Pixel Art Creation Guide

When creating art for Pixelcade, there are a few nuances when working with LEDs with the main caveat being low contrast (colors with a small difference between them) look bad on the LEDs. It’s highly recommended to use black backgrounds as opposed to a solid color background. When using a black background (LEDs off), your artwork will be much more visible on the LEDs.

Pixelcade has a 9-bit color palette for a total of 512 colors, the same color palette as the Sega Genesis, Sega Nomad, and TurboGrafx-16 video game consoles.  If you use colors outside of Pixelcade’s color palette, that’s ok too and Pixelcade’s software will find the closest color in the palette.

Most users use Adobe Photoshop to create pixel art. Here is a tutorial on how to covert a higher res image to a 128×32 PNG image for Pixelcade.

Download Photoshop and Illustrator Color Palettes (Optional)

Export your animation in animated .GIF format. Pixelcade has 128×32 or 4,096 total LEDs for 2 panels or 64×32 or 2,048 LEDs for 1 panel, each LED = 1 pixel. If your animation is a higher resolution, that’s ok too, Pixelcade will automatically re-size it. Just keep in mind a high resolution image isn’t going to look good. Use the same frame rate for each frame in your GIF, Pixelcade will not play different frames at different speeds and will rather use the frame rate of the second frame in your GIF for all frames. If creating a still image, then export in .PNG format. 

You can add specific LED marquees for your favorite games by creating a 128×32 PNG or GIF. Simply name the PNG or GIF to match the rom name and place in < your pixelcade install \ emulator >.

Note that every game will not have corresponding artwork although the major arcade / mame games should . That said, some romsets using different naming conventions so if a particular game marquee is missing, refer to the Pixelcade Listener window (For Windows users) or open the file < Your Pixelcade folder > / pixelweb.log. In the example below, the arcade front end sent the rom name “4dwarrio” so Pixelcade will look in the mame sub-folder for 4dwarrio.png or 4dwarrio.gif. If this file does not exist, then instead a generic mame marquee will be displayed. So you can overwrite 4dwarrio.png with your own creation or add it if it was missing.

arcade handler received: /arcade/stream/mame/4dwarrio?event=FEScroll

STREAM MODE

Console Before Mapping: mame

Console Mapped: mame

Game Name Only: 4dwarrio

# of Times to Loop: null

Looking for PNG: /userdata/system/pixelcade/mame\4dwarrio.png

Looking for GIF: /userdata/system/pixelcade/mame\4dwarrio.gif

PNG image found: file:/userdata/system/pixelcade/mame/4dwarrio.png

Note also that some games have multiple rom versions. For example, the game 1941 has the following:

• 1941.zip
• 1941j.zip
• 1941r1.zip
• 1941u.zip

So you would create one .PNG design and make 4 copies of it with the names:

• 1941.png
• 1941j.png
• 1941r1.png
• 1941u.png

And then place them in D:\Pixelcade\mame for example where D:\Pixelcade is the directory of your Pixelcade installation. If on Raspberry Pi, then place them in /home/pi/pixelcade/mame.

Be sure and use the .PNG or .GIF extension and not the extension of the rom.

If you add both a GIF and a PNG (ex. pacman.gif and pacman.png), then Pixelcade will play the GIF animation for one loop and then will stay on the PNG marquee still image.

If the game selected in your front end does not have a specific PNG or GIF, then a generic PNG for the selected emulator will be displayed or scrolling text. 

You can also edit the existing artwork. Let’s say for example you want to make your own marquee for the game Firefox which has an existing marquee, specifically firefox.png and firefoxa.png. You would edit one of them in your favorite image editor (Photoshop, MS Paint, GIMP, etc.) and then over-write both of the existing files with your new creation in 128×32 resolution.

Pixelcade can also display up to 3 different GIFs per game selecting one at random on each game select. To use this feature, name your files like this:

• citycon.png
• citycon_01.gif
• citycon_02.gif
• citycon_03.gif

In this example, the rom name passed to Pixelcade is “citycon”. When this game is selected from the arcade front end, Pixelcade will at random select one of the three GIFs and then stay on citycon.png after the selected GIF has completed one loop.

And if you can, please also share your creations with the community on the Pixelcade Art Exchange.