MAME Marquee
Temporary Marquee
Yeah yeah.. I was so excited to see what the cabinet would look like, I had to make up a temporary marquee. Really boring, I know. but doing this temporary marquee taught me a few things. First, although you can’t see it plainly from the picture, apparently I made a minor error during measuring. The marquee area is actually 1/2″ larger on one side than the other. This became obvious when I measured to cut the plexiglass, and was important when I designed the finished logo in Photoshop.
Here, I wanted to give you a close-up shot of what effect the 2×2′s behind the plexiglass had on the overall backlight. You can clearly see where they are, so when I design the final marquee, I’ll need to be sure I don’t put any important pictures in these areas.
Designing the Final Marquee
Well, after a few hours in Photoshop I was able to finish my marquee. The final piece is 28″ by 7.5″ at 150dpi. (4200px by 1125px) I had it printed up at the local Kinkos for around $16. Although the plexiglass in this picture is making it appear glossier than it should, the Kinkos printout was supurb. The black ink they used was truely flat BLACK and turned out great. You’ll notice that I didn’t put anything above Qbert or below Spiderman… to avoid the lack of light behind those areas. This picture also shows the bottom retaining plastic clear angle molding better than any of the other pictures.
Here’s a quick rundown on how I made it: There are a bunch of places that have the logo, but I eventually found the original creators of the main MAME logo that I used, and it is on OscarControls’ Website To capture each character I played that particular game in MAME and did the old alt-print-screen combo to capture a screen-shot. I pasted it as a new layer, did some transform-scale so that each character would be large enough to see, and then cleaned up the edges. The I went through my huge collection of fonts to find just the right combination for the “Webb’s” portion, and added a few effects to make it match the style of the MAME logo. After a little bit of shuffling around, I wound up with my marquee. That is about it. Pretty simple.
Here it is, in its final glory. 
Download the Marquee
After MANY requests, I have finally decided to post the Photoshop source file for my marquee. The file is a 6.8MB ZIP file, and contains a Photoshop 7.0 file and the font I used for my name.
BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD: All I ask, is if you download and use this marquee as a starting point for your own marquee, and you post pictures of your cabinet online, that you give Oscar Control and myself credit, and post a link back to this page on my website. I just want to be sure everyone gets credit where credit is due. Enjoy!!! (OK, ok.. I agree to give credit where credit is due, let me download the file already.)