Customizing your Hyperspin - Making everything pretty

[Roadrunner]

Having just gone through a rebuild of my cab, I started thinking about how many different little things I do to make it the way I want to be. Hyperspin's great in the sense that you can customize pretty much anything in it. You can skin it however you want, build your own themes etc... But there are a bunch of little things that I think make a huge amount of difference so I figured I'd post this as I know I'd like to have had a guide like this as a newbie when I started so many years ago. So I figured I'd post some things that have guided me in my experience here. Some of this will be on cabs but it's mostly geared towards customizing HS. 

1. Make it your own. If you're going to build a cab you might as well build it with stuff you like. Got a favourite game, movie or band? Make it the theme for your cab. You can customize the cab itself or add elements in HS to spruce it up. You can stay generic and that's fine but it's always better (in my opinion anyway) to customize it towards you. 

2. Standardize the wheel sound. HS is great in that it comes with (by default) over 300 sound files in the Hyperspin/Media/Main Menu/Sound/Wheelsounds folder. That's a huge amount to choose from and it makes sense that it would be there by default as I'm sure Bill wants the users to know they're there. However, it's chaotic having all of those sounds go off everytime you spin the wheel. I can't tell you have many times I've gone on Youtube to see a cool build and they haven't standardized the sound... it just ruins it as far as I'm concerned. In my opinion, it makes a whole lot of sense to pick one sound to standardize your wheel sound on. To do this, create a copy of the Wheelsounds folder and rename it Wheelsounds (original) so you have a backup. Now with the Wheelsounds menu, pick one sound that you like for the wheel and go with that and delete everything else from that file. I personally use the GS102 sound as my global it works really well. There are some others that work well too though. Some good ones: GS40 (Pacman sound), GS61, GS113... play around with it and pick one you like.  

As always with Hyperspin though, the fun doesn't stop there. Every emu has a corresponding media/sound folder. You can do the same with each one. For my Atari 2600 I use the Frogger sound. For the Dreamcast wheel I use a custom sound I downloaded from the internet. As long as it's mp3 you should be good to go.If you don't want to hunt for them on the internet you can always go back to that original soundfile of 300+ mp3s and choose them from there.  And you can also customize start and exit sounds. For example when I go into my colecovision wheel the opening sound from Donkey Kong starts, when I exit the end of game sound plays... you can do this for any system. On Dreamcast that wheel starts off with Soul Caliber's 'welcome back to the stage of history' and ends with 'but the soul sill burns!' When I have friends over (who used to play that game on the console) it's always a great laugh. It's super customized and super cool. 

3. Sometimes less is more. If you are a completest and you want every emu and game under the sun, you can skip this part. Me personally, I don't need to have the 1000s of games from every system ever made on my wheels. I've got about half a dozen emus and a jukebox and that's it. To me it makes a whole lot of sense to pick the games that I know I and/or my friends and family would want to play. It's one thing to have all of the ROMs but you don't have to download all the themes or display them on your build. You can hide these games in a few different ways. In HyperHQ you can tell the system to only display games with themes and then only download the themes of the games you want. Alternatively you could make a custom database (Rocketlauncher will do this for you) but make sure you keep a copy of the original DB if you do this. 

4. Have fun with videos. For my jukebox app, I've got 80s video hits that I play from my favourite bands. Sometimes I switch it up. This is so easy to do... once again go into hyperspin/media/mainmenu/video and change the video for the system you want to change. *Use the same wording (and capitalization) that's in Hyperspin so it matches. For some of the consoles, I downloaded some old commercials for Atari and Colecovision. They're all on Youtube, people love it when they see them and they bring back tons of memories. Get creative! 

5. Learn to make your own themes. It's a lot easier than you think it is. Building themes in Hypertheme (included in the HS download) is dead simple. A theme you build yourself is going to be something you're going to love a lot more than even some of the best themes available for download. To do it, make the background image 1024x768. You can add a logo on top of that and add basic animation (already pre-built) to it, throw in a video and you're good to go. You can draw your own overlay if you wish or simply use HT to do it. It's not hard... really, just go try and mess around with it. When you're done, save it with the same name as it would appear in the database. You can even customize the exit screen if you want to. You can check my sig for some examples of Exit screens I've built. 

6. Download the wheel art. It just looks a lot better. 'Nuff said. Go to the media folder and the appropriate emu file. Click on images and then load the pics into the wheel folder. Voila, you just made your HS build look 10x better.

7. Go with a two player cab. If you're set on having four that's fine go ahead. If you're on the fence... two players is better. It's a lot of work for four and in my experience it's rare that you'll get four people wanting to play at the same time. Maybe you have more friends than I do... but I'd still say that two players is just fine. 

*Troubleshooting tip: The one thing you will learn when you start customizing and running into problems is that HS is very picky about files. Your media files must match the emu filenames on the DB or you'll have problems. Most of the time it will be a capitalization issue because HS is case sensitive. So if you run into issues, the first thing you should check is the filename and uppercase/lowercase. There's a good chance that you'll have solved your problem this way. 

 

That's it for now. If I've made any errors here just point them out and I'll update this post. And if I can think of anything else, I'll add it. Hopefully this helps some of the newbies out there. 

RR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[fire10]

Great post Roady

[Mykillvee]

Awesome tips!

[Rowr14]

-1 for standardized sounds.

It adds a nice noisy arcade feel.

Also specific sound packs per console which really put in a dose of nostalgia when you hear iconic sound bytes from games as you scroll.

[Mykillvee]

Theme making certainly can be easy if you want to put out stuff that’s less than decent.  I’ve learned that it’s much harder to make an incredible looking theme, though.  Time and practice makes perfect.  Advanced Photoshop skills are also an absolute must.

[X-Fil]

-1 for standardized sounds.

It adds a nice noisy arcade feel.

Also specific sound packs per console which really put in a dose of nostalgia when you hear iconic sound bytes from games as you scroll.

Having a personalized hs setup is very nice.... Everyone of us has personal stories about old games or systems: that's the reason why I prefer and love retro gaming.

Sound is a good way... Anyone knows where iconic sounds can be downoladed?

What do you mean with wheelsounds menu? Where I can define start and exit sound for a particular system?

 

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[gigapig]

Wish you had written this 9 years ago when I was a struggling newbie.

[Roadrunner]

21 hours ago, Mykillvee said:

Theme making certainly can be easy if you want to put out stuff that’s less than decent.  I’ve learned that it’s much harder to make an incredible looking theme, though.  Time and practice makes perfect.  Advanced Photoshop skills are also an absolute must.

If you want to make an advanced theme then sure... it takes practice. 

When I started out I had zero skills. But I learned how to make themes myself almost right away. I simply downloaded 1024x768 images and then logos and made my own themes. I did this mostly for Virtual Pinball (a system I don't use anymore) and the themes were more than adequate. For example I had a great image of Chrisopher Reeve for Superman and just added in the video. It's not the most sophisticated theme but it looked great and I was happy to say that I'd done it myself. 

As I said in my post, a theme you make yourself is one you'll love even more than the best themes that are made on here. I certainly feel that way. It's more personalized and you've "made it your own". 

20 hours ago, X-Fil said:

Having a personalized hs setup is very nice.... Everyone of us has personal stories about old games or systems: that's the reason why I prefer and love retro gaming.

Sound is a good way... Anyone knows where iconic sounds can be downoladed?

What do you mean with wheelsounds menu? Where I can define start and exit sound for a particular system?

1. Hyperspin comes with over 300 sounds to begin with. That should more than meet your needs. 

2. If you have Mame, you downloaded samples for some of those games. Zaxxon for example has several sounds that you can use. They need to be converted from WAV to mp3 though. I find the Zaxxon laser is a great sound effect as a wheel click. 

3. It will take any mp3 sound. You can go on youtube and download any gameplay video. Use a sound editor to splice the sound you want and use that. I've done this a lot. (You do need an editor for this of course.) It's not hard to do but you've got to have the tools to do it. I believe Adobe has this capability. I actually bought some programs from NCH that I find extremely useful. I use it to convert and edit sounds as well as editing videos. For example I like to use commercials for games as my videos, esp on the main menu vids. 

4. Here's how it works. Go to hyperspin/media/atari 2600 (or whatever)/sounds. Open the sounds folder. If it's not already there, add the following folders. System Start. System Exit. Wheel Sounds. I have the first letters capitalized and it works so just do it that way. Now that you've got the folders you can enter in whatever mp3 file you want. It will pull from that file to do the startup, wheel sound and exit sound. You can now personalize it anyway you want to. 

17 hours ago, gigapig said:

Wish you had written this 9 years ago when I was a struggling newbie.

It's such a task just to get HS/emulators running (emus are usually more than half the battle) that we spend so much time talking about that and forget to really talk about what makes HS so "hyped" to begin with. It was months after I had set up my system that I even realized I could mess with the sound files for example. I remember after I changed it how much better it sounded. 

You should actually use some standardized sounds on the HS builds you've set up. I can talk to you offline about this if you wish. I've got some sounds that are perfect. 

[Roadrunner]

One other note I should make... 

 

While the wheel sounds should be standardized (it's chaotic if it's not) the startup/exit sounds can be randomized. You can have mulitple files in there and you'll get different sounds every time you start/exit the system. That's not too bad if you can't decide which sound you like best. So in the start/exit files you can have multiple sounds if you wish. If you only want one, then just have the one mp3 file in that folder. 

[Rowr14]

On 01/07/2018 at 3:35 AM, X-Fil said:

Having a personalized hs setup is very nice.... Everyone of us has personal stories about old games or systems: that's the reason why I prefer and love retro gaming.

Sound is a good way... Anyone knows where iconic sounds can be downoladed?

What do you mean with wheelsounds menu? Where I can define start and exit sound for a particular system?

 

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Here's a couple I put together. There are more out there for other systems, though I had to scour a bit to find them. Take a look on the FTP, otherwise let me know and I'll see what I can find.

 

Also as an example of where to put system start and exit sound directories, here is the directory for NES system start "HyperSpin\Media\Nintendo Entertainment System\Sound\System Start"

[Roadrunner]

I just loaded up some sound packs for MAME, ColecoVision, Ninentendo and Atari 2600. They're all in the sound section. The MAME soundpack is what I use as my default for my system. It's nice and clean and if you want a unified sound pack for everything this is a pretty good option. 

[Rowr14]

33 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

I just loaded up some sound packs for MAME, ColecoVision, Ninentendo and Atari 2600. They're all in the sound section. The MAME soundpack is what I use as my default for my system. It's nice and clean and if you want a unified sound pack for everything this is a pretty good option. 

There are some more somewhere on the ftp for Super Nintendo, Nintendo and Genesis also. Maybe I'll look at uploading them when I get around to uploading the couple of packs I put together, so they are more easily available.

The only thing I didn't work out was that the sounds that come with Hyperspin (which are great) seem to come through much louder than other sound packs. I assume it's something to do with the files themselves, but I know nothing about that stuff. It's not the end of the world it's just slightly annoying because the sound packs come across a bit understated by comparison.

If anyone knows anything about this or about taking sound files and batch increasing/decreasing volume or something please let me know.

[Roadrunner]

4 minutes ago, Rowr14 said:

There are some more somewhere on the ftp for Super Nintendo, Nintendo and Genesis also. Maybe I'll look at uploading them when I get around to uploading the couple of packs I put together, so they are more easily available.

The only thing I didn't work out was that the sounds that come with Hyperspin (which are great) seem to come through much louder than other sound packs. I assume it's something to do with the files themselves, but I know nothing about that stuff. It's not the end of the world it's just slightly annoying because the sound packs come across a bit understated by comparison.

If anyone knows anything about this or about taking sound files and batch increasing/decreasing volume or something please let me know.

 

I use Wavepad sound editor as an amplifier

[Rowr14]

On 03/07/2018 at 12:19 AM, Roadrunner said:

I use Wavepad sound editor as an amplifier

This seems perfect, thanks for the tip!

[MydknyteStyrm]

Great post. I love Hyperspin but have a real problem with the glitch that kills the joystick control if HS is idle for more than 10 minutes. I use HSS to control HS since it doesn’t have native joystick support. How did you get around it?


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[Roadrunner]

On 7/5/2018 at 12:21 AM, MydknyteStyrm said:

Great post. I love Hyperspin but have a real problem with the glitch that kills the joystick control if HS is idle for more than 10 minutes. I use HSS to control HS since it doesn’t have native joystick support. How did you get around it?


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Wrong thread for this question. We're the stupid artists not the engineers. Make a thread on it and I'm sure somebody can help. 

[Roadrunner]

A couple of other things I was thinking about in terms of prettying things up.

 

1. Exit screens. Yup, you can customize this too. I've got some if you want to use them but once again you can just download an image you like and use that. 

 

2. Bezels (can be done in a variety of ways... I think Rocketlauncher can do some of this) and they're pretty cool. I've got some that were made for MAME in my FTP and they're great. I've also got some custom ones as per the link in my sig. All of those are on the FTP as well. Tons of places to get these though and they look great. 

Here's one of the MAME ones on my FTP. I got it from Cooleywire years ago (site is no longer around) and they're awesome. 

[Roadrunner]

Quick question for all the big brains out there... 

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to add links to my sig anymore. I've got a bunch already and wanted to add this one in but I can't remember how to do this? Where is it? 

[ninja2bceen]

It’s tucked in the settings in your profile. Can’t remember lol though it’s tucked though


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