New Theme!

The new theme has been decided and the artwork is nearly done. That's right. DONE!

It turned out supergreat and it actually took less than a week to finish the artwork for the entire cabinet and playfield. A lot of high quality material was available so things just kept rolling.

The theme?

It's really the perfect "replacement" for the original theme - the art deco is there, the decadence and all the major game elements could almost directly be translated into a Bioshock feature. I have a little more work to do on the playfield parts before sending it off to printing.

I'm psyched about the current design and can't wait to get the printed decals in my hand!

In case you're wondering -
The old theme was based on the early Fallout games! Also a setting very dear to me, but it was really hard  to find high resolution images to use and the color palette was mostly brown-isch. With Bioshock, I'm allowed to use blue, red, green, pink, purple etc without it getting weird. It all fits together really nicely. You'll see for yourselves soon enough!

(I won't publish any pictures of the playfield yet, but it will come soon! )

...and re-assembled. Sort of.

Here's a few pictures for reference.
The head is not finished yet and is currently drying, so it's mounted upside down in the pictures...

Paint It Black

While I'm waiting for the new theme to settle in my mind, I've begun painting the cabinet and head. Does quite a difference on the appearance compared to bare wood.

1) Bare-wood cabinet

2) Putting the head together. A small door allows for easy access to the
display and speakers. A fan is also in place to draw out hot air. 

3) The assembled cabinet head. A fluorescent lamp is bolted in place
to keep the translite illuminated.

4) The painted cabinet and head. (Not finished yet)

There's a little retouching needed here and there, but at least the major parts are painted now.

Change of heart?

Hmm... I'm not so sure about the current theme after all.

I will have to check the pro's and con's of the various themes I've had in mind to see which comes up as winner this time.

Image to DMD conversion

I've been working on converting regular image files to DMD images (well, my interpretation of them anyway) and just tested it out:

A) Converted RGB GIF to 16 color DMD. 

B) The original image for comparison.
(the format is RGB despite the black&white appearance)

Pretty neat, huh?

Basically I wrote a python program that loads images (animated GIF's preferably, but almost any image format works), converts them to monochrome and spits out a converted 16 color image in DMD format. Each frame of the animated image just adds another 4096 Bytes to the DMD file, meaning an animation results in a single DMD file.

I will probably have to do a little fine tuning to get the actual color conversion more precise. Right now it's simply dividing the 255 colors by 16. It could be better represented, I suppose.

In the example above, there's a lot of bleeding going on. That lies in the original file and has nothing to do with the conversion etc. The image was created very sloppily with a anti-aliased scaling of the original images. Nearest-neighbour scaling is preferred when working with so few pixels.

(There can hardly be anyone out there who can't guess the theme now, right?)