Marquee

I wanted the marquee to be a montage of the marquees for all my favorite games.  The problem was where to get all of the marquees?  The answer rested with the KLOV.  Here I found all of the marquees I could ever want.  I downloaded and ran them all through the "mogrify" program from ImageMagick to brighten and sharpen them up a bit.  I then ran the "montage" program from ImageMagick to stitch them all together.  The MAME image was downloaded from somewhere I don't remember and I created a drop shadow and placed it over the montage.  Viola, my marquee was done. 

I looked into a few techniques for printing marquees but decided to use my trusty Epson Photo 700 with banner photo paper to do the dirty work.  The finished result hot off of the printer is shown below.  The printed area is 27" long by 7 1/4" wide.

I trimmed the marquee down to size with scissors and inserted it in between two pieces of Lexan I cut to size on my table saw.  I left the white backing on the inside piece of Lexan in hopes of better diffusing the light from the fluorescent light.  I read about this trick on someone's arcade cabinet web site.

The whole thing is held in place with a Happ marquee retainer on the top and bottom.  The marquee retainer is screwed to the inside panels with some black trim screws.