Family Guy needs some color

Must have on all my games! Great dude too.

Bravo on an awesome product -- design, packaging, planning, hardware, software, documentation, communication, everything! Just installed on my TSPP to go along with my LOTR. ColorDMD is a must-do mod!

There was some loose talk about it in the forums at one point, the issue was that the BSM speaker panels have the red permanently screened onto them, making colorization tricky. But there are replacement ones where the red is removable now, that's when it came up.

Was probably going to be done by a volunteer who flaked or bailed out. Which is why they don't like to announce titles ahead of time.

Who knows, someone might pick it back up at some point. If I ever did an alt translite for BSD I'd be sure to do a speaker panel with a removable red film to support a ColorDMD.

Alt trans for BSD sounds way cool.

Still hoping for WCS and IM.

I ordered a Sigma display for MetPro. I always, always, always choose USPS Priority Mail, as it truly does get here in 2 days flat from ColorDMD every time. Friday was "the day", and it didn't come.

Went and checked my order, I picked UPS Ground on accident, and it's like 50 cents less (values were so close, I didn't pay close enough attention). The wait is on til Tuesday .......!!!!

First world problems .____.

What about Cleveland? (couldn't resist)

I hate when that happens.

I know IM has been discussed on/off in other threads, but are there any official plans for it? I'm *SO* freaking happy to hear about Tron... my Paypal account stands at the ready on that becoming available!

BSD would be sweet!

Pinball Magic would be the ultimate!!

BSD would be the ultimate ultimate!

Agreed, and if those pins are DE Star Wars, South Park and Jurassic Park, I'm going to need a second job...

tron
Tron
TRON

Please...yes!!!...

I know it's weird but I just can't buy a Color DMD until they are available for the all games I own

To have a color LOTR, color TSPP & a plain ass FGY DMD would irk the piss out of my OCD & I'd likley play FGY less because of it which is just unacceptable because I love FGY

The 2 games on my wish list are already colorized IIRC or at least in the pipe which makes it even worse lol

Cmon, FGY it up!

Please listen to this man!!!! freakin love my FGY, but since I've put the color DMD in TSPP (right next to it) feel like I've wronged Stewie...think the machine is pissed too...been beating the hell out of me lately....

I read somewhere on Pinside that X-men had too many animations and not enough memory to add color. Does anybody know if this is true, or is it that the the Colordmd team has not gotten around to it and it will probably be added in the future.

The XM memory limitation was specific to the SmartDMD product and because the ColorDMD product takes an approach where it doesn't add code to the game ROM it isn't subject to the limitation. That said, there's been no announcement one way or another whether XM might be in the works.

Here's the difference between ColorDMD and SmartDMD:

- SmartDMD edits the existing ROM, so you're limited to whatever free space is there. If the ROM is pretty packed, and your changes end up ballooning the code footprint, then yeah, you can run into problems. That's what happened to X-Men, half way through coloring it the ROM ran out of space to hold more changes. I believe ACDC and Metallica had more headroom, likely because they used a bigger ROM to hold all the music. I don't know if there's a solution to that or not coming, but it's just how it works now.

- ColorDMD intercepts the DMD information and applies color to it in real time. So the existing ROM isn't touched, and free space on it isn't a factor.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I was wondering how it could run out of space?

Maybe there's a way to make the SmartDMD replacement information the same size as what it's replacing, and that will fix that, but it appears for now that as you change things the size grows.

couple of variables (but don't know the inside of these systems).

only a few different shades of the monochrome system are used for the original DMD. not sure how many... 8? 16? 32? 64, 256?

each color could have been stored as raw color data or as a reference to a CLUT (color look up table). not sure which was implemented.

the colorized DMD device has some range for each color. not sure how many. ie: for red, 8, 16, 32, 64, 256, ...etc...?

if the original system has a smaller range for just 1 monochrome color than the range used for many colors, then it takes more space. This is most likely the case, as to store Red, Green & Blue values each of a likely same range takes more space.

If the original system used 32 bits to store a range value for the monochrome system, then the new system could use 10 bits of space to store a wide range of red, another 10 for green, another 10 for blue, with 2 bits left over for other interesting stuff. But, unless the original developers were sloppy (and i'm doubting that for an embedded system), they probably didn't use 32 bits per 1 monochrome color. They could have been lazy and used 8 bits, even if they didn't use them all, which could open up a little wiggle room for packing bits in a new design.

blablabla...

I think since we're talking SAM it's 16 shades, and the system is just mapping each shade to a palette. So you should only have to store the palette once, and then the existing shading would be the same data, no?

You do need to store different palettes for different scenes though. Still, it seems like an awfully small amount of data. Obviously not, since people are running out of memory mid-color, but I don't know how packed those ROMs are. Not a lot of head room evidently.

ok. so if 16, then original system could be doing 1 of these things:
a.) 4 bits to store the monochromatic color value for 1 dot in each frame.
...or...
b.) maintained a CLUT of 16 values within the monochromatic range & using 3 bits to store a reference to 1 of the CLUT locations (containing a unique value). This would allow each frame to take less space in memory, but causes the GPU to do more work referencing CLUT locations to render a color. Keeping the CLUT and an advanced series of frames in VRAM would accelerate rendering along with ROM based GPU processing versus CPU based rendering from RAM.

with option (b.), there'd be little room for R G & B color data, especially if you want at least 16 color samples per R, per G & per B.

...hence ColorDMD's choice of putting itself between the data output and the human display.

note... this is "if" they want 100% color output accuracy. they could actually be storing frame data with some lossy compression & take even less space. But, not sure they do that.

fun stuff

hehehe...

long life as a graphix games programmer

Less talking

More colorizing FGY

Smarty pants

tron too

Tron is a fav game of mine and I put a color dmd in it on blue. I'm not really sure how a color treatment would be that great. The movie itself is quite intentionally color deficient. Blues and oranges and that's about it. I hope I'm proven wrong.

BBH definitely
best game EVER

yeah, i picked up a colorDMD at TxPinFest last month just for Tron.
hoping the colorization happens soon

it's kinda like waiting for your favorite black & white movie from the 40's or 50's to get colorized back in the 80's.

True, but when it's colorized, you'll see both blues and oranges at the same time, like in the movie.

That would be cool

How about Shrek?

WCS may or may not be in the works.

Same could be said for other titles in this thread!

Truuuuuue....

ColorDMD is such a tease.....

Can't believe I picked UPS... Shoulda gone usps!

When Family Guy is colored, just put the FGY code on your Shrek! Boom, done.

Kinda funny, but does not work that way.

Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life

It does, though.

You can put FGY code on Shrek (or vice versa). So - if FGY was colored, and you put the FGY rom on a Shrek - you could play color FGY code on Shrek.

Well, it's good that all the games I own/want have a ColorDMD.

IJTPA has a ColorDMD, right?

One of the best looking ones of all them, yes.

What is the resale of a pin with colorDMD? What % of the upgrade cost Is recovered when selling? If low, do people remove and sell without it?

i hope this is not offending somebody to post this in a colordmd threat but i have a friend working on a colorizedsmartdmd for shrek. No deadline set, no succes garantueed. Just a volunteer making a good attempt.

Wanna see shrek in green/white? See

. I think this can be done with colordmd in sigma to but leave this to the colordmd experts to confirm.