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Arcade artwork What is on this page: Anatomy of arcade art Artwork on an arcade cabinet Raster versus Vector Direct comparison of a raster and vector image To see samples of the artwork I created for arcades, take a look at my portfolio. Building your own arcade is one thing, making it look like a replica of a 'real' arcade cabinet is another. Creating a totally original arcade machine that actually looks like it's a factory build machine is a different ball-park.   Anatomy of arcade art When discussing the art on various parts of an arcade cabinet, terms like 'marquee' and 'bezel' are used. See below to get a quick rundown on these terms: Marquee. The marquee is the tile of the cabinet, it is also the focal point of the cabinet when looked at the front. Often the marquee is lighted to catch more attention in a dark arcaderoom. Sideart. The side of most arcade is large and smooth. It suits greatly to display the theme of the cabinet with pretty or stylised artwork. Bezel. The area around the screen is called a bezel. The bezel is basically a picture frame for the monitor. Artistically the bezel can be used to display instructions (how to play the game or how to score points) or it can be used to continue the theme of the cabinet. Controlpanel. The players' desktop. It's the area where the buttons, joysticks, trackballs and spinner controls are located. This give lots of posibilities to decorate - ranging from instructions with each control, grouping frames or distinct player 1 vs. player 2 graphics. It can also be used to continue the graphic trend from the sideart. See also Wikipedia's entry for more details on the anatomy of an arcade cabinet.   Artwork on an arcade cabinet When restoring a cabinet you often have damaged artwork. This artwork can be replaced. There are various stores on the Internet that sell original artwork or reproductions. You can also visit the Arcade Art Library to see if someone created high quality reproduction versions of the artwork for you to print. If you are not restoring but building from scratch (or even converting an old cabinet) to your own dream arcade, you might need to create your own artwork.   High Quality Artwork: raster or vector? Computer graphics can be defined in two ways: Raster or Vector. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Pictures consist of a collection of dots - called pixels (short for picture element). The more pixels the more detail you can have in an image. The amount of pixels available to a picture is determined by a few things. Your screen for examle consists of a grid of pixels (typically 800 to 1280 pixels wide and 600 to 1024 pixeld high). Printers also vary in available pixels for an image. Most printers have 300 pixels available per inch on paper. The pixels can assume a colour and like a mosaic these dots of colours produce an image. Raster images are images that remember what dots are coloured. In short, if you create an image 200 pixels wide and 200 pixels high the raster image "remembers" the colours of 40000 pixels. Vector images are images that calculate what pixels have to be coloured. To draw a line the vector image "remembers" the start and endpoints of the line and in a 200 x 200 pixel image it calculates what pixels should be coloured. The advantage of raster images is that they can be photo realistic with complex shapes. Vector images tend to be less complex since these are harder to create. The disadvantage of raster images is that they have fixed resolutions in which they look good. The 200x200 pixel image only has colour information stored for 40000 pixels. When outputted on a printer, the image would only be 0.66" wide! When enlarged to a bigger size the ammount of pixels required to describe the image would increase enormously (1 square foot image on a printer would require 12960000 pixels!) Since (in the 200x200 pixel example) there is only information for 40000 pixels the image would look distorted. Vector images have no real size. Lines are calculated so to enlarge or reduce the image in size, all calculations are simply mulitplied or devided by a factor. Since no detail is lost in vector graphics, vectors are mainly used in the printing industry.   See this example, the part in the red square is enlarged 5 times: enlaged raster enlarged vector Since arcade art is fairly large (most probably enlarged more than the 5 times example above) and is printed in high quality, the most suitable image type to print the graphics is the vector type. (C) 2005 Frank Buiting