Hello all from a 50yo new dad - former old school 70's & 80's arcade kid - have mercy

[ScarletFever]

Yo, amazed I even have the time to type this.  Yes I'm 50 and yes I have a 1+ year old at home 😅 so my free time is limited.  Younger me would dive into every tutorial, video, pdf and build from scratch.  Well now...

I have an arcade hyperspin system that was put together for me in 2017 - and life happened, haven't touched it much until recently.  Now I'm trying to modernize, clean up, touch up and simplify.

I cloned my C drive to a new m.2 and formatted to gpt.  I upgraded my monitor from a tv to an Asus G-Sync.  Updated the lighting in the cabinet to be powered by my cpu usb ports for easier simplified shutdown without turning off several switches.  All so far so good.

My gaming drive is an older external samsung 8tb that I'm going to clone to an internal firecuda 8tb 7200 drive for now, thinking about solid state but not doing that yet.

So... some questions I have will be dumb, some will be dumber, some may be mediocre.  Anything you can knock out or at least point me in a better direction I will appreciate, and will work on this when I have my 5 minutes of free time per month.  Plz let me know if I should also just break down these questions and ask in the proper forum.

* My drive is absolutely full of a ton and i mean a ton of systems, which is kind of nice but also... I think I mainly want to use my cabinet for arcade games and my raspberry pi for consoles.  May remove some wheels, wondering if I should just hide those wheels and leave the arcade based ones (mame, namco, etc)

* I remember first using my joystick / buttons for most mame games, and how easy it was to map them.  The console type wheels I was able to also figure out with my x360 controller - I think this system was set up for xpadder but most tutorials I see are for JoytoKey.  Should I switch to JoytoKey (I think some of my games / wheels are a bit messed up)

(Also is JoytoKey even used for joystick / button games or only console controller games?)

* Would it be easier for me to adjust and fix what I have, or better for me to just build a new system on a new drive starting from scratch using the roms I already have on my 8tb drive?

* I know my emulators are way out of date.  I know it's not as easy as replacing the executable file, what I plan to do is make a backup emulator folder copy, download new version, unzip over the existing.  I think I'm confused on updating romsets, so the original roms I do have now won't work with updated emulators?

* Is upgrading to windows 11 insane?  Keep it at windows 10pro?

I mean, that's what I have for now, kind of a mess.  Any general direction (stop that, go here, why did you have a kid old man) is appreciated and will be followed.

 

My system specs are in my bio, let me know if I need to add anything else to those specs to help out.  I did at least figure out how to get my hyperspin 1.5.1 to work with a recent windows 10 upgrade.

 

Take care all

 

SF

[brudibru]

Hello and welcome ! You are not alone being 50+ around here and it's not yet considered a disease (...I hope) ! 😀

I can't answer all your questions but you will have to face an important decision: keep your working hyperspin rig as is and enjoy playing it or update and upgrade and face many, many challenges (which can be fun !).

I think you have already chosen anyway, considering your post.

Updating the emulators shouldn't be too hard and your romsets should work as long as you don't change the databases but you might want to update them to include new games (especially for MAME of course but not only).

Starting from scratch is also a very good option if you want to be able to master Hyperspin eventually. You already have the roms and probably the media and you have a working setup to compare with so that makes things easier. I don't know if it's the case already for your working rig, but make sure to use rocketlauncher alongside hyperspin.

Once you have an updated setup working you could think of adding the many new systems that have been added on this forum since 2017.

Good luck and keep us informed !

 

[Johnfreitassousa44197812]

OK !! thank you very much for your attention friend.