Spiderman would be better left to someone who wants to rip the exact same clips and use them in hd on a color display. Who does that no idea but thats what would look the best.

That would be awesome if somebody came up with a mod that makes it easy for us to insert the exact movie clips from a blu-ray into an LCD display similar to ColorDMD (in place of the DMD). I suspect the screen ratio may be a problem if limited to the DMD size.

I think any DMD with movie clips should be done in 2 parts. One person could color all the DMD animations and get that part released, while sometime in the future someone could color the movie clips. It would be less strain for 2 people to get the titles done instead of 1 person going insane and taking a really long time.

I dunno. Reading a blog by an otherwise sane pinhead growing insane because of a color coding project could be rivoting. I'd watch.

As soon as you use the word "RIP" the IP bell goes off.

Would there be anything wrong with it if every person involved owned the Blu-ray? It seems like fair use in that case to me.

You couldn't rip video segments and include it in the stern game.

You could rewrite the game from scratch with an HD framework and a p-roc/p3roc or another boardset with their toolkit.

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

Under fair use laws what is the difference? I think under the "Transformative Factor" both are providing a level of editing to the original work, but you are not adding new expression or meaning (or adding value). You are just replaying the clips from the movie. Maybe if you put text or scores over the video that would fall under "new aesthetics"?

Why rip the video at all, opening yourself up to interpretation fair use? Include a DVD player and play video directly from the disk, overlaying scores, etc. on the fly.

Ouch, I thought the ColorDMD was in the $200 ballpark, not $400.

What could I sell my Shadow DMD for to offset the cost of a ColorDMD? Makes me almost wish I wasn't able to fix the missing line in the DMD so I could justify buying a ColorDMD outright.

maybe $100? With colorDMD, many of us now have multiple DMDs sitting around 'in case"

Maybe if I start a Patreon fund............

If they were only 100 cheaper I would own a ton by now. Shadow will be my first. Would love to have them in acdc met, and lotr, but man thats a whole nother machine i could own!

If there was a way to take advantage of the LCD display to just play the same video clips in the game in their original HD (or even SD) resolution/colors along with the accompanying pinball specific overlay graphics, would that infringe on IP? After all, the game content would be unchanged only the display resolution/color would change.

I am not talking about IP. I'm saying technically its not possible to add HD or SD video clips in color to a stern SAM rom. The resolution is fixed at low res 128x32.

If you want to retain the SD or HD resolution of video you need to recreate the game in a different framework.

You would not be adding the movie clips to the Stern ROM. You would have an additional piece of hardware that read the output of the Stern ROM and sent the equivalent movie clip to the display.

Thanks, got it. Seems to me there are two issues then, one is hardware and the other might be IP infringement.

If IP infringement is not an issue, there are many creative people on this forum who might be able to come up with a hardware solution.

Sorry this has nothing to do with the ColorDMD plans and I apologize for steering the conversation off topic, but it would be interesting to continue discussion in a new topic.

To get back on topic. Come on ColorDMD lets see XMEN released! I would love to see those cool animations in color.

I don't think Randy's ColorDMD technology is that much different from what would be required to do the movie clip insertion. The problem is that he probably would be worried about intellectual property concerns, and there would be quite a bit of additional design time needed which he also may not want to invest. I don't doubt Randy is capable of doing such a project.

Its different. ColorDMD looks at portions of the screen for patterns of dots it knows and then applies blocks of color over the top of it (simplified explanation of course). It is not recognizing individual assets with the ability to replace them. So the ColorDMD system wouldn't be able to recognize specific text (score, other random bits) and re-create it over the top of video frames, for example.

I am not saying that it is not different. I am saying it does a sort of analytical recognition and then applies something. The general concept could be used to do video replacement with the appropriate hardware design and software. For video replacement the DMD clip would only need to be identified and substituted with movie clips, rather than the excruciating pixel by pixel replacement.

I'm in agreement here. Just cut out the low Rez movie clips and tack in exact same colored clips. Colordmd is a computer after all.

Does anyone know all the games that made intensive use of video clips? It would be interesting to see the untapped potential for ColorDMD.

Pretty much all of them from Spider-Man onward...then it went back to custom dots around ACDC (mostly custom w/ a few video clips) & X-Men (100% custom).

If I owned Spider-Man I'd be stoked to have a colorDMD that just did this:

- Colored all 'normal' dots as usual
- For all scenes with movie clips:
* colored all the text so that it was easy to read
* set a colored shading for each scene, just like Stern dots are all shades of red, but pick good colors to match each scene

So for instance, the Stern logo, scores, etc would be in full color. The a scene with the Lizard could maybe be in shades of green.

No nightmare coloring jobs, but it would be enough to give it colors and flavor so it would match up with other colorized games.

And I guess if people wanted to enhance some of the movie clips over time it could get better.

I would be willing to tackle that, if those were the terms

Yeah that would make that game a snap to color I bet

I suggested a while ago that it would be great if they just coded the scenes to a single color that matches the villain's theme in the game: Yellow for Sandman, Green for Goblin (both), Red for DocOck and Blue for Venom. Scenes for Rescue MJ, Amazing SM, Daily Bugle, etc. could be all be Red or Blue or a mixture as those are the primary SM colors. I don't know enough about the process to know how hard this would be but it would still be a pretty good improvement on the Sigma mode.

Incorrect. Look at his patent information. He's basically checksumming frames and if matched applying colors to the individual dots.
He has no SRAM (as I recall); so he wouldn't be able to magically "transform" a static frame into moving video.
There really isn't a clean way to do this technically; with the exception of redesigning the entire DMD controller.

$646 shipped to a post office for me to pick up.

Zitt, stop pooping on the party and come up with a solution man!

You're one of the bigger nerds here, I'm just good for looks and popularity. It's a curse.

I said he would need hardware and software changes. I am not trying to oversimplify things. It would take significant creative design, hardware, and software. I already stated that in post #671

Swapping in high def video is really a non starter. It could be done with a PROC/FAST style system, but it would be completely redoing the rules from scratch. And then you run into the big IP problems. One is distributing the video. The other is all the sounds etc from the game. Stern will shut that down ASAP.

Assuming you could avoid that, and somehow run a middle system at run time it would still require a separate computer module of some form to output the video, and you'd still be hosed when it came to the video. There's no fair use exception for this, you can't do it.

Stern shut me down just for using ACDC's font. I could have fought it, I didn't use their actual logo, and you can't copyright a font. But it was a grey area, and I wasn't interested in getting into a legal case. You think they wouldn't lean on someone doing that with Iron Man and Spider-Man? Especially with this VE Spider-Man coming with new animations that will compete against it? (That's basically confirmed at this point.)

So you have a big project, lots of work, lots of expense, and it's guaranteed to generate a cease and desist. It's just a non starter. You could tackle it as a personal project, but it's basically impossible to be commercially viable.

There's honestly no point in even discussing it, it will never happen. ColorDMD is your only option, and it's just about what people are willing to color.

Geez.

Ok. Gawd. I'll just settle for single color hi def colordmd. And Aliens LCD. When that's ready.

Transformers would be another crazy one to try and color the video scenes. Way too much video in that one, otherwise I'd be coloring it

Here is a Xmen sigma video.
Sorry about the poor quality.

That huge sea of smeary constant shifting dots is exactly why IM and SM would benefit more than handcrafted animations. Like Popeye, It'll likely take a true fan of those games to get it done.

Ok, so now I get why the handful of times I played Spiderman, that the DMD animations looked like ass and I couldn't understand what I was looking at.

I would agree with that. The kick is finding somebody crazy enough to tackle it. I know on the few ACDC frames I had to do, it was taking about an hour per frame on the video sequences to get it to look right. A game that has a ton of video sequences would take an eternity. I am not opposed to trying Tron at some point on my own time since I own it, but it is down my list quite a bit.

Tron has less video clips, they're isolated against black with high contrast, and a lot of them are pretty monochromatic. Seems like it would be at least not as insane.

There isn't too many video clips in IM really and they're all pretty short. That would be the one to do...

Ut oh . . . (not a "true fan", just an "enthusiast of the different" like Python might work)

Hmmm, I did not even own Popeye when I decided to do it. I bought the game just "to" do it.

Sorry folks, but when it comes to coloring a game Devotion gets you 95% of the way. But it takes a bit of insanity to get the last 4%. And still its not complete. You lie awake at night worrying someone will see the last uncolored pixel.

The horror, the horror.

This is true, there are just a handful of video clips in either IM or SM, and they are only a few seconds in length.

I'll gladly do it. Anybody want to loan me a machine?

For the love of GOD yes!!!!

Sounds like a challenge to me.

I know everyone who has been voicing support for a DE pin has been pushing fot JP, but, even if it is a pipe dream, I'd LOVE to see Tommy with ColorDMD support. It screams for bright colors.

I agree 100%, and I have expressed the same approach for Tron. I'm not sure how well it fits with the design flow, but I would love to see incremental releases for "problem" games.

Maybe someday. I have one now so you never know.

I though Tron was already down to be done (by whom - i'm not sure)?

But perhaps i misread this as "Tron is happening".

If i didn't have a very young baby, a fulltime job, a stake in our family business and absolutely no skills in programming; then maybe i'd be up for giving something a go! Congo might be an easier 1st choice for a novice though I quite enjoy playing these games too, when time allows of course.