Andyman

Awesome work! I can't wait to dig into this set and upgrade my cabinet with them. Thanks!

Hey, I wanted to add that you can achieve the visual effects you're looking for with the Artwork files from the MAME EXTRAs set:

Several versions of the game in 0.139 use samples. Check them out - one might be what you're looking for.

I see you asked for 0.139 nonag last year, and that version would likely be much better than 0.114b. The Space Invaders sample should be the same. Here's a link to 0.139 nonag: https://mega.nz/file/eYwylIxD#9afqTeGxLlECrXBqyjRQiZKhL96ALxyB2NlIMjA212s

Also, it helps to add your HyperSpin folder as an exception in your antivirus app, as many will wreak havoc via false-positive alerts.

@gigapig Tagging an Admin for visibility. Curious behavior indeed.

Hahaha... I've done that in racing games for what seems like forever. It works! (But not in Sega racing games because if you so much as caress a wall in one of theirs, you lose like half your speed.)

VGA to an Avermedia 300 adapter to S-Video. I haven't observed any noticeable input lag as yet, but I'm early in the build process too.

Hey, thanks for the offer! If I run into a problem I just can't get past, I'll reach out and see if you've come across it and solved it.

Oh, and taking a 3-inch hole saw to the pristine Cruis'n USA control panel to enlarge the opening for the G920's steering hub was enough to make the arcade connoisseur in me cry a little. Knowing the cabinet would never have been restored and knowing there's a lot of them in circulation eased my emotional stress, though.

1) I have had to do some minor modifications to the cabinet, such as cutting a larger opening for the G920's floor-mounted pedal unit (Cruis'n USA uses a face-mounted unit). I really like how it's working out, though. 2) I absolutely love how the 4:3 CRT makes modern games feel retro, and the new blends well with the old because of it. It amuses me to watch HyperSpin in demo mode go from the advanced visuals of Forza, to the pixels of Pole Position, to the rough polygons of Gran Turismo 2, to the cel-shaded cartoon look of Wacky Racers... it's great. 3) I've roughly setup all the games, and will be fine-tuning everything once the Logitech G920 is in the cabinet completely and I have the control panel buttons wired up fully. That part of the project will probably take quite awhile - partly because I'm a bit of perfectionist, and partly because there will be extended breaks to play each game once it's setup to my liking. Thanks for the feedback and praise! And yeah, I could easily put over 1000 racing games in this project, but I wanted to keep the overall quality of the experience high. 500 is more than enough to induce paralysis of choice as it is! Haha.

... and then an early Black Friday deal alert lands in my Inbox and I pull the trigger on a 2TB SATA SSD to really make this thing shine. I might need to subtitle this project The Rabbit Hole Edition.

Some of you might've noticed I mentioned my sit-down racing cabinet project in my Pure (4:3) universal theme announcement back in October. Well, the project has evolved a bit since then, so I thought I probably ought to start a dedicated thread chronicling the project... Rewind a bit to a couple of months ago, and I was fortunate enough to acquire a Cruis'n World cabinet from the wonderful folks at Pinball PA in great condition (although absolutely filthy, as it had been in their warehouse's basement for a bit). Side note: You really must visit Pinball PA if you're in the area - it is incredible. A 2-hour trip to Pittsburgh with the utility trailer in tow and 2 hours back, and the cabinet was mine. I even managed to dodged that day's rain showers, so the cabinet arrived home nice and dry. Then began the cleanup process, to rid the thing of "that old arcade game smell" - you know the funk I'm referring to: a combination of smoke tar, mold, dust and other crud. I bet I changed my wash bucket a dozen times and went through at least that many rags. It's still not quite as sparkly clean as I'd like, but it's about 1000% better than it was! The next stop was to my local e-cycling center, to see if I could find a good-quality and working 25" CRT to use for the visuals. To my amazement, I found not one, but three - for free, even! Score! Even better, while I was rummaging through the piles of old TVs, I discovered a stack of discarded office computers. Curiosity got the best of me, and buried in the stack I found what had to be a company mistake - a Dell Optiplex 3020 small form-factor desktop in absolutely pristine condition. i5 CPU and 8GB RAM, but no hard drive (e-cycling centers are obligated to destroy them due to privacy concerns). I had a spare 2TB hard drive, so that worked out fine, and the PC is perfectly sized for the cramped confines of the Cruis'n World cabinet, and plenty fast enough to run the games I planned to include. Then I did a little research online, to see if I could squeeze more performance out of the little monster on the cheap, because I'm greedy like that. To my delight, I was able to max out the RAM at 16GB and add a respectable low-profile video card (Radeon R7 250), and I now have a whole $70 wrapped up in the machine. It runs Forza Horizon 5 very well, so I'm stoked, and confident that it'll run everything else I want to include. Next up, CRT testing time! They're identical 2006-vintage Samsung models with a full host of inputs, including S-video and component. Since all 3 CRTs were laying in a very wet section of the yard, I let them air-dry for about a week (see the first photo), then began the process of opening each one for inspection and powering up after making sure all looked fine. Their cabinets were pretty beaten up, so I hoped their guts weren't as abused. To my surprise, the first one I tried was perfect. I ran the S-video feed over from my Gauntlet Legends cabinet for testing purposes and was amazed at how clear and crisp the picture was. I think it's even better than the awesome Toshiba 27" I have in the Gauntlet cab. I immediately decased the CRT and mounted it in the Cruis'n World cabinet. You can see how it looks in the second photo. Fantastic, but a long way to go! I tested the other two CRTs - one's in equally great working order, and one's DOA. Hey, two out of three ain't bad! I stashed the other working CRT in a cool, dry place for possible future use. Control-wise, I'm mounting the Logitech G920 wheel, pedals and shifter I was using with my Xbox Series X to the cabinet. I don't have photos of that process, but I'll add pics once the controls are all in place. Here's the very slick Xbox 360 controller emulation app I'm using to make non-wheel games work as if they had wheel support. So cool. Now for the real meat-and-potatoes of the project: the games. I've spent the last couple of months methodically curating, installing and testing all the games I want in this beast. I decided the total will be 500 - no more, no less. What better number for a racing cabinet? Some games had to be discarded due to not working offline (Forza Motorsport 7), not being emulated well enough yet, or not playing nice with the 4:3 aspect. Surprisingly, a lot of very recent PC racing games work very well in 4:3 aspect. Who'd have guessed? In that time, I've also created a custom universal theme to tie the arcade, console, and PC games together visually in HyperSpin (see the link at the top of this post), and I've gathered logo wheels for each game and gathered/created video previews for each as well. That's been a job, and I'm glad it's done. I've attached the 500-game database as it stands right now. I don't anticipate major changes to it, but I'm still discovering racing games I want to include, so it'll probably continue to evolve as time goes on. I love me some racing games, as you can probably tell. If you have questions, ask away! Thanks for reading. More to come! CruisnWorld.xml

Thanks to the wonders of Xbox Game Pass, I'm completely engrossed in Immortals: Fenyx Rising on the Series X at the moment. How this phenomenal game snuck past me when it first came out, I have no idea. It's like God of War and Spyro had a kid who loved ingeniously designed puzzles. Absolutely brilliant game.

Thanks! <gets out the broom and sets to work swatting spammers with it>

After all these years, I still think HyperSpin is the ultimate in an arcade cabinet. Here's my latest project. I managed to find this gem for a mere $250 - working even! Don't worry, preservationists - my conversion is 100% reversible back to stock. I've even stashed the original CRT monitor away somewhere safe and dry for safekeeping. A few fun parts of the project to note: The CRT in it is actually a 27" Toshiba TV I got for free off Craigslist. Fun fact: the tube and mounting points are identical to the arcade original monitor. It slotted right into the frame and slid right into the cabinet. Also, the Toshiba has power-on sensing, so when I turn the cabinet on, the monitor turns itself on too! The video connection from the PC is VGA-to-Svideo, via this great adapter board, at 640x480. I was concerned about lag, but I haven't noticed any at all. Score! The stealth button bar above the control panel is actually a table leg cut to length and sprayed black! I needed a place to put the insert-coin buttons, and the little ledge below the monitor was the perfect spot. I picked up some tiny pushbuttons to match each player's color, and added a black button in the middle to escape back to the HyperSpin menu. The 25c slots in the coin door work for player 1 and 2 also. The marquee light didn't work no matter what I tried, so I set it aside and put this LED fixture in its place. I still can't believe how perfectly it fits and looks. I haven't gotten around to replacing the damaged yellow T-molding yet. It'll happen soon... if I can pull myself away from playing long enough to do it! And yeah, I made sure I can play Gauntlet Legends and Gauntlet Dark Legacy on it. The monitor is also big enough to play 4-player Tournament Cyberball 2072 with both screens displayed on the one monitor! MAME recommendation for other cabinet enthusiasts: Get familiar with the control bindings in the Tab menu! I was able to configure nearly every game in my setup in one shot, even the dual-stick games like Robotron and Karate Champ. It's super easy, once you get your brain around the way MAME does things. Feel free to ask any questions you have!