MAMEWorld Forums - MAME Artwork: Official - Re: Robotron: 2084 Marquee Restoration

> Man this one Is warped. I'm currently altering it to look like it's accurately lit
> and almost everything is crooked. The stripes on the bottom droop to the right hand
> side and quite a lot on the far right. The bottom of the large text tilts down to the
> right while the tops of the letters are all different heights and some tilt to the
> left. The top stripe seems to be the only thing that appears level. Nope, it's not
> level either.

Welcome to the complexities and many inaccuracies of the Classic Arcade Grafix scanned artwork repository. You can't always tell immediately what is accurate, and what isn't, based on first glance. This is one of those that is hard to tell.

Based on the actual raw physical scan in TIF form that exists, Ars did an excellent job cleaning up the artwork, especially when you compare it to the PSD "restored" files in the same repository, which are trash (inaccurate colors, letters are fatter than they should be, etc.).

When you take a second look at the actual scan, though, you start to see the weird things more.

The actual scan of this was done vertically instead of horizontally. The pic below is of that scan, rotated using the bottom of the first horizontal blue line as reference. I then added in a bunch of additional grid lines to address some of the things you mentioned that are incorrect.

All of the bottom lines do droop as you mentioned, but compare that to the top blue line... why is it straight when the rest are drooping. And if you look at the ON on this side of the marquee, both sides of the red part of the "O", and the left side of the red part of the "N" are aligned correctly, so we've narrowed out that issues in this scan are due to rotation of the image.

Also correct that the first five letters are tilting up towards the left, but you can also see that the last three are not (well, the last "O" is slightly). On top of that, the "N" is shifted downward compared to the second "R." Back to the earlier letters... if the OT are wrong because they are tilting upward, why are the 2 and 4 in 2084, directly below that, aligned horizontally at the top? You would figure if one was wrong, so would the other.

And back to the top stripe... yeah... it's straight on the bottom, but it bends down in the middle. After measuring, the height of the top line on the left hand side is 112px, while on the right side, it is only 92px, so even that line, all by itself, is "off."

To add... almost all of the text in the red line on the left of the marquee, is both top and bottom aligned, with the exception of a few letters.

So the thing we have to figure out now is:
-- Was the original marquee this scan came from warped somehow, and that's why there are all these different variations.
-- Is this just a really badly done bootleg or repro of the original marquee?
-- Is this an actual original marquee, and it just so happens that in the original artwork, not everything is symmetrical?

The only way to be 100% sure, would be to find a real, original marquee, which is not as easy as it sounds, because there have been multiple reproduction runs of this in the past almost 40 years.

In the meantime, if your goal is to have a completely symmetrical version, to save yourself trouble of redoing the whole thing, it might be easier for you to grab the vectored Euro version of the marquee here:

http://vectorlib.free.fr/Robotron/

And from there, add/fix the missing pieces for the US version.

[ATTACHED IMAGE - CLICK FOR FULL SIZE]

RELAX and just have fun. Remember, it's all about the games.