HTPC XBMC/Kodi Users Rejoice! - Hyperspin Replacement

[KrillCaz]

Seeing as "Hyperspin 2.0" has been teased for years, postponed indefinitely, BBB likes to remain "mysterious" about development, and Hyperspin is closed-source; I've been adamantly in search for a definitive Hyperspin Replacement for my HTPC... Admittedly, while in search for a replacement frontend, other, currently available frontends would pale in comparison to Hyperspin, at this very moment... Although all of the annoying nuances-- Hyperspin is still great! However, it is also lacking in many areas, is plagued with many notorious bugs which could easily be fixed, and requires many hacks/workarounds just to get the desired outcome (ie. 16:9 widescreen, horizontal wheel navigation bugs, freezing randomly, etc).

I have finally found (what I consider to be) an eventual definitive Hyperspin replacement for us HTPC users! This program is currently being developed as a fork of XBMC/Kodi (which most of us HTPC users are already very fond of), and will be integrated into master sometime in the near future. This program is called "RetroPlayer". Retroplayer, which is being developed by an amazing developer, Garrett Brown, uses Libretro, and will have the ability to seamlessly launch games directly from Kodi. I know, I know... That sounds great and all, but we can already do this using third-party add-ons, right? Yes, we can, but this goes even further than that! Not only are those third-party add-ons not exactly what I'd consider to be "seamless", but RetroPlayer aims to be as seamless as launching movies, music, and T.V. shows via Kodi. Point to your rom directories, scrap artwork/metadata, press "Enter", and it just works. RetroPlayer will effectively turn your HTPC into an actual all-around media center/gaming console! No longer will you need an external frontend to launch your video games! In addition to being able to seamlessly launch games/emulators, RetroPlayer will have the expected artwork scrapers, metadata scrapers, etc, but an interesting feature is that it will eventually enable is SEAMLESS netplay with other Kodi users. You heard right; no exchange of I.P. addresses, no port-forwarding, no keyboard/mouse-- just you, your friends, your controllers, and retro netplay! RetroPlayer intends to integrate a lobbying system with ranking, friend-lists, etc. The FULL console experience.

Here's a somewhat outdated concept demo of what this program will do:

Here are some key features which this fork will have/bring to Kodi:

Design and Components

• RetroPlayer: Player core that plays games using game add-ons. Despite its name, it can play all types of games, not just retro ones. Games can be paused, fast-forwarded, and rewound in realtime. Save states are created similar to bookmarks, allowing for quick browsing of the game's play history. 3D support (for N64, etc) is being worked on.
  
• Game Add-ons: Standalone games, emulators, NVidia GameStream via Limelight. and WINE capture are possible through the Game API. The Game API has 1:1 compatibility with the libretro API, so all libretro cores are valid game add-ons.
  
• Peripheral Add-ons: A way to interface DIY hardware (currently game controllers and media readers) with Kodi.
  
• Joystick input: The joystick peripheral add-on provides access to many joystick interfaces across various platforms. A controller configuration utility is in the works:
  
  Future Components
  
• Media readers: Cartridge adapters and disk drives that give Kodi access to game ROMs. Such cartridge readers include the Retrode adapter (which can also interface with console controllers). Python scripts also have access to the ROM and can do things like automatically backing up ROMs and downloading metadata, artwork and multimedia using identifiers embedded in ROM data. Media readers also allow for gameplay persistence across sessions - yank the cartridge out of the reader and Kodi stops the game and takes a save state; plug the cartridge back in and Kodi plays the game right where you last left off.
  
• Game library: Games offer new ways of interacting with media libraries: box art, game trailers, gameplay videos, system intros, save states, and more. Games don't have to be on your computer; plugins can provide games that can be scanned into the library. Free clones of virtually every popular game can be streamed (and cached) directly from public domain ROM sites. If binary add-ons could provide games, then Steam libraries on the network could be scanned into the game library.
  
• Network play: The details for this need to be worked out. Netplay for emulators can be trivially implemented by extending the Game API over a tcp transport. One computer hosts the emulator and transfers video, audio and input. Two frontends (Kodi instances) connect, one over the DLL interface and one over the network. Connecting to peers could be done through the "Play using..." button.
  

Source: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=164725

You can find the forum branch which is dedicated to this amazing program here: http://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=194

Would you like to try out the Alpha builds? If you're comfortable with compiling source code, give it a shot: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=173361

[rdhanded2]

This is definitely not what I want for my cabinet but I can see this working great for my HTPC. Thanks for the share.

[KrillCaz]

I agree. Hyperspin is definitely still the definitive cabinet frontend, for now, anyway. This, as Kodi itself, is geared towards the use on a HTPC. It'll effectively be an all-around media console, at that point. In addition, it will eventually scrap artwork, metadata, etc, as accurately as Kodi currently does for movies/TV shows (granted you name/organize your ROMs somewhat correctly). No more XMLs, or having to tediously, manually rename your ROMS to match. Furthermore, RetroPlayer will have as many "view options" as your Kodi skin does, so it will not be limited to just horizontal/vertical with no choice to change the wheels on the fly, as Hyperspin is.

[Fromlostdays]

In terms of scraping, I'm a total noob. Would that mean we'll have to rename all our no intro games to get a good scrape? Also, both of these seem like great programs, it is a not a slight on one to want the other. Especially this netplay. So thanks for bringing to my attention, and also for the tutorials you're going to generously write for me so I can get it to work.

[KrillCaz]

I'm not sure if you've used XBMC/Kodi before, but it's the same concept which is used to find your movie, episode, and music artwork/metadata. Scraping is essentially an automated script which uses the arbitrary name of a file to search a database for the correlating artwork/metadata and downloads it for you. It allows for marginal errors, so you don't need to precisely name your ROMS to any particular naming-convention. Garrett plans to make his scraping more accurate than what's currently available for RCB/Advanced Launcher-- In fact, he is going for ~99.99%. I will, indeed, write up a tutorial for this program, if needed (although, I believe that this will be the easiest/most straight-forward frontend of all-time, granted you're somewhat familiar with Kodi). I'm an avid supporter of this project and it's devs.

[Trnzaddict]

I'm not sure if you've used XBMC/Kodi before, but it's the same concept which is used to find your movie, episode, and music artwork/metadata. Scraping is essentially an automated script which uses the arbitrary name of a file to search a database for the correlating artwork/metadata and downloads it for you. It allows for marginal errors, so you don't need to precisely name your ROMS to any particular naming-convention. Garrett plans to make his scraping more accurate than what's currently available for RCB/Advanced Launcher-- In fact, he is going for ~99.99%. I will, indeed, write up a tutorial for this program, if needed (although, I believe that this will be the easiest/most straight-forward frontend of all-time, granted you're somewhat familiar with Kodi). I'm an avid supporter of this project and it's devs.

Yes I've been following retroplayer for quite a while now. And I agree 100%...HS will always be the number one frontend...for cabs. But those of us that have a htpc and run xbmc/kodi....we've been hurting for a good add on for games that has a seamless feel.

No matter how hard I try, I just cannot get the look and info I want from HS on a htpc. Even after the two theme sets I did, it still is not giving me what I want.

RCB is buggy, and is lacking system separation and the scraping is not that good.

Advanced Launcher has system separation, but no support for automatic preview videos to play when selecting a game.

And that's pretty much all we ha e right now unfortunately.

[marxkemp]

Im in the same boat as Trnz

[Fromlostdays]

I've been using xbmc since it was xbmc and I have kodi now. I just catch hell trying to scrape, say, my anime collection. I can't even get futurama named right. I spent a little time learning the themes, settled on Aeon Nox, but otherwise I'm still pretty much a noob. I do have hyperspin on the main menu of kodi with custom artwork and it launches perfectly and closes right back to kodi. Its only a matter, I think, of not putting the time and effort I put into hyperspin/hyperlaunch. I'm just glad to know I don't have to rename my roms because I plan on having both hyperspin and Retroplayer on my PC.

I'm also thinking Retroplayer is going to finally allow me to shift my focus and energy a bit toward actually learning the ins and outs of kodi, and of course, any extra info is always welcome. This is going to be fun.

Walter