Finally planning to set up Hyperspin

[Fahad]

Hi everybody,

I've been collecting roms for a while with the intention of setting up a fancy hyperspin fe based retro gaming station.

I do however have a few requirements I couldn't find obvious (best) answers to:

1) While I appreciate most hyperspin users being English speakers they would only want the official database to include games playable without knowledge of Japanese, but I'd like to include all Japanese versions of games, even if they exist in English.

From some research here, it seems the best way to do this would be to set up separate Japanese systems. Can someone confirm that, and any tips on achieving that?

2) Would I still be able to maintain my collections (and update them when updates are available) even if I set up separate systems etc? It's a bit hard to wrap my head around it with so many new components.

3) If I'm setting up multiple front end machines, is there a convenient way to restrict one to certain age restrictions? E.g. Having a family-friendly machine and a personal all-inclusive machine? If possible, what tools/methods would I need to achieve that?

Thanks a lot for the support, and hope someone can help!

[Fahad]

Thanks a lot for the response! I've been trying to answer since yesterday but the mobile version is finicky with quotes so I had to wait until I was on a PC.

 

1 - Setting up a separate Japanese wheel for each system is one way to go about it, you could also add in any Japanese games to the official database if you wanted everything together. If you wanted to create a J only wheel you could do so relatively easily by putting all your J roms in a folder and generating an xml from that folder. If you wanted to add the J titles to the official one you could take that generated J only xml and merge it with the official one. In either instance you would need to manually find and fill in the metadata for any games not in the official xml. One hurdle you'll come across no matter what is a lack of artwork for J titles that aren't in the official xmls.

 

I think the separate wheel solution will work the best for me, since I'd like the option of separating the two modes of Japanese vs non-Japanese. As for lack of artwork, I guess I won't have a choice but to either accept things as they are or roll up my sleeves and get working on some myself. Judging from some posts here, it seems there is work already done so it would be nice if some sort of collaboration could be made to complete full sets (I think I've seen that done for some systems here as well).

 

 

2- I'm not sure what you mean by this. Could you explain further or give an example?

 

Apologies for the wording, I meant auditing full No-Intro sets and the like, as I'm hoping to maintain them as is somewhere at the least, and am already considering whether I would have trouble updating sets if they were integrated into Hyperspin or otherwise (I'm not yet sure whether I'd need to make separate folders with only the Hyperspin usable roms or whether I can specify which ones to use from within a larger collection).

 

3- There's not an easy one click solution to age restrict everything, but what you could do is use Don's HyperSpin tools to filter the official xmls by rating to only include games rated for Everyone or other criteria. You could also create custom xmls using only the games you want to include.

 

I made my answers pretty general because I didn't want to get super technical and scare/confuse you, so feel free to ask if you want me to explain something more in depth or if you have other questions. Basically, what you want to do is doable but it's going to require some amount of manual work on your part to accomplish.

 

At the least I can be assured that it is technically feasible. I'm willing to get down and dirty with setting up (only time gets in the way!) and have no problem with details.

 

This brings me to one more question to make sure all things would click:

 

How compatible would Hyperspin be with running from a NAS? Or otherwise at the least by referring to all/most of its media files from a NAS? How about roms residing on the network? I know this is a very general question with potential pitfalls, but at the least it would be comforting to know that usage cases exist with people using Hyperspin working along with network storage based systems. I found out today, while looking around, that Launchbox for example has compatibility issues with running from a NAS (disk-caching I/O causing excessive loads) and has been acknowledged as an issue that is yet to be addressed on their side, which makes me more convinced to focus on Hyperspin.