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Need some clever images/sayings to go on a big LED sign


Strike911
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pillshere.jpg

So I acquired this rather large LED display. It took me a few months to fix it, but I got it up and running like new. It's basically a computer built in the late 1980s with a whopping 2MB of RAM and it essentially runs DOS from a Floppy Disk to work. While it's 100% old, it's also 100% full of awesome. I love this thing, its retro but still interesting enough to be in a techie's house.

The reason I'm coming to you clever OCR forum goers is because I would like suggestions of sayings, quotations or images that would be clever/interesting/funny/witty to see on a hanging LED sign. It's a slide show basically. It's not being displayed commercially so it'll just hanging in my personal space, so worrying about being offensive really isn't the biggest deal.

If there are any movies, tv shows, or games that had interesting signage I want to know about it!

I've got a few already. That recreation of the "Pills Here" sign from the Airport from Left4Dead is an example of one of them I've got finished. I also have "the cake is not a lie" in there too, in addition to an image of the Virtual Boy WarioLand. The WarioLand image looks both silly and awesome all at the same time since its almost the same colors as the Virtual Boy's display. :) I think I also have an image of Chuck Norris and another of Mr. T.

The actual resolution of each image is only 128 pixels by 48 pixels, so its really limited, and it only allows for 3 colors (black, 50% red, & 100% red), so yeah. Any images suggested have to be modified by me in Photoshop before I can convert them to the weird file format the sign uses to display images. That said, pixel art works perfectly. Converting images to smaller resolutions look great on the display despite the low resolution and the fact that it's only in two shades of red or black.

It helps that images be high contrast though, where the subject matter is clearly visible from the background. Like the picture of Chuck Norris I tossed on to it clearly shows Chuck Norris and a giant American flag behind him, so it works for things like that.

Your suggestions and comments will make me super happy. I'll throw anything on there that is interesting, funny, or just plain cool; sayings, images, whatever. :D

Thanks.

EDIT: OH YEAH, I forgot to mention. Outside of your typical slide transitions, it can do very rudimentary animation too by playing slides in order with a no delay (or at least a shorter delay than if you wanted to display something). It's fast enough to be pretty smooth too. It's a lot of work though, but something really cool would definitely be worth it.

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Haha, true and fair enough. It's terrible that I forgot to add "Please, no penises." in the original message. haha.

It would be kind of funny to see people's reactions to something like that though. Anyway, yeah, no penises (or any other various number of explicit body parts)

I'd prefer not to have anything on the sign that is TOO offensive. A little bit of salty humor I can deal with, but nothing too sweepingly overboard. :)

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If you want to go high-brow, a scrolling marquee with a Shakespeare play might bring a touch of class to the room. Or music lyrics. I'd even suggest a high score of a game you're really proud of (like best score for SMB or Frogger or something).

Now, how elaborate is what's going to be on the sign? Will you be able to animate or are you looking for pure wordage?

I also take it hooking it up with some sort of stock/news/weather ticker is out of the question? I'd imagine if you had a constant feed via the "floppy drive"... but that'd be a lot of work.

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"What in the bloody blue fist fuck of death are you looking at?"

"Leave the sand in your vagina at the door, please."

"I 1CCed your mom last night because she was too easy."

"Do you smell that?"

---

"The next time you have a thought, just let it go."

"Your opinions of late have been ridiculous."

"Jesus loves you, but I think you're a cunt."

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Says you.

boxingred2.gif

EDIT: Little Mac needs to be touched up by hand if you're actually going to use this. With these colors at this resolution he looks like ... something else ...

I only have so much skill with photoshop man, but I'm glad you were able to make it work :)!!

Oh yeah

3ab78826e029ab820c26fc3.gif

Edit* I didn't do this one but it's a nice find nonetheless

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Oh My Gosh! I love you guys! <3

This is awesome. Some of these lines are great and the actual animated files are especially super awesome in a hundred ways. I'll have to take some vids of what it looks like all together. :)

This is awesome guys, seriously. :D I love the catpuppet and the prince of persia thing. Omg!!! Too awesome for words!

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For anyone who's interested, the way I'm making the animations in Gimp is as follows:

1) Load image and scale it correctly (128x48 ).

2) Make sure Image > Mode is set to RGB.

3) Set foreground color to black and background color to pure red (use HTML notation: ff0000). Reverse the foreground and background if you want to invert the colors.

4) Select Colors > Map > Gradient Map, which turns everything red.

(You could also use Colors > Colorize to accomplish this.)

5) Repeat the Gradient Map for all frames.

6) Select Image > Mode > Indexed.

7) Select "use custom palette" and click the palette button.

8 ) In the drop-down that appears, click "open the palette selection dialog" in the lower right.

9) In the window that appears, click "new palette." The palette editor opens.

10) Click "new color from foreground color." The color appears.

11) Right click the color, select "edit color," and make sure HTML notation is 000000. Hit okay.

12) Add another color, and set it to 880000.

13) Add a third color and set it to ff0000.

14) In the palette editor, click save.

15) Close the palette editor and drag your new palette from the palette window to the custom palette button in the Indexed Color Conversion window.

16) In the Indexed Color Conversion Window, set the dithering to whatever looks best (you'll have to try all of them).

17) Hit Convert.

Boom. You have a three-color image that reflects the color intensity of the original image.

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Isn't that image of the girl dancing from the game DJ MAX?

Yeah, these are very cool. I'll try my hand at converting some of these animated gifs to individual frames for the display. Haha!! A Giant Flashing "NO" is DEFINITELY next on the list. Lmao.

As far as animations go, anything that has more than 10 or 15 frames just takes too long. I tried putting in the Prince of Persia animation but I could only include the last part where he blocks and attack, kills the guy and runs away. I think that alone was 78 frames, all of which have to be manually inserted and converted to the right filetype... I used a macro but still, it took a while. The Cat puppet was easy since it was only 4 frames and I could put it in a for loop for like 8 times, so it looks cool.

Ideally, any animations should be light on the number of frames and not require too much fast frame switching. The sign seems to handle slow moving animations better... keep in mind this thing was built in late 80s, so its not as advanced an animated GIF (teehee). The Prince of Persia animation looks sweet though when its running, though it took forever to calibrate it right. For those 78 frames it required about 300KB, which is a third of the space on the floppy. lol. :) STILL, if you find a cool animation that you don't think would be very difficult to implement please post them as they look really impressive on the display when they're going.

I was seriously considering some of those crazy black and white pixel animations that those asian people made... but I can't for the life of me remember where they were on this here intertronz.

Again, ideally any animations should be light on the number of frames (around 20-ish) and though the animation speed can be fast, ideally, slower animations work and look the best. Faster animations tend to have a slight flicker since I guess the LEDs are having to fire up constantly.

The pics of the guys running and the fist of the northstar gifs will work perfectly and look cool, and I'll try to convert them later tonight, but the one with woman singing, while it would look very cool is just too detailed. It's so smooth that the frames for the animation would probably fill up most of the space on the floppy. I'm a little worried about putting large animations into the machine that require a lot of system resources since the RAM is so limited. So far so good though.

I've added almost all of the stuff you guys have suggested in addition to lot of game title logos and animations that I'm a fan of *Cough* Phantasy Star Online, Snatcher, Metal Gear, and Zelda *cough*.

Animations look cool on the thing, but pictures are good too... so if you have any suggestions for static images *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*!

The floppy disk is only half full, so yeah. Good times.

Awesome stuff so far everyone! :)

EDIT:

Well, after looking at those GIFs, the fist of the north star pic and guys running are both around 10-15 frames which isn't bad at all. The girl singing is only about 55 frames, which really isn't too bad either, especially after doing that Prince of Persia gif. hehe. I might consider tossing all three of those in.

Where do you guys find cool animated gifs btw?

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