I'm building a bartop arcade machine based on Recalbox and I wanted to have a dynamic marquee which can change depending on which game system is selected and which game is being played.

As my Pi4 has dual HDMI outputs I wanted to drive the marquee from the second HDMI output.

dynquee (say "dinky") is the program I wrote to do that. It's a bit over-engineered for what it does, but it seems to be stable now so I've decided to release it in case others find it useful (it has been asked for a few times before; see e.g. 1 2 3 4).

For more info see the project page on github.

All comments / questions / criticism welcome.

A few more recent photos of dynquee running on my bartop now that I've nearly finished building it.

@faided The included games are located in /recalbox/share_init/roms

They don't usually disappear when you add your own ROMs, unless you change the option: Main Menu -> UI Settings -> Game Filters -> Hide Preinstalled Games.

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

1. Where did you buy that LCD?

I ordered it from Caison LCD in China - the model is DV190FBM; was not cheap though

If you can put up with a TN panel there are some less expensive options around e.g. here or here.

2. Does it work on Recalbox PC?

I've only tested it on Raspberry Pi so far, but I think it can be made to work. If you've already got Recalbox running on PC, I'd be interested in the output of the command ls -al /dev/fb*

Does it work in Pi4 if I am using RGBDUAL ?

Again, not tested but I don't see why not. Let's give it a try.

@jorgemagana I think it's because it's trying to save the settings to a read-only partition.

The workaround I use is to create the file roms/ports/Out Run/.core.cfg
with my preferred settings e.g.

cannonball_video_hires = "ON"
cannonball_freeplay = "ON"
cannonball_fix_bugs = "ON"
cannonball_fix_timer = "ON"
cannonball_jap = "OFF"

See the Libretro Cannonball wiki page for a full list of available options.

I have managed to get it working on Recalbox PC

Because EmulationStation runs under X with Openbox it needs a few tweaks. Please see the first draft of the instructions here.

Version 0.9.6 released featuring much improved support for Recalbox on PC

Version 0.9.7 released: adds support for showing images/videos when the Recalbox screensaver is active.

@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.

@RadarG In the folder named megadrive (which was the name of the console in Europe)

@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.

@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 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.

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 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.

@LordIcon said in Recalbox auf NVME SSD Installieren:

Wenn ich dann aber runterfahre und die SD raus nehme sagt er im eeprom beim hochfahren er kann die NVME nicht finden. Kann mir hier jemand helfen? Oder geht Recalbox nicht "standalone" von einer NVME ohne das die SD Drinne ist?

Ich habe es nicht getestet, aber für Pi 5 soll das möglich sein. Statt das Image auf SD zu schreiben, schreib es direkt auf die NVME.

Dazu musst du möglicherweise die SSD an einen PC anschließen und den Imager benutzen, oder das Pi in PiOS booten und das Recalbox-Image auf die SSD mit dd schreiben.

Siehe auch diesen Beitrag

@daniel6984 said in [SOFT] dynquee: dynamic marquee for Recalbox:

Avec la ligne terminate_viewer = yes, il y a bien l'image des marquees que sur le crt pendant le chargement du jeux, mais rien sur l'écran lcd

Hmm

Et aussi rien sur l'écran lcd avec

viewer = /usr/bin/mpv
viewer_opts = --screen=1 --loop {file}

?

@caganimo123 said in Changing refresh rate manually?:

Can I decouple refresh rate and resolutions and pick them individually? Like 3440x1440 @60Hz

I wonder if you can set a custom mode in /boot/config.txt, something like:

hdmi_cvt=3440 1440 60 6
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=87

If that doesn't work, then I would probably look at booting the Pi from a Raspberry Pi OS card and inspecting the monitor's EDID. From there you may be able to get the raw timings for a custom mode using hdmi_timings=

See

• Which values are valid for my monitor?
• hdmi_timings

@daniel6984 said in [SOFT] dynquee: dynamic marquee for Recalbox:

aucun mouvement d'image n'apparait quand ont va de droite a gauche, l'image startup reste fixe

J'ai oublié qu'il faut aussi modifier (dynquee.ini ligne 174):

terminate_viewer = yes

mais plus d'image sur le CRT

Tu vois rien sur le CRT, ni les images de marquee ni les jeux?