Starting from scratch.....Here goes nothing!

[M8harry]

Hi Gang,

Here goes my first attempt at Hyperspin! There are going to be lots more posts about my build so I wanted to give you all fair warning

A bit of info on me and my build. Im from Australia, NSW and I'm a full time shift worker and I' looking to build my first cabinet. As I'm pushed for time and tools I'm buying a flat pack cabinet kit that will be modified to have the features I want in it. (Dynamic Marquee, 32" widescreen monitor for gaming on, casters for ease of mobility with leveling feet, cut out for light bar for the light guns the ultimarc ones.) Currently my controls are mounted in a timber box so I can play around with setting up controls and making sure things work first so its one less thing to troubleshoot before migrating it to my future cabinet (still fine tuning the details of the cab with the manufacturer). I'm running an Ipac 2 (will be upgraded to Ipac 4 as the cabinet is a 4 player cab) with Happ Rotary sticks and an Ultimarc Rotary Encoder for P1 and P2 (Midnight Resistance is my goto game), P3 and P4 have undetermined sticks at this point (open to recommendations). I trialed a promo pre-loaded hyperspin drive but when talking to the supplier about changing control layouts it was clear from the get go they had no idea what I wanted or what I was working with and so I thought stuff it do it myself, there are thousands of Hyperspin movies on YouTube so here I am and here we go!


So after watching the AVTV youtube clips followed up by the tutorials on the  Planet Geekdom youtube channel I have lots of questions and some answers and some need for some pointers.

So first things first I have been downloading HS and RL and newer version of mame and that's when muggins here remembered the roms wont work as i have a version that is ANCIENT! so I'm looking to try and update the set using RomVault. Is that a good choice of program or should I stick with Clrmamepro? I really want to try and do this right and have an up to date system (up to date as of time and date of this post.)

Does mame support High Score support or is that a HS/RL feature? Or does my exe need to have HS support compiled in?

Joytokey! My questions are as follows.

• I plan on using the arcade sticks and buttons as the primary control method for as many systems/games as possible. For games where I would like to use my non genuine xbox controller (its a generic brand) do I set it up in joytokey as well as my Ipac in RocketLauncher?
  • Or only use Joytokey if thats the primary control method?
• Can I use my Xbox controller for some mame games? For example Smash TV requires 2 sticks per player perfect for Xbox controller so is there a way I can bind my Xbox controller controls for that game only and mame know that?
  • If so how would one go about that, would that be an RL setting?
  • Would it be the same setup process for other systems?

Would it be worthwhile being a platinum member now or wait till I get up to wanting to add custom wheels and the likes as I like the whole Auto downloading of art and stuff through Hyperspin and Emumovies?
Are custom wheels hard to make? For example I would love to make one for games that require Rotary joysticks
Are there many custom wheels available to platinum members?
Can anyone point me to a valid tutorial on how to install custom wheels?

Thats enough of me badgering you good people for now. Ill be back with LOADS more questions but now I have to get RL and HS finished installing then see what you all say about Joytokey before i touch that tab.

Thank you all

Regards

Harry!
 

[Rowr14]

Hi Harry, that's a lot of questions!

My advice to you would be to start at the basics and knock over installing and getting HS and RL up and running correctly and then moving onto setting up a few wheels. There are a lot of room for optional extras and customisation for HyperSpin and RL and my advice would be to take things on one at a time and then move to the next thing. Trying to keep a focus on good clear folder structure for the files and tools you amass in the process. I found it easy when I started to embark on 10 things at once and it definitely made things a little bit tougher later on trying to relearn and re-find things. 

You have already found the right tutorials so that's going to make your life much easier. I recommend working through Avar's basic installation and then checking out ninja2bceen's (planet geekdom) 3 parter on RocketLauncher. I'd encourage you to work through the rest of ninja2bceens tutorials after that.

Your probably going to find a sub to emumovies fairly useful in the long run for the auto sync and also access to the ftp.

I believe there are some programs for creating custom wheels (check the download section under 3rd party). You can create custom themes or edit existing ones through the hypertheme program that comes with the HyperSpin install. One thing you should be aware of is HyperSpin does not contain native support for 16:9 so can be a little more painful to edit for that format, though there are many existing themes to choose from here.

Anyway the short story at this stage is that most of what you asked is possible and there is plenty of room for customisation. The question will become the time and dedication to working out how to use the tools to implement things exactly to your tastes.

I can't help much on the joy2key stuff, I think ninja2bceen has a tutorial so check that out. He also has a tutorial for the high score stuff.

Also many questions you may have will undoubtedly have been asked in the past, google is your friend! That said everyone here is pretty friendly and more than happy to help for any roadblocks you run into

 

 

[griffin518]

Heads up! If you're using an ipac you won't need Joytokey. It makes everything so much easier.

[32assassin]

 most modern day emulators have full joystick support,  their is no need for you to use joy2key or any other mapper.

MAME lets you map individual controllers for specific games.

So yes you can have a default Arcade style control panel,  and use a specific controller to play an individual game.

(I"m not sure if this is still the case)  but when I initially set my controls

I tried to play Spy Hunter (MAME) with a keyboard ,    the fire button and (gas) peddle  where mapped to the same button.

only way I can play it is with an Xbox controller given that it has analog controls.

[M8harry]

13 hours ago, griffin518 said:

Heads up! If you're using an ipac you won't need Joytokey. It makes everything so much easier.

I just wanted joytokey so I can map the xbox controller to be the same as the ipac controls. I have a few mates who like to use the xbox controller over arcade style controls so that seemed like the logical approach.

[M8harry]

I have managed to answer a few of my own questions now im getting my head around how things work.

Between joytokey and the ipac software in RocketLauncher custom controls per application are going to be SOOOOOOO easy!!! I still use my xbox controller in some mame games (Smash TV for example) and thats an easy configure so all good there.

Ill be back with more questions soon

[M8harry]

Update:

After working huge amounts of overtime, having a quick trip away to visit family I decided to format the arcade box and start from scratch AGAIN.

Progress. Hyperspin installed, RocketLauncher Intalled, Retroarch set up to play NES games.

Next up: Install mame and get that up and running.

Short Term future: Get emumovies account and get art and movies and all that good stuff. Learn to add wheels, Add N64 and Dreamcast wheels
Questions for the brains trust:

1) is it possible to configure RocketLauncher to launch Retroarch to run a config for NES games that is different to SNES games config for example? The reason for this is im pretty picky about key binds and I would like RetroArch to have slightly different button mappings between those 2 systems. If yes possible how do I go about that? I cant see anything blatantly obvious at the moment /shrug

2) How do I get wheels like "arcade classics" or "4 player" etc is there a repository for that because wheels have me kinda confused at the moment.

3) Can anyone link me to a tutorial on creating wheels? Ill be buggered if I can find something that is what im after. I basically want to make a wheel for my favourite MAME games and one for my Wife. I would like to progress to making a multi platform wheel, for example all the sonic games etc.

 

Thats all for now but thanks in advance for any help

 

regards

 

Harry.

[Creezz67]

Suggestion, Maybe walk before you can run !!!!

Get the basics done first then start looking at splitting cores on Retroarch etc

Like you say " Between joytokey and the ipac software in RocketLauncher custom controls per application are going to be SOOOOOOO easy!! "

Everything is easy when you know the answers, now you just need to find out what the answers are ?

[saif31131]

woow

[Rowr14]

@M8harry

1) When you launch nes games through Rocketlauncher->Retroarch it should load the core for nes games (nestopia or something as default). snes games use a different core I think by default. That said there is the ability in Retroarch to save 'per core settings' which basically mean set the control scheme that you want for the core you are using and then save the settings to the core, then all games loaded from that core use those settings. I don't remember for sure without looking where you save that but I think it's in the quick settings menu (have a bit of a google for 'per core controller settings' and see what you find).

Also note that RetroArch saves settings when you exit correctly by selecting exit, or by going to configurations>save configuration. So get into the habit of exiting RetroArch in that manner or manually saving while you are doing this stuff.

If your still having some troubles I'll have a bit more in depth look at my own stuff to see exactly where you need to go. 

Also that said there is the option to set in RocketLauncher which core RetroArch loads somewhere in the emulator settings, though I know last time I played with that it wasn't an option for some systems. 

Unless (doubtfully) your suggesting that you have it setup somehow so that your nes games are using the same core as snes in which case it will be easier to set them up to use different cores most probably.

2/3) I think ninja2bceens main menu changer provides the ability to have these sort of wheels and nested wheels (haven't done this myself though so can't say for sure) So maybe check his tutorial for that, otherwise someone else around here might have an idea.

I personally use the genres function. When you hit the genre button while browsing in the wheel of a system you can sort by whatever you want there such as manufacturer, year released, rating, number of players, genre, best of, etc, you can create your own it's basically an xml file with a list of games you want for that wheel. So you can even create one that just has games your wife might want to play. When you want to do stuff like 'all sonic games across all systems' it becomes a slightly different kettle of fish, it's possible and I know there are threads around here but I haven't played with that stuff personally, .

I think it's phulsof that releases a full zip of MAME xmls split by just about everything you can think of, there is a thread here somewhere on the site, I think I link to it in my genre pack which i'll link below so you can take a look and get your head around it. I don't provide xmls for my MAME genre pack although I do for snes and mega drive packs so check those out to get a better understanding (also you want those because I fixed the genres so they are correct.)

There is also a direct link to ninja2bceens genre tutorial which is a must watch to get your head around it.

Note that the genre function doesn't have theme support but uses static images as the background as provided below. (Click through the title to get the run down and links as opposed to 'Download this file'.)

 

 

[M8harry]

On 12/10/2018 at 7:14 PM, cataclysm67 said:

Suggestion, Maybe walk before you can run !!!!

Get the basics done first then start looking at splitting cores on Retroarch etc

Like you say " Between joytokey and the ipac software in RocketLauncher custom controls per application are going to be SOOOOOOO easy!! "

Everything is easy when you know the answers, now you just need to find out what the answers are ?

Ive moved away from having the ipac software loaded in RL as it kept loading the wrong ipac board so my key binds were not complete. After hearing on youtube that controls schemes can be defined per console through <insert means here> I figured that would be the way to do it, as I got sick of trying to force RL to load the fight ipac configs.

 

[M8harry]

Bit of an update:

So its been a helluva ride so far.

So after working out what I want and what I dont, I started to assemble the required files and started getting my head around different emulators.

I have retroarch sorted for now but im sure there will be bumps down the road.

Im making new wheels for Hyperspin and thanks to ninja2bceen's awesome tutorials im saving mountains of space on the mame related wheels by using system links to the art and themes and all that good stuff!!

More later ?

[DomusdelCapo]

Adecuar un sistema Arcade personalizado son muchos detalles a tomar en cuenta:

Primero.- Es partir de la idea de tener conciencia de que es lo que busco y lo que se ajusta a mis necesidades (Hardware, Software, etc).

Segundo.- Partir de una estructura de la estacion de trabajo, independizando el HS, RL, Emulator, Categorias..etc

Tercero.- Instalar y puesta en funcionamiento de HS enlazando a RL (*)

Cuarto.- Utilizar un script master para los controles intercambiables, control de tiempo si así lo deseas (Timer.exe), siempre he usado Xpadder en mi arcade con perfiles e instalación y configuración con tu panel de control 8 botones + enter, escape y coins del monedero, También EDS etc.

Quinto.- Contar con un sistema de apagado modificando la bios para iniciar desde el impulso de la energia electrica (*)

Sexto.- Todo lo demás es configuraciones propias de los emuladores es un largo viaje que tienes que descubrir  con el paso del tiempo pero por suerte tuya ya muchos de nosotros hemos adquirido la experiencia.

 

[ninja2bceen]

So much love here, thanks all. Let me know what you want to see next. There is still a lot to be covered. Glad the channel is helping so many folks


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