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Arcade Player Control Information on Sub-Display (3.73 AR or 1920x515) Showcase


dsync89

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tldr: This is for those that has additional sub-display with non-conventional aspect ratio (e.g. 3.73) and NOT 16:9 or 4:3 or 21:9 and wishes to display control information such as moveset for fighting games. Currently seeking for community sites and efforts to gather control information with such aspect ratio to expand the supported games.

You can find my curated widescreen images reordered to display relevant control information on sub-display with aspect ratio 3.73 (1920x515) or similar from my Github repo here . The file structure here follows the same structure that Launchbox used to store such image type.

 

Requirements

You had to first install MultiMonitor plugins for Launchbox. Then configure your second or third display to show Game Controls so that it will read the game control information for the selected game.

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Motivation

The pictures scraped by Launchbox Games DB already contains multiple images for controls information for Arcade game stored in Arcade - Controls Information. However the aspect ratio is mixed and most of them (4:3) are not suitable to display on a sub-display (e.g. marquee display) with aspect ratio fo 3.73 or similar. Otherwise the text might look too small and the black side borders are too much. In fact many of those images are a generic black template with button actions such as the following pic which looks ugly (no offense 😅) on such an odd-ly wide LCD screen. It will display just as fine on a 16:9 monitor though.

image.thumb.png.3384d6b0fcf71f5c38efde5fffa1b8ac.png

 

As of present Launchbox still doesn't allowing user to select a default image for an image types with multiple images. It always display the first image with the smallest number, e.g. -01 or if multiple images are found. There is no option to modify the order such as random.

 

Monitor Display

The images that I reorderd are best viewed with a screen with aspect ratio of 3.73 (e.g. 1920x515) that is typical in most sub-display to show marquee, such as the NV126B5M-N42. You may easily find them on Taobao https://world.taobao.com/item/680221506574.htm? as well.

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Picture of me mounting the NV126B5M-N42 LCD display to my Vewlix/Chewlix player panel. The spot used to be a white LED strip.

Ignore the left and right 'holes' next to the LCD screen 😁, as I'm now custom-ordering a custom-sized metal plate from China to cover it in my next phase of my arcade mod. The plate will be my next 'mod' to house additional controls of this awesome Chewlix/Vewlix cabinet.

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The text on the moveset is also visible clearly with the LCD size. 68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f

Video Demo

https://youtu.be/en7EAzlzqxE

Method

I browse through the image scraped by Launchbox, and simply copy and rename the control information images that best list a moveset for an arcade game to -00. Since Launchbox always choses image with the smallest index number, it will use it instead of the different -01 image name that might contain 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio not ideal to be displayed on the sub-display.

The image were scraped on my full merged MAME 0.250 set.

 

How to Use

Simply clone my repo on Github https://github.com/garygan89/Widescreen-Arcade-Controls-Information-Images. Then copy and paste all those images with *00.jpg and *00.png into your LaunchBox\Images\Arcade\Arcade - Controls Information folder.

TODO

  • Find more high quality images for more arcade games.
Edited by dsync89
remove unused spoiler block
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