Is RocketLauncher still the way to go?

[maliusmaximus]

Hi everyone, 

Doing my first ever cabinet and its great to be part of the community. 

I'm up to learning about Hyperspin and Rocketlauncher and watching the tutorial videos, but I can see that Rocketlauncher hasn't been updated since 2015. Also the intro videos here are from 2016, before it seems it was clear that Rocketlauncher stopped development, so before I go down this path I just want to make sure that Hyperspin and Rocketlauncher is still the best practice. 

I'll be running on a 40" widescreen TV on a Viewlix style cabinet. Computer Specs:

Core i5 (10th Gen)

16GB DDR Ram

Geforce 1650 GTX

500GB SSD (plan to add more)

If relevant, Control panel is 22 button config with Trackball (see pics). Also has coin door

System will be mainly used for retro games but will install some selected newer ones 

 

Thanks in advance

 

[Spawk]

Welcome maliusmaximus

Nice looking cab you got there! RL is most definitely needed. Don't let the lack of updates deter you. The only thing that ever needs updating is the modules when emulators decide to change things. These are usually easily found on the RL forums. It still does way more than any FE could dream of doing. I don't see how anyone could avoid using it no matter what FE they are running. And as far as HS, what is the alternative? Go back to Hyperlaunch? It died the day RL started... load through HQ? hahaha, it's laughable.

Just as a tip of the iceberg, RL will immediately throw up a "fade" screen when you choose a game, this will hide emu windows opening or any brief glimpses of the desktop till the game is fully loaded. It also has it's own "pause" which will allow you to browse fanart, move lists, manuals... switch discs for multi disc games. And a million other benefits. Seriously, my head spins when I start to think about describing all the features.

No worry, I will help where I can or at least point in the right direction.

[SparklePig78]

17 hours ago, maliusmaximus said:

Hi everyone, 

Doing my first ever cabinet and its great to be part of the community. 

I'm up to learning about Hyperspin and Rocketlauncher and watching the tutorial videos, but I can see that Rocketlauncher hasn't been updated since 2015. Also the intro videos here are from 2016, before it seems it was clear that Rocketlauncher stopped development, so before I go down this path I just want to make sure that Hyperspin and Rocketlauncher is still the best practice. 

I'll be running on a 40" widescreen TV on a Viewlix style cabinet. Computer Specs:

Core i5 (10th Gen)

16GB DDR Ram

Geforce 1650 GTX

500GB SSD (plan to add more)

If relevant, Control panel is 22 button config with Trackball (see pics). Also has coin door

System will be mainly used for retro games but will install some selected newer ones 

 

Thanks in advance

 

The cabinet looks awesome dude! I recently built my first cabin with my dad, it's 4 player and looks pretty cool but I just have no idea how to design the decals. I'm decent with photo editing but the weird shapes that the decals have to be just makes my head spin. Anyways, as a fellow noob, I can say, the Hyperspin+RL combo has not let me down. My main problems have come with emulators. Just a tip, try to use multi system emulators if possible. Mednafen being a good example, it can be a bit hard to set up but it runs many systems and will save you time. If you need a good guide on that, let me know.

[SparklePig78]

Forgot to mention something. Depending on how many systems you want to set up, I would add a lot more storage asap. A full mame chd set by itself is 500gb. The old systems aren't very big but once you get into downloading full romsets you will run out of storage quick. I put a 2tb ssd in my cabinet and I'm already down to 500 gb. I gotta ask, how did you make the decals as far as getting the right size and shape?

[Aorin]

2 hours ago, SparklePig78 said:

Forgot to mention something. Depending on how many systems you want to set up, I would add a lot more storage asap. A full mame chd set by itself is 500gb. The old systems aren't very big but once you get into downloading full romsets you will run out of storage quick. I put a 2tb ssd in my cabinet and I'm already down to 500 gb. I gotta ask, how did you make the decals as far as getting the right size and shape?

Most of the CHD games won't work and there are a lot of duplicates, unneeded and garbage among them all, there's a list of working titles that can help those with less space to decide what's worth adding, in the end, only a few should be kept anyways.

As for the first post, the RocketLauncher developers did an amazing job and it's unfortunate it's not being updated for years, like other threads mention that as well, it kinda shows in other places too how things changed in a few years.

It's still solid and working, and once you know what you're doing it will do wonders for you.
There's the Shadow Warrior Classic Redux in which it relies on a launcher so you can choose the main game and the other two expansions, you're kinda forced to click on one to get it started, with a script, I was able to make the mouse move to the respective selection and start it for me, so there's no need to interact with anything other than the gamepad I use for the frontend and everything I play on PC, so yeah, it's that cool using scripts to solve even those minor annoyances.

Check it working here, the cursor movement and clicks are all automated from RL to the AHK script:

 

[maliusmaximus]

Wow thanks for the quick and helpful replies guys. It's awesome to be part of a community into this. I don't know anybody else in Vietnam doing this yet, but I plan to try to build a community here. 

Seems clear that Hyperspin + RL is the way to go

 

@SparklePig78 for the decals, I had the initial cabinet designs which formed the basic shape for the designer to work from. 
The cabinet panels were all CNC milled so I took secondary measurements including angles to see what the actual dimensions were.

The artwork is commissioned from a local artist here in Hanoi from a VN Cyberpunk series. As part of me paying for re-use rights they resized all the artwork onto the cabinet files. 

When we printed it, the directive to the decal guys was to scale the print so that it was at least 1cm beyond any edge. It works in this scenario because the artwork is continuous. It would have been muh harder if the artwork was meant to follow the lines of the cab. 

When the decal was laid down, it was brought over edge and trimmed to the edge of the t-moulding groove. That way you get a nice continuous uninterrupted decal that goes over edge and disappears behind the t-moulding, and you can be forgiving about discrepancies between design file proportion and actuals with print scaling. 

Fun fact, you can do 3d decal printing where the decal is actually physically textured based on the color palette