mGalaxy forum

Hey,

some title images (i chose marquee png's as shown in the video) are being stretched beyond their borders in the arcade themes. i am using 1600x1200 as a resolution. is there an option to resize (or not to resize)?

Hi gitarre80,

The image is stretched to fit the whole marquee frame. That way no black bars will be displayed whatever marquee size (and orientation) is used.
One has to take a decision on how to proceed with possible different marquee ratio...and we chose this solution...but it's a question of taste.
Here is a little diagram (the marquee frame is symbolized by the orange stroked rectangle) to help you understand the 'problem' and the 'solution' (stretching image rather than fitting it to the frame).



We are of course open to any solution/workaround on the subject!


Just one remark concerning the marquee size! If you're concerned about speed while browsing your game list, a resolution of 1600x1200 is overkill!
On our last 'Arcade v3' theme, the marquee space is about 1/3 of the theme width. That means that if you were to run mGalaxy on a 1920x1080 monitor, the marquee size "should" be 1920:3 = 640px wide!
You surely have your reasons, or you don't want (or know how) to resize those marquees but I just wanted to let you know!

Ok, I fired up Photoshop and did some testing....

FYI, this is just for the Large v2 theme.

I fired up mGalaxy and hit "Print Screen" on a marquee that I was sure was full bleed to the edges. I pasted that in Photoshop and cropped it to get the actual size of the mGalaxy marquee box.

The perfect marquee size is  - 739 wide x 207 high (in pixels)

I only run my favorites in my cabinet, which is 230 or so games. I'm very familiar w/ Photoshop and have no problem resizing all of my marquees to force it into these dimensions. I will just have black bars.

And honestly, black bars are ok. I don't think it's realistic to expect mGalaxy to support every type of marquee type. To do that, he would need to have a different cabinet for all possible types and if the type changed, he's have to swap out the entire default cabinet image. That's just nuts for something like this IMO.

However, what I think mGalaxy should have is a toggle. Let us toggle "stretching" to be on or off. That way we can resize all marquees to 739 wide and leave them at whatever height they wind up at. If we could turn stretching off, then the width would always be correct and the marquee would be centered w/ black bars.

Personally though...I have a creative idea I'm going to try to see if I can take advantage of this behavior for the better. I'll post examples here if it works out.

Update #2 - I figured out that if you drop a hi-res marquee down to 739 wide, mGalaxy 6 will leave it alone if the height is over 207 pixels. If the resulting height is above 207, the marquee displays fine.

Nope. Totally wrong w/ the above comment. (FYI, the following is what I found from my testing. Not a clue what the code is actually doing. I believe I'm write in theory, but my assumption as to what mGalaxy is doing to get there may be different)

mGalaxy wants the marquee in that 739x207 box....and it seems like it'll adjust the height to get there. The logic behind it seems to be, "resize to fit, but stop if the resizing will give you black bars". So unless you've put the full artwork of the marquee into a 739x207 box, you're going to lose some of it to stretching. (for rectangular ones anyway, didn't even start on oddball shapes)

For example...

I grabbed a marquee at 1440x374. Since mGalaxy just wants to fit the box, it drops the height to 207 so it fits. That leaves the width over 739, and I got a "stretched" look.

Conversely, I used a marquee that was too small. 500x110. mGalaxy raised the height to 207, but it keeps the aspect ratio, so the width went up too. Too far actually, so a tiny marquee looked stretched.

So in both scenarios you're left w/ a width that's over 739....and a stretched looking marquee. Some worse than others, but always stretched.

The only marquee that's not for me is Crystal Castles but that's because it has a big black border. So when the marquee was fit into the box, the "too wide" image looks fine because only black is being chopped off the sides.

So if you want the full marquee artwork, you have 2 options. 1) Wait for some future toggle that'll give you all the art, but black bars. or 2) Customize everything yourself

Update #3 - Customizing marquees. I'm going to be customizing mine, as I have an idea for marquees that wind up giving me horizontal black bars. Below is my creative idea to deal with it. I just put the black bar on the bottom only, then use that space as you see in the image.

For marquees that give me vertical bars....nothing I tried creatively looked good, so I'm just going to roll with centering the marquee and having left/right letterboxing.