance vibe.

On the screen you'll also see a theme/project I'm working on which is based on Futurestate by @Hexxxer whom very kindly gave me permission to release it in the future. It's still in a very early beta stage and I'm planning to release the theme with custom and cut out high res arcade cabinet images, as well as cut out arcade carts/pcb's and more. I'm still thinking about the theme's name, something like 'Futurestate Neon Deluxe'.

I think that covers it I guess :) I can't say it enough, everyone should have a marquee screen, it looks amazing with those beautiful high res marquee artworks out there, it really adds to the experience, there's some amazing bezels out there as well which will make the experience even more complete in my opinion, ofcourse a real cabinet is even cooler but I'm not that handy so this is my alternative path, I'm in heaven now lol :)

 

DSC_0045.JPG

DSC_0048.JPG

DSC_0052.JPG

DSC_0053.JPG

 

shut_up_and_take_my_money__by_yugiohart-d5d3lgn.jpg

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45 minutes ago, Dan said:

Wow this theme looks amazing! Is it released yet?

Also - what is that marquee screen?

Thanks bro :) The monitor is a 21:9 25 inch LG ultra wide monitor the smallest one of the series, it aint't very expensive, over here it's around 169 euro. 

Ah yes the theme, been trying to manually adjust a copy of Futurestate from @Hexxxer in notepad++ as I don't want to install the required software package for customizing themes (wanna keep the system clean) but it's becoming too complicated for me at this point to create what I have in mind, the theme also runs reaaaally slow on my lower end system. All in all I have put it in the drawer for the time being and was thinking of releasing it to the forums so experienced coders could maybe finalize/fix/optimize it. 

 

Edited by Mr. RetroLust
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Sorry to hear that man. I have to say from your screenshot that it is the best theme I've seen - and I've been through pretty much all of them! Having the big video but also the transparent picture of the arcade cab, the box and the board, along with the info and clear logo - looks excellent. The marquee is of course a bonus. 

This work really needs to be finished, for the sake of the community! If I had the skills I would try and carry on with this work, though unfortunately I don't. I installed Microsoft Visual Studio to try and edit some themes but haven't even scraped the surface of that.

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1 minute ago, Dan said:

Sorry to hear that man. I have to say from your screenshot that it is the best theme I've seen - and I've been through pretty much all of them! Having the big video but also the transparent picture of the arcade cab, the box and the board, along with the info and clear logo - looks excellent. The marquee is of course a bonus. 

This work really needs to be finished, for the sake of the community! If I had the skills I would try and carry on with this work, though unfortunately I don't. I installed Microsoft Visual Studio to try and edit some themes but haven't even scraped the surface of that.

Thanks man, all the credits go to @Hexxxer for his amazing Futurestate theme, I just changed around some image and info placeholders and adjusted the graphics a bit plus a few additional ones. Yeah I love to see all the info as much as possible, the arcade cab images deserve a lot more love imo, though I think the reason why it runs so slow on my lower end system is because of multiple overlays on the full video placeholder. I'll make a new post soon with the theme, hopefully it's in better hands then.

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25 minutes ago, Dan said:

Yes, you should do that.

Is the monitor the LG 25UM58? As seen here on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/LG-25UM58-inch-Ultrawide-Monitor/dp/B01BV1XB2K

 

Yep that's the one, great marquee monitor! But if I could choose now I would have bought the one a little larger, it depends how close you're sitting from it ofcourse, for me it's about two meters. Another factor to consider is the combimation with the size/scale of your main gaming screen.

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4 hours ago, Mr. RetroLust said:

Thanks man, all the credits go to @Hexxxer for his amazing Futurestate theme, I just changed around some image and info placeholders and adjusted the graphics a bit plus a few additional ones. Yeah I love to see all the info as much as possible, the arcade cab images deserve a lot more love imo, though I think the reason why it runs so slow on my lower end system is because of multiple overlays on the full video placeholder. I'll make a new post soon with the theme, hopefully it's in better hands then.

Looks beautiful! From where you get the cab images? I found them in progettosnaps but they all have a black or white bg, not transparent pngs. 

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41 minutes ago, Kondorito said:

Looks beautiful! From where you get the cab images? I found them in progettosnaps but they all have a black or white bg, not transparent pngs. 

Thanks bro! I searched for high res cabs photos for a few CPS1 games at the time as a test concept, cut them out and color corrected/cleaned them up, I did upload a few to the database if I remember correctly. Am also planning to create cab images that don't have any or only very low res ones. Will be a lot of work but working through system by system would be doable, at the moment I'm still busy working through Neo Geo marquees and in the future their bezels. Lot of plans haha might take a lifetime all in all ;)

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4 minutes ago, Mr. RetroLust said:

Thanks bro! I searched for high res cabs photos for a few CPS1 games at the time as a test concept, cut them out and color corrected/cleaned them up, I did upload a few to the database if I remember correctly. Am also planning to create cab images that don't have any or only very low res ones. Will be a lot of work but working through system by system would be doable, at the moment I'm still busy working through Neo Geo marquees and in the future their bezels. Lot of plans haha might take a lifetime all in all ;)

I hear you! I made an action in PS to batch remove the bgs of the cabs from the progettosnaps set a long time ago, but a lot of black cabs with black bgs ended up with some weird borders, so I gave up :)

Keep up your great work. 

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54 minutes ago, Kondorito said:

I hear you! I made an action in PS to batch remove the bgs of the cabs from the progettosnaps set a long time ago, but a lot of black cabs with black bgs ended up with some weird borders, so I gave up :)

Keep up your great work. 

Thanks bro, yeah cutting out by hand would be the best result, most progetto cabs are too low res for the displays we have these days so to make things look really nice we need higher res. Perhaps we could organize a team with several photoshoppers in the future and work together on batches so the work is finished sooner and we can balance out the amount of time per person.

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  • 4 weeks later...

@Dan I haven't forgotten about the theme just so you know but was in a transition to a new and faster system, the theme works well now on this new system at least for smaller playlists, the 7000 arcade game list is still slow though lol, it needs a lot of downsizing still, so i'll work on it some more to release a somewhat decent and more finished theme, I can't promise a date though, have a lot going on in real life atm and some side projects but know it'll be released, at least this year! ;)

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  • 3 weeks later...

Update of the cave: These photo's below are not recent anymore as I changed the pc and the ps3 died (yellow light of death) due to overheating in that damned narrow cabinet mid part, let that be a lesson though PS3 need sufficient cooling space. It might be fixable but I'm afraid it isn't.
I'm a sucker for black light, the counter-culture and anything psychedelic for that matter. I might have overdone things a bit with those posters but it's my normal behavioral pattern.
The black light is something I didn't expect to really work as it does, it's a led blacklight bar (it's not behind the tv btw those are other led strips), it gives far more and stronger light and is slightly more purple than the blueish classical blacklight, I love it, but that seems obvious I guess.

I basically made this theme to fit a dimly lit blacklight/neon game room lol (sorry for the quality)

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