Scratch Build – In Progress MAME Over - Updated 25/04/08 - Marquee and Video Cable

Sorry for necroposting but hows this going? I am looking at doing a jukebox like thing to use up an old pc.

 

No this project hasn't died in the water (thank goodness), it's just slowed a little. I'm making progress but nothing major or massively interesting by itself. I should have enough small items completed to put together an update shortly. Oddly enough I was just thinking about this last week.

Good luck with the jukebox. There's a plethora of jukebox software out there. It's just a matter of finding the one that looks like what you want.

 

I'm glad to see that this build/log still lives! ^_^

When you are done with this, do you think we could sit down and make plans for world domination? *looking at my nick subtitle* Australia and Sweden are almost perfect counterpart on the globe, let's divide the earth in two hemispheres with Australia and Sweden at the center of their respective areas... or are there other construct[a/i]cons around that we need to include?

 

For winbloze yep but for the superior linux there's not much

I've got some scripts for amarok but looks like I will need to learn to program ruby.

 

Check out this page for some ideas Actually JukX looks kind of hot.

 

......and we're back. Progress has been slow over the past few months but suddenly it's all starting to come together. Here's the first of a couple of updates to bring you up to speed.



First up this week is the marquee frame. I took a length of aluminium U channel and cut out 2x 90 degree sections where the corners will fold up.



Upon folding it up I found the angle wasn't quite right. It turns out that once you bend aluminium 90 degrees and then try to unbend it at all it snaps. Fortunately I had bought a 6m length. Unfortunately however, I measured incorrectly on my second attempt so I had to buy another 6m length. Third time was the charm.



A quick spray of black paint and it's ready for fitting.



To fill the void I cut 2 pieces of acrylic. Once the marquee is printed it will be sandwiched between them. It became obvious at this stage that there was a hairline gap between the marquee frame and the light box wall. With the covered acrylic in place it became quite noticeable. There's no way I was going to be playing games with that shining in my eyes.



A quick trip to my local Bunnings turned up this little gem. I was planning on using black silicone until I found this. It got right into the tight corners and was self propelled. It was one of the easiest products I've ever worked with.



And then last Friday, my printing came back. Oh happy day! I'd been working on several versions of these for the past..... well since I started building this thing. I made them entirely from scratch in my favourite photo chopping software.



I pixelated the background to protect it's identity to give a retro, 8-bit arcade flavour. I think they turned out pretty snazzy myself. It's a fact of life that a 300dpi picture doesn't look the best when scaled down and displayed at 72dpi on a screen. But this should give an idea of how they look in real life.



Remember how the TV snagged on the front of the cabinet? Here's the solution I came up with. This lifts the TV above the front so it no longer snags. It's also the size of the footprint of the TV to minimise extra weight in the cabinet.



To connect the TV to the computer a custom cable is required. As it turns out SCART is the best way to connect a TV to a computer. SCART has the ability to directly receive an RGB signal which is funnily enough, what VGA sends out. For instructions on how to build one check out here.



You also have to change the output frequency from your video card. While Smartstrip does the job I found that Soft-15KHz does it the same job and is made for just this purpose so it needs no configuration out of the box. And voila!



Windows also works. It still needs a little tweaking, but that's yet to come.


Well good people. That's it for this update. Stay tuned for another update later this weekend. As always, thoughts and feedback are always appreciated.

 

It's ALIVE!!!! *lightning + thunder* BD

Cool, homemade VGA-to-SCART converter!! =D

 

agreed

Glad to see you back at it Constructacon