Before I could start work on the marquee, it needed a name! My wife and
two sons each gave suggestions - here's the list we came up with:
- Mamecade
- PlayerONE
- Mame-O-Rama
- MameGate
- MameStar
- Intruder Alert
- Get The Intruder
- StarMame
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- Chicken... Fight Like Robot
- First Wave
- Starport
- Mameport
- Mame-4-All
- Arcade Classics
- Omega Mame
- Mame Wars
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- Dad's Addiction
- Arzoo's Addiction
- Video Addiction
- Classic Addiction
- Arcade Addiction
- Vid-Addict
- Wonka Machine
- Altered Arcade
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After much debate, we went with Arcade Addiction (as you can tell from the name of this site).
Although my oldest son still liked PlayerONE the best.
With the name decided on, I went to work with Photoshop - which by the way, I am basically a novice.
For my first attempt, I went with a freely distributed (and popular) background used
by many other MAME builders. The font is very TRON like.
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| My close friend contributed his own concept using a Defender theme.
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I liked my friend's star field background.
Turns out it's not so easy to do a realistic star field in Photoshop - I spent many hours
working at it - and in the end it was barely visible on the printed marquee, oh well.
This next attempt combined the TRON and Defender fonts.
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The Space Invader monsters were very cool, but I couldn't think of what else
to add. Plus, I was hoping for something a bit more original.
My office wall has eight framed record albums;
Boston, Queen - A Night At The Opera, The Rolling Stones - Some Girls (with all the original faces), Pink Floyd -
Dark Side, Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell, Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run (from my wife's collection), STYX - The
Grand Illusion, and Electric Light Orchestra - Out Of The Blue. Hmmmm, ELO...
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But here again, I couldn't think of what else to add, and perspective and
scale issues were also a problem.
That's when I decided to go old school. Defender has always been
my favorite game - could I somehow use the ship and enemies? Problem is, they're made up of a handful
of pixels - I needed to do some serious enlarging (and I was working at 300dpi). Unfortunately, a
big Defender ship doesn't really look all that interesting!
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What I needed were large or 3D images from Defender or other classic
arcade games. I spent hours searching Google images. Had I any artistic ability, I might
have tried creating some myself. Eventually I gave up and stopped working on the marquee for a few weeks -
I needed a break.
In the interim, I began work on the screen layouts for MaLa (the software
front-end). Sticking with the TRON/Defender concept, I used MAME screen captures to get exact images
of the TRON Light Cycles.
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| That's when I realized I could do the same for the marquee! I began the
tedious task of grabbing screen pics from all the classic space-themed games, then enlarging and
matching the scale of each. Here are a few examples of my image pallets:
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| This is it, the final marquee design for Arcade Addiction. There are a total
of 13 different games represented - all engaged in one big galactic battle!
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The marquee graphic was then professionally printed onto a backlight material
by MAME Marquees, and sandwiched between two sheets of Plexiglas.
I mounted a florescent light bar and added a backdrop (made from the left over control panel
laminate) to prevent the light from coming through the speaker grills and monitor plexi.
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| Here's how the marquee looks completely installed, lit and unlit. All in all, I'm
happy with the design. It's a bit busy and the images are small from a distance, but up
close it's a blast to look at!
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