$700 is too much, but the price on these panels may come down, or already be lower in a bulk purchase. I just really want one in my CV (to address your "isn't broken" claim).

That is really awesome. It sure as hell ain't gonna be cheaper, though.

Really? No IJ? No TZ, either? Instead, the hobby gets a color matrix on an overrated turkey of a pin? Who handles marketing and advertising for this company - Moe Howard? Dopes!

Protip: The world does not revolve around your selfish desires. Please leave.

Back on topic, looking pretty sweet! Especially the colorized logo.

I am psyched and will continue buying for every title available that I own. Huge fan of my wh20 and afm colordmd and can't wait to get cftbl

The 3D glasses thing is also interesting. Surprised pixels cannot be added. I thought it was simply replacing one frame with another but I guess it's really done on a pixel by pixel basis?

There is a common misconception that people wore red/blue 3D glasses for 3D films shown in the 50's. All of the feature films from 1952-1955 shown theatrically in 3D (including creature from the black lagoon and its sequel the revenge of the creature) used a polarized process. The lenses of the polarized glasses were the same grayish color as seen in current 3D glasses.

The red/blue anaglyph glasses were used for printed 3D media like comic books.

So to be technically accurate to the era, the lenses in the DMD animation should both be a shade of gray. However the red/blue would look cooler on the color DMD.

See top 3D myths here:
http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/home/top-10-3-d-myths

It would be awesome if I knew how theses were sold. I see dealer on their site but find nothing at the dealers site. I am not just speaking of this game, as I am sure this is not out yet.

I've read somewhere about how they preserve intensity of each dot to preserve the artistic integrity. And I think that's a great idea!

But now, it's probably turned into a technical limitation, and although I think doing red and blue glasses would be superior, it's probably not easy to do. Otherwise they would have done it, right?

I can't wait to order tomorrow!

They probably just assign base colors and let the Sigma system match the appropriate shading. For example, they assign bright green to all of the gill man's pixels and the Sigma shades the edges and details appropriately.

We build them in small production runs several times a year, often timed with new product releases. Runs tend to sell out in 1-2 months, though this current run was split into two halves and the first half sold quickly.

On each run, we ship to distributors and then release them on our store site (http://shop.colordmd.com). Once they're posted to our site the 'ADD TO CART' links will be visible and accessible.

Displays should be on our site by 8:30AM PDT on September 26.

There is a common misconception that people wore red/blue 3D glasses for 3D films shown in the 50's. All of the feature films from 1952-1955 shown theatrically in 3D (including Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequel the revenge of the creature) used a polarized process. The lenses of the polarized glasses were the same grayish color as seen in current 3D glasses.
The red/blue anaglyph glasses were used for printed 3D media like comic books.
So to be technically accurate to the era, the lenses in the DMD animation should both be a shade of gray. However the red/blue would look cooler on the color DMD.

agreed, colorizing the dmd graphics to match the glasses of the people on the plastics would have made more sense and added consistency

cftbl_3d_plastics.jpg

edit:
Dmod:
with the cftbl software not being made available until oct 5th, how are the display kits now sold? are they still by game title even though they don't ship with the software rom image pre-loaded or just a single pool of available units?

I think that you would need red-blue for a 50's drive-in screen, as those would not have the proper coating to show a polarized 3D picture. According to Wikipedia many theaters did show CFTBL in inferior red-blue 3D.

I know this will sound insane, but I want Color DMD for WCS more than any other game.

I don't think they are game specific. They are sigma so they can be used in any related Bally/Williams game in a selected color.

Yes, and what we really need is an LCD replacement for unobtainable crazy-expensive large Sega displays.

Would you give up your Monster Bash for it?

it's called DMD extender

is ColorDMD still threatening to sue everyone that talks about making their own DMD colorizing stuff? (like the DMD extender guy?)

thats the only reason I haven't purchased a color dmd for my wh20

Really? Care to explain that one?

the DMD extender guy was looking at making a framework so people could use a DMD extender and colorize their own frames... the ColorDMD guys basically said do that and we'll sue you... pretty sure it was a pinside thread

The displays all ship preloaded with the SIGMA (single-color) ROM. You can download and install any of the ROMs from our website using a USB flash drive. A video linked to our home page shows how this works.

We announced that CFTBL is compatible with the same hardware platform and once the ROM is released, you'll be able to download and install it like any of the other supported ROMs.

Randy

thanks randy

while I've got your ear, I've got a couple of questions for you. if sigma is installed on every colorDMD that is sold today, why does the colorDMD store site look like it's set up so that you have to pick a pinball title to purchase and display the color display kit for that particular game?

does the game rom code for that particular title come pre-loaded or is it an attempt to track what people are potentially purchasing the display for or just that the store site hasn't been revamped since the switch to shipping them all with sigma installed? (yes, I see that there is an option to purchase the sigma display, but given what you stated above, I'm not understanding why each title is listed separately as well)

Good question. I have been wondering the same thing.

A little of the former, but now mostly the latter. It's a poor tracking tool at this point. The displays we sell through distributors are all "Sigmas" so we don't really know what games they end up in. A lot of them also end up in games that were not originally ordered.

I've been wanting to clean the store site to make this less confusing. Just haven't had the time.

one more (technical) question

also, with regard to what colorDMD has released so far, some of the animations look simply incredible, while others (where there is a lot of unique pieces of information on the display at once) look like the method that you are using will only translate a very limited number of colors on the screen at the same time.

technically, with the 128 x 32 dots that you have to work with, if you're able to display a different color for each dot, you should be able to display 4,096 colors at once.

however, looking at the promo videos for titles like monster bash and cftbl, it appears that the artists were limited to using as little as 6 or 8 colors at the same time. I'm not knocking what you and the company have been able to accomplish, but rather trying to get a better understanding of if there are actually limitations to the way that the original dmd information is being processed and re-colored.

and one more for the night and then I'll quit bothering you

are there any plans to release colorization tools to the general public so that owner of one of more colorDMD products can take a stab at modifying the colors a bit more to their own personal liking and then colorDMD could potentially offer multiple rom images for a given title?

The way the hardware is set up today, a palette is limited to 12 colors per animation frame. The dot intensities modulate the 12 colors for a total combination of 36 different colors/shades (37 if you include black) on the screen at a time. We use multiple palettes so a game can have many more than 12 distinct colors, but only 12 at a time.

When I started with AFM this seemed like a lot since I was only trying to match the colors on the playfield. For a game like MB with multiple characters, it forced Chris to be creative and he was a little frustrated with me.

There are some technical reasons for this that are related more to memory storage and data throughput. It could probably be increased to 15 or 16 colors/frame without much trouble. Beyond that becomes problematic for the processor resources we have.

Did I ever say it did? I'm simply expressing my opinion in a public forum that "Creech" is a dog and doesn't warrant a color DMD. Your inane commentary and endlessly bland posts mean nothing to me and you can stuff your "Protip" back into your pocket-protector. Oh boy, 3D glasses, fellas...so exciting!

No plans to do a widespread release or allow ROM customization, but we've started working with people interested in helping us color. There's a surprising amount of problem solving required to obtain good results with the tools, and this has required a lot of training and support from us.

I just hopped on to shop.colordmd.com, saw that the website was updated to include CFTBL, but that everything was out of stock! This was at 8:32, so I was super bummed... Then I realized that they're going to be made available at 8:30 Pacific time! Whew!

less than 2 hours to go before I lighten my wallet

In a word, no.

But if the software came out...I would for sure swap it back and forth while I waited for my new one to show up.

Got mine ordered. I just hope they fix the glasses. It's Red & Blue not Red & Black that's bugging me!

To me it sounds like you're just whining because none of these improve YOUR games. Quite mature.
Back on topic (again)... evidently colorizing not only takes time but requires training? It must be a more complex process than we all imagined.

Bingo. Let me try to explain it this way...

Coloring an animation frame is easy. But the catch is, it's not possible to color all the animation frames presented during a game. When you consider things like:

1) layered scores with varying score positions for 1/2/3/4 player games
2) animations that may be altered (text or graphics) based on the state of the game
3) screen wipes/scrolls/dissolves
4) layered animations where one or more elements move in pseudo-random directions or change based on what's happening in the game

then coloring every possible frame that could appear in a game would be an insurmountable task. The magic inside the ColorDMD invention is the algorithms that make it possible to color a game without having to color every single frame.

Painting dots is less than half the work required to color a game. Most of the work is figuring out how to exploit the features of the platform to handle and color the difficult animation sequences, and this is where the training and support is required.

Randy

sounds like an artists' dream.

Randy was explaining all this to me at a party a bit ago, and I walked away with a lot more respect for what they're doing. Remember, they're not touching the ROM, they're not working with sprites or anything, they basically are decoding the raw DMD information and transforming it on the fly. There's some smart engineering work going on here utterly outside the more artistic choices of the colorizing itself.

I'm a programmer, and I could read stuff about how ColorDMD works all day. Thanks for the explanation and all the great work. It's an amazing product, and I can't wait to get my CFTBL. It'll be my first!

I should totally be a colorist for dmds. Everything I've done in my software career has trained me for it. Lol

I hope LOTR is coming soon!

The ColorDMD arrived for my Creech today. Even as a newbie, it was incredibly easy to install -- about 15-20 minutes (very easy instructions). I can't wait for the actual game-specific code to get released in a few days so it's full color, but even set at "green" it looks great.

Anyone install a color dmd with the tail light mod speaker panel yet?