As you can see, I had to a lot of manual cleanup. The way I did the preparation is take the original photo, then change the hue to make one of the colors stand out more. Then extract that color (eg. red channel).
I used Inkscape to copy the Object Properties / Titles from the Top Gun svg that you uploaded to the svg that I created, but I guess there's no svg2lay for Windows, huh?
I updated the Top Gun file and I'll populate the titles for the other svgs I create.
Is there any way to tell if I skip a segment? I used the XML editor in Inkscape to find some "orphan" paths that potrace created, but it would be very slow to check every path for titles.
pff, separating the colors on Zaxxon took me much longer than expected. But no turning back now, almost done.
Rik can you make some photos of Bandai Zaxxon in action? And I'm assuming the mirror is placed right in the center of the VFD, between the big explosion and the lives-indicators, right?
So, it looks like the mirror is positioned to cut the big explosion exactly in half. So this means the larger 'half' of the VFD (with the score and your lives) is closest to the player. When looking at the playfield, you are looking at the actual VFD where your lives are, everything else is either reflected in the mirror, or you are seeing through the mirror.
The side of the VFD with red lightning-looking lines is what you see through the mirror, thus it all looks a little dimmer than the stuff reflected in the mirror. That makes it easier to tell it's on the lower level of the 3D space. You can see this dimming effect well on the players ship as he goes up and down.
Here's a video:
That might be kind of loud, and the sound of the joystick moving is a little more prominent than I thought it would be... But you get the idea.
Thanks! I looked at the include files and it was more than I wanted to get into right now.
Your exe seems to run OK, but gives me the error "Error: object 1.6.2 is not visible" on my Top Gun svg. That's segment 250, the upper left top cloud, which is in the file and looks visible to me. It is the first segment in the svg file. And TMNT also dies on its first segment with the same error.
One thing I noticed is that when I load my svgs into Inkscape, it shows a border, but yours do not. So maybe there's a structural difference in the files? I created the files with potrace, then edited them in Inkscape.
No, actually the Bandai one is the easy one to play (Coleco's is a bitch... )
I haven't loaded up MAME yet, but does the display look exactly like the .svg files? It's supposed to have a hard perspective to it do to the angle you look at the VFD on the real game. Is that implemented? If it can't be programmed easily, it might be better to just create the graphics that way.
Another thing that might help would be to change the colors of under.svg slightly (make them a little darker or paler), since it's the slight color difference of being seen though a one-way mirror that make it more obvious that those things are on the lower plane. The ships all look a little different, but for me it was their 'paleness' that really gave it away...
But you get the idea.