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[dan2600]

Hey all, 

 

long time lurker first time poster here.

 

Was wondering if anyone could help me out.

 

Long story short, I'm working on a "High Score" display. I'm using a 128x32 RGB matrix, and then 3 rows of 16 character 16 segment displays I designed and had fabricated myself.  I'm pretty happy with it right now. Here is one of the 16 segment displays:

 

 

 

I plan on posting a detailed tutorial once I finish it, but the "brain" is a raspberry pi, and then each display as an Arduino Nano getting serial data, and then I have 2 HT16K33 chips running the displays. there were pinboard 2000, 3000, and 4000, but they didn't work as well or were too expensive.  I got the BOM for each display down to only about $30-35 bucks! (1x$5 PCB, 1x$4.00 dollar Arduino, 2x$1.00 HT16K33, 16x$1.50 16 segment displays)

 

 

I'm using the 128x32 RGB display as a fake DMD display, it's not true "orange" like a plasma DMD, but it looks close!!!!

 

 

So! Now the part I need help on. I want to display DMD logos/animations from the machines. and I'm having a HARD time capturing it.

 

I've been basically taking screencaptures of vpin or pinmame. The results are OK...but the problem is my video capture card compresses the video on the fly, so it's not SHARP edges, unless I take stills. It's also very time consuming to capture my desktop, cut out the DMD part in a video editor, convert that to a gif.  Here is an example of T2

 

 

 

As you can see, the animated part looks a little "fuzzy", this is due to the h264 compression of my screen capture (nvidia shadow play). The last frame is from a uncompressed screenshot, and looks sharp and nice!

 

Ripping from Pinmame directly is slightly easier than having to load the table with vpx, HOWEVER, pinmame refuses to display the graphic in the correct aspect ratio, the window starts 320x240 and I have to eyeball it trying to resize the window to the correct ratio. 

 

 

Anyone have any suggestions for "ripping" DMD graphics/animation in their full 128x32 glory? Ideally capturing the frames from the rom playback directly. 

 

Thanks for the help!!

 

Cheers!

 

-Dan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[gtxjoe]

Pin2dmd project added the ability to dump DMD images using vpinmame to a file as the table is played. You can probably use that out output for your project