Retro & Glitch
Dot-matrix ticker
Amber LED dot-matrix marquee scrolling GAME OVER / INSERT COIN / HIGH SCORE across a dim dot grid. Custom 5x7 bitmap font with pulsing brightness per column.
canvasmedium complexitymoderate motion
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Worth keeping?
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When to use it
Retro/arcade-themed hero sections, game-over screens, loading screens, or any dark-background display needing an authentic LED ticker feel.
When not to
Light backgrounds (hardcoded dark brown). Contexts needing readable arbitrary text — only uppercase A-Z glyphs are defined in the font map.
Working with an AI agent
Every component ships agent-ready metadata. An example instruction for this one:
Change the marquee message to ' ★ LEVEL UP ★ PLAYER ONE ★ ', set the lit-dot color to green (change rgb values to 20,255,80), and slow the scroll speed from 1.3 to 0.7.
Safe to edit
- scroll speed (off += 1.3)
- marquee message (msg string)
- lit dot color (rgb pulse formula)
- dot size clamp (Math.min/34)
- background color (#160500 in CSS and bx.fillStyle)
Keep intact
- precomputed bg canvas (critical for perf — avoids redrawing dim grid each frame)
- visibilitychange pause
- prefers-reduced-motion guard (off += reduce?0:1.3)
- DPR-unaware but integer-pixel canvas sizing
Known limitations
- Font map covers only ~17 characters — lowercase letters and punctuation beyond ★ are silently replaced with spaces
- No DPR scaling — may appear soft on high-density displays
- Background color is hardcoded in both CSS and JS; must change in two places
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