Beta Week 1: Big Wins, Awesome Themes, and What’s Next!

[fr0stbyt3]

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to give a huge shout-out to all our amazing beta testers for an awesome first week. We’re already 6 builds in with 12 new features and over 80 fixes—talk about a busy week! None of this would’ve been possible without you all taking the time to test and give feedback.

Over the next few weeks, we’ve got a bunch of big changes planned for our backend systems—starting with our caching. Right now, we cache a lot of data to keep HyperSpin running fast, but rebuilding that cache whenever something changes isn’t as speedy as we’d like. Thanks to your input, we’ve gone back to the drawing board and completely redesigned it! By the end of next week, we’ll have a new setup that’s quicker, smarter, and doesn’t rely on the old _cache folder. This should squash a bunch of issues you’ve been seeing, like missing or default-reverting themes and wheel images that just won’t update.

In the meantime, if you want to test HyperSpin after making changes, the best trick is to open the wheel manager, move a wheel (or make any small tweak), and let the cache rebuild. Depending on how big your setup is, it might take a few minutes.

We also heard your feedback loud and clear after our first livestream—you wanted media overrides, and now you’ve got ‘em! We delayed them at first to focus on our new media distribution system, but I’m excited to say you can now override wheels, boxes, carts, and more. We’ve even added video marquees and video themes. For the main menu, just name the file after the system; for games, use the same name as the ROM. After the cache rebuilds, all your overrides should be good to go.

One more thing: a big shoutout to the content creators making amazing themes this week— @RetroHumanoid, @baddeolv, John, and @yaron. You guys have made some truly stunning artwork. I’m using themes that are sometimes only a few hours old, and it really brings everything together in a big way!

A quick note on video themes: they do use more memory. A typical theme might be around 10MB, while some video themes can hit 1GB. I’ll share more details on performance and trade-offs in another post. For now, here’s a quick demo to show them off in action!
   

Thanks again for all your support, everyone. Your feedback is what keeps us going, and we can’t wait to show you all the cool stuff that’s still in the pipeline. I’ll be taking it easy this weekend to rest up before another big week ahead—stay tuned!

[thatman84]

I thought I was about to get rickrolled with that video theme 😂

 

Thanks for your efforts! It’s. Very much appreciated and needed around these parts 👊

[rik81]

Where do the video themes go exactly?

They cant go in the same video folders right?

C:\ProgramData\HyperSpin\media\Systems\_overrides\Arcade (MAME)\EmuMoviesVideoMedium <--Wouldnt it just think its a regular video? 

Since this is overrides... hyperspin knows to use this folder over the cache folder? And even if it does use it... it projects the video to the full screen? Not displaying in the system theme?

Also... having a copy of the video in the regular client folder... then copying it over to cache... and having another video in override.... is a bit nuts. 3 copies of the video for the same game? Plus snaps?

We should be able to delete the ones we want and turn off syncing... every time hyperlaunch starts... it just starts grabbing the same files.  Taking up huge amounts of space.

Thanks

 

[ninja2bceen]

Weekly recaps?! Could dig it 🤭 thanks for keeping up!

[Circo]

11 hours ago, rik81 said:

Where do the video themes go exactly?

They cant go in the same video folders right?

C:\ProgramData\HyperSpin\media\Systems\_overrides\Arcade (MAME)\EmuMoviesVideoMedium <--Wouldnt it just think its a regular video? 

Since this is overrides... hyperspin knows to use this folder over the cache folder? And even if it does use it... it projects the video to the full screen? Not displaying in the system theme?

Also... having a copy of the video in the regular client folder... then copying it over to cache... and having another video in override.... is a bit nuts. 3 copies of the video for the same game? Plus snaps?

We should be able to delete the ones we want and turn off syncing... every time hyperlaunch starts... it just starts grabbing the same files.  Taking up huge amounts of space.

Thanks

 

Spoke to @fr0stbyt3 this morning and you are absolutely right. It wasn't in the logic plan so I had to double check, but in the rush to get that out ASAP it got added with the current cache system in place that kind of demanded it be injested.  Next weeks cache upgrades will eliminate this need and then this whole thing should make a lot more sense and not needlessly fill your HDD with duplicate media. So consider this feature *experimental* this is not how its going to work long term or even near term.