Marquee art not always filling second monitor

[myztikjenz]

Running GameEx Arcade (v18.62, not current I know) and I'm working to add a second 24" 'supermarket LCD' screen to dynamically display marquees. Overall, it's working just fine except that some (most?) marquees don't fill the display. The native resolution of the display is 1920x320 and I noticed that marquees that are 1200x<300 (where <300 is in the 260-290 range) will fill the display. But ones that are over 300 px tall won't. 

I looked for rules on how GameEx or MAME wanted to see marquees and didn't find much. I'm guessing GameEx (or MAME) is sizing to fit and not wanting to truncate any part of the image, which is fair. But if that's the case, is there a way to composite another image behind the marquee so that I don't get black pillarboxing? Or is there a preferred marquee size that should always look nice on wide aspect ratio monitors like this?

[Draco1962]

It is mostly about the image's aspect ratio and nothing to do with GameEx or MAME and more likely Windows.  For example, your display of 1920x320 is a 6:1 aspect ratio (or 6 pixels length for every 1 pixel of height in proportion). 

An image that is 1200x290 is 4.14:1. As you can see, there is a 2 pixel difference in the length proportion. Some minor scaling is likely taking place to fill the aspect ratio of the monitor as a 4:1 ratio is kinda close to 6:1 and probably not really noticeable thus filling the monitor.

On the other hand, let's assume that you have an image that is 1200x400. That is a 3:1 ratio, half of the length of your display's aspect ratio of 6:1. It will center the image based upon the height of the image with the ends "cropped." You can see this in action when using the Center option for displaying a windows background that does not fit the aspect ratio of the monitor (say an 800x600 image on a 1920x1080 monitor - 4:3 vs. 16:9. 

I have seen where some users have used a background image that fits their monitor as an underlay and leveraged some sort of batch bulk processing through a graphics program (Photoshop or GIMP) to grab the marquee images and center them atop, thus creating some continuity with a theme.

As an example, here is a link to a project I did - manually mind you, with a hexed theme for pincab topper videos primarily but a similar thing can be done with still images - 

A good online calculator and explanation of aspect ratios - Furey, Edward "Aspect Ratio Calculator" at https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/technology/aspect-ratio-calculator.php from CalculatorSoup, https://www.calculatorsoup.com - Online Calculators

I hope this is of help.

[myztikjenz]

Definitely helpful and was what I thought the answer would be: the ratios are just too far apart and the image is centered and sized to fit.

Thanks for the links too. Your work looks really nice, I like the hexagon look. I was thinking it'd be nice if I could just oversize and blur the marquee and use that as the background, something like videos shot in portrait but that are viewed in landscape will do on YouTube and news sites sometimes. Maybe this is a feature request for GameEx. 

I'll take a stab at trying to batch process the marquees to add enough pixels to fix the ratio.  Thanks again for the reply, I appreciate it.

[Draco1962]

Anytime! Be sure to share your work! I am interested in how you address the issue!

[myztikjenz]

After trying a bunch of options (including the backdrop blur of the marquee itself... it wasn't great), I ended up creating a background based on an image I found searching around for marquee ideas. They had really dark gray arcade manufacturer logos on a black background and it looked... OK. But it looked pretty terrible on the display, not much better than filling with black. And it was created with PotatoShop, it didn't have nearly enough pixels to fill a 1920x360 display nicely. Where I ended up is a bit more colorful:

A batch processing script that sized each marquee to maximally fit as much of the space as possible kept the marquee filled with as much of the game art as was reasonable. Sometimes the art was so small I could only size it up a little and just center it. Some art is pretty square so it only covers a little. And then there's Red Baron, which was one of a few big enough to cover the entire display on its own.

The company logos are the work of Dan Patrick over on the LaunchBox Forums: https://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/file/3402-v2-platform-logos-professionally-redrawn-official-versions-new-bigbox-defaults/

Also found folks who are creating updated, high-def marquees over there as well: https://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/file/3080-huge-mame-marquee-collection-including-many-in-4k-resolution/

(hope it's OK to link to them)

As for my marquee, it's free to use if anyone wants it. It's three times the size of my monitor so it should scale down nicely if need be. And I clearly don't own or claim any of the logos used, so a standard "don't sell the art" disclaimer applies.

[Draco1962]

Awesome! Thanks for reporting back and sharing!

What program did you use and do you have a link to the batch script?

[myztikjenz]

The app I used was Acorn and while it has scripting capabilities, it's not documented the best (it's an absolutely fantastic image editor though, I use it all the time). The script was driven by an Automator workflow since Acorn has a pretty severe memory leak when it's being scripted and needed to be killed repeatedly, but the script that did the resizing and composition is probably straightforward to rewrite for GIMP or Photoshop, for those that know how. I've attached the script here.

acorn_marquee.jsUnavailable

[Draco1962]

I think you are right that there is something similar for batch manipulating images with GIMP or via ImageMagik as you demonstrated. Thanks again!