* READ THIS before posting for help

[Spawk]

Welcome to the official Hyperspin forums. I just want to make a couple of points that may save everyone some time.

This site (hyperspin-fe.com) is the ONLY place to get Hyperspin. There is NO such thing as an authorized retailer. NO other site has been given permission to distribute Hyperspin in any way. If you acquired a "setup" in one of these ways, please consult them for support. We are not here to diagnose why these shoddy setups don't work.

So support here is mainly geared toward the people who are actually setting all this up. We expect at least some knowledge about using emulators, setting up controls, and what other programs you may be using and why. Nothing says "I just want a quick fix for my unauthorized HDD purchase without having to learn anything" more than a post that simply says " I click the game and it doesn't load".

I should also state that there are no actual employees here. Nobody is getting to paid to provide support for anything... whether you are platinum or not. There is a handful of Mods, Admins, and long time users that enjoy helping people purely out of the love for the hobby.

Do a "Search"! A lot of questions are already answered. I see new posts every week about the Win10 2004 update for example. We really don't need 50 posts asking the same question. 

Be as specific as possible!!! Does the game play in the emulator itself? What emulator/module are you using? What are you using for controls? Screenshots of your settings are great! What tutorial did you follow to get to this point? What are your PC's specs? What OS you are using might be important. What brand video card might be relevant. The more information you give, the better the chance someone may know exactly what the issue is.

A Rocketlauncher "troubleshooting" log is the best most of the time. You can set that here:

Then try to run a game one time. This is not a continuous log. Only the very last thing you launched is saved.

It will create (or overwrite) the log here:

* do NOT paste the contents of the log directly into a post, it is too long to scroll through here.

Take that log and upload it to pastebin.com (just drag the file over, no need to even open)

It will create a link and you can share the link here.

** turn off troubleshooting when finished as it will slow down loading in general.

 

Follow your own thread! This will give you a notification when a reply is made. You can also take it further by installing a very useful app called "Tapatalk" on your mobile device. Then you will get notifications even when away from home. (Tapatalk is currently broken). It's also polite to reply or at least "like" the comment that helped.

Thanks for reading, I am always available via PM if anyone has any questions.

[Spawk]

The rest of this thread will be tips and/or otherwise handy information. The thread is locked so if you have any questions, please PM me.

TIP #1 - Connecting HS and RL

This is really "day 1" stuff. This is the very first thing you should do after downloading a fresh HS and RL and placed them where you want to run them from. Navigate to .../HyperSpin/Settings/ and edit the "settings.ini" like so:

You'll notice that the path to the old "hyperlaunch" was just a path to the folder. The path to RL must point right to the exe! Also note that in this example, I am using drive z:, replace with you own drive letter (path) of course.

Next, you'll want to open RLUI and make the following changes here:

And here:

These settings will ensure that RL knows that HS is your frontend. Very important that RL knows what program to give "focus" to after exiting a game. 

This setup uses the databases from the HS folder structure. Now technically, there is a way to use RLUI as the plugin and it will use the databases in the RL folders. This can be handy if you want to use more that 1 frontend... but it has it's issues. Like most 3rd party apps expecting to read from HS like Hypersync! Hypermarquee, Hypersearch... It's a much better idea to finalize your XML's in HS. You can always copy them over to the RL folders after you done for future use.

You should now be fully connected. Launching through HS should be exactly the same as launching through RLUI. From this point forward, that's all HS does is "call" RL.

[Spawk]

TIP #2 - Launching HS

If you click HS and it refuses to launch, chances are you are on an updated version of Win10 (or Win11). Changes to a file called sxs.dll in these newer versions of Windows prevent HS from launching properly. The easy solution is to take a copy of the old sxs.dll and place it in the same folder as hyperspin.exe

You can find that file here:

* You may want to restart your PC after you copy to make sure nothing is half loaded in the background. I am assuming you've already clicked HS... probably more than once wondering why it wasn't loading.

[Spawk]

TIP #3 - Filters and Databases

As covered in TIP #1, all launching is to be done by RL so this window in HQ can usually be left blank. "HyperLaunch" (that now points to RL in settings.ini) should almost always be selected. NEVER set an "Executable" here unless you plan on bypassing RL altogether and setting "Execution" to "Normal".

You do however have to include a "Rom Path" and "Extension" whenever you use the "roms only" filter in HQ.

Roms only is a popular choice for new comers. Simply delete any rom you don't want and it will vanish from the wheel. If you want to add a game or simply have more control over what is and isn't in your XML's, then you will need to get used to editing them yourself. They are just simple text files that are editable in any word processor including the Windows included "Notepad". Notepad has some kind of size or character limitations though so some of the bigger databases like Mame might not even open. It also does not retain the original formatting of xml. Fortunately there is a freeware program called "Notepad++" (plusplus) that has several benefits.

You can get it here:

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/

Fire up RLUI and tell it where you just installed notepadd++

Now you can click on the "edit" button in RLUI:

You can have more than one XML open. And it will remember which databases you have open. Which is saved or not:

[Spawk]

TIP #4 - Mame not launching

Another popular error for new users is Mame refusing to launch through RLUI/HS. The module included with RL works with all versions up to and including .211

ANY version .212 and higher needs an updated module. You can find it on the RL forums:

http://www.rlauncher.com/forum/index.php?threads/mame-v0-212-dont-launch-with-rocketlauncher.6201/post-44551

* make sure it replaces the one in the ../RocketLauncher/modules/MAME/ folder and NOT the ../HyperSpin/modules/MAME/ folder! The HS folder one is for old hyperlaunch.

** setting LegacyMode is NOT a proper fix. This is for very old versions of Mame. It basically disables a bunch of features.