[SOFT] dynquee: dynamic marquee for Recalbox

[toniosj]

@poppadum Awesome!!!

Where did you buy your LCD marquee? What dimensions?

[poppadum]

@toniosj It's from CaisonLCD in China - model number DV190FBM.

It's a 19.1" panel with resolution 1920x360
Dimensions are 116mm(L) x 87.3mm(W) x 19mm(H)

There are now quite a few different panels available on Amazon too.

[Colywobbles]

Can anyone help? I have installed via the easy option above and it seems everything is there however I am using a Pi4 with RBGpi on one setup and a Pi5 with RGBDual both running on Scart CRT TVs perfectly.
However no matter what I try I can not get any of my 3 marquee displays working.
The marquee picture does quickly flash up on the CRT then goes off as any game loads.
The 2nd display just reports no signal as does any display regardless if its a letterbox widescreen or full size 1080p one
It would make my year if this could be solved.
Thanks in advance Coly

[poppadum]

Hi @Colywobbles
I don't have either an RBGpi or RGBDual to test with but it's likely those are the reason it's not working as intended.

On a Pi 4/5 with 2 displays connected to the HDMI ports, both screens share a single framebuffer device. dynquee uses the fbv2 command to display an image on the framebuffer. This means marquee images are shown on both screens briefly when an emulator launches or exits. While a game emulator is running it writes directly to the first display so you see the game running on display 1 and the marquee image on display 2.

My guess is that the RGB devices are interfering somehow. To debug you could connect to your Recalbox via ssh and stop EmulationStation and dynquee by pasting in these commands:

es stop
/etc/init.d/S32dynquee stop

then test if you can get an image to display with
fbv2 /recalbox/share/dynquee/media/startup/startup.01.png

It could also be useful to run
ls -l /dev/fb*
and let me know what the result is.

[toniosj]

@poppadum Does it posible to show an image/video in the marquee while Recalbox is showing the intro video on first screen?

[poppadum]

@toniosj On Raspberry Pi, no because the splash video is using the same framebuffer as the marquee.

On PC dynquee is started from the xinitrc when X (the graphical user interface) starts and I can't think of any way that it could start earlier.

The one way it could work is if you run dynquee on a different device to recalbox (e.g. a Pi Zero 2W), but even then you couldn't be certain that dynquee would start up faster than recalbox.

[toniosj]

I've detected a problem in PC.

I've configured the recalbox monitor and marquee monitor. But sometimes, when I reboot Recalbox, the screens are swapped and I have to restart again.

I have to restart several times until everything is displayed on the corresponding screen.

Recalbox PC 9.1

[toniosj]

@toniosj

Update: The problem occurs when rebooting from ES in the Recalbox menu.

If I turn it off completely, and turn it back on, everything appears in its place.

[toniosj]

@toniosj
Update 2:

It also happens sometimes on the first start.

It starts with changed monitors on some occasions.

[toniosj]

@toniosj Fixed using two graphic cards.

[poppadum]

@toniosj said in [SOFT] dynquee: dynamic marquee for Recalbox:

@toniosj Fixed using two graphic cards.

Ah, interesting. It's the xrandr command in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc that is supposed to set the screen layout. But the device names that it sees can be quite generic e.g. HDMI-A-0 and HDMI-A-1, and with two outputs of the same type on the same video card, the kernel can be a bit random when deciding which output gets which number.

There's an idea in this stackoverflow answer about using the EDID data to work out which monitor is which and a script called monitor-switch that looks potentially useful.

[toniosj]

@poppadum Using the same graphic card and two output (HDMI and DVI), Recalbox runs with very significant fps drops.

Using integrated graphic card for marquee, and NVIDIA for Recalbox, fps at 60 always.

[persichini]

I read through the tread and i've seen one message mention Raspberry Pi 5, but nothing in the office documentation.

Is there any special requirements to getting this installed and working on a Pi5?

Also what is the minimum resolution requirements for the second screen.

[poppadum]

@persichini said in [SOFT] dynquee: dynamic marquee for Recalbox:

Is there any special requirements to getting this installed and working on a Pi5?

I don't have a Pi5 to test with but it should work exactly the same as on a Pi4, as the Pi5 has two HDMI outputs.

Also what is the minimum resolution requirements for the second screen.

No particular minimum resolution as you can resize your marquee images to suit the screen you're using. If the Pi can recognise the screen it should be fine.

For testing I used an old TV with 1366x768 resolution, so if you have a spare monitor you could test with that. Most of the marquee images on the internet seem to be approx 1280x360.