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Cabinets

HyperSpin Setup On My Computer Space (2-Player)

Yup, it's true. My Emulator Machine is bigger than yours.

Mine may only be a two player machine, but it has four terabytes of games, arcade related videos, cheats, and more. No movie filler or non-arcade junk polluting my drives either. Everything is setup for easy play too. I have seen some fancy games packed with movies, but who watches a movie standing in front of an arcade game? This one is pure arcade and console games baby!

 

 

Below is how I setup my 2-Player Computer Space to play almost 22,000 games. I had to split this page into a second page which explains how I actually built the control panel and setup the box. Computer Space 2-Player Restoration.

 

What would Nolan Bushnell have said in 1971 if he knew this would be possible someday?: "Huh?"

 

This is my rough control panel layout. I scanned the original panel for sizing and used it as a guide to layout my buttons and make sure everything would fit.

This project finally gave me a chance to use all the starcade and other videos I have collected over the years.
I tried downloading a hyperspin torrent of an allegedly setup system only to find it was 99.4% complete and it was a rar file set so it would not extract even 10% of the files. I found another torrent and tried it. It was supposed to be complete and setup. It had the video files but was completely setup wrong. Some games were displayed with the incorrect aspect ratio, paths were wrong, files were missing, it was a mess. I had to rebuild it myself and fix every single emulator and figure out the settings which is not easy because many of the emulators have zero documentation. You just have to go through ini files and try changes until you find the right line.

For example, AAE was set to force 4:3 aspect ratio which crushed even horizontal games into a narrow rectangle in the middle of the screen, Actionmax had the wrong key setup so it was unplayable and there was no config utility to set the correct keys. Every MESS emulated game failed to load because the hyperloader script had an invalid line in the command line so I had to fix all of those instances. Galaxy Ranger and Roadblaster had the wrong rom names in their setup so they did not even work.

I added the dragon's lair prototype rom and video set which plays differently from the final release.
I used mess where ever possible because it has the easiest to configure interface using TAB. I also combined Mess into one installation. The previous setup had a different mess for every game which took up more disk space and made it harder to update.

So what is installed? Lets take a look.

Mame (complete, those people offering Mame on DVD do not include all CHD files(137gigs worth which would be more than 32 disks just for the CHD's) but my set does include all of them) Approx 3000 working games not including clones(which is then 7000)
Playstation2 840 games (wrong, see update below, more added)
Gamecube 980 images (wrong, see update below, more added)
Dreamcast 211 games (wrong, see update below, more added)
Naomi(the arcade version of Dreamcast) 92 games
ScummVM(Lucas Arts and other point and click adventure games like Kings Quest and Leisure Suit Larry) 396 images
Computer Space - This game is not truly emulated by any emulator but I have included a simulator that plays it and gives you options to change to improve gameplay.
Atomiswave 18 games
Panasonic CD-I was just added by me with my own custom theme which is not available from the web. 628 images
Misfit Mame - games not in the official mame version. 1379 roms
Atari 2600 (+prototypes and extra games added) 259 roms
Atari 5200 63
Atari 7800 51 games.
Atari Jaguar 36 games
Atari Lynx 77 games
Famicom Disk System 93
Nintendo Entertainment System (+prototypes and extra games added) 804 roms
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (+prototypes and extra games added) 770 roms
Nintendo 64 288 roms
Gameboy 585 games
Gameboy Color 543 gamees
Gameboy Advance 1068 games
Virtual Boy 19roms
Sega SG1000 68roms
Sega Master System 286 roms
Sega Genesis (+best of japanese games added) 816 roms
Sega CD (USA+best of japanese games added) 194
Sega 32X 33roms
Sega Saturn (+best of japanese games added) 274 roms
Sega Game Gear 250 roms
PC Engine 289 roms
TurboGrafx 16 92 roms
TurboGrafx CD 50 images (This uses Mednafen which does not work on all computers, not sure why, maybe it is 64bit computers it does not work with)
SuperGrafx 5 games
PCFX 72 roms (This uses Mednafen which does not work on all computers, not sure why, maybe it is 64bit computers it does not work with)
Neo Geo 142 roms
Neo Geo AES 144 roms
Neo Geo CD 72roms
Neo Geo Pocket 10 roms
Neo Geo Pocket Color 40 roms
Panasonic 3DO 134 images
Sony Playstation (USA AND best of japanese games added) 1515 images
RCA Studio II 5roms
Channel F 28 roms
Astrocade 40 games
GCE Vectrex 25
Arcadia 2001 48 games
Magnavox Odyssey 2 81roms
GX4000 34 games
Actionmax all 7 known VHS based gun games(plus these are audio improved, not like the crappy audio version on the web)
Creativision 14roms
Adventurevision 4 known games
Intellivision 142 roms
Colecovision 171roms
Supervision 43 roms
Wonderswan Mono 110 roms
Wonderswan Color 92 roms
Commodore Amiga 154 floppy disk games
Amiga CD32 24 programs
DICE - 3 games(that is every one it supports)
AAE All 62 Roms for this vector arcade emu.
Nintendo Arcade Systems
Daphne 24 laserdisk games (includes other daphne games not in the normal distribution like Shadoan, Cliff Hanger, dragons lair prototype and others)
Neo Geo Arcade
Sega Model 2 - 35roms
Zinc 78roms
Future Pinball 179 pinball tables.
Gun Games - 10 laser disk games(like Mad Dog MCCreee, Crime Patrol, Time Travelrer) plus all the ones from Mame

The consoles and other emulators add up to: ~15 000 games, roms, or images(not including the other videos etc below)

Or if you include the 7000 Mame games:

TOTAL: 22,099 games!!!!

But wait, there's more. My cabinet also includes
A total of 111 episode of Starcade the arcade gameshow, just select an episode and watch, also shows a 30 second preview when a clip is selected.
238 classic console TV commercials in the menu, move the pointer and see a preview or watch the full list.
93 arcade related movie clips, news reports, etc.
Computer Space Simulator

Plus includes special category sections for Mature games, Gun Games, classic arcade and others.

 


This was quite a project and it took me about 200 hours to put together just the front end and make it work. That does not include the cabinet restoration and control panel build or obtaining the roms.

DOWNLOAD MY AHK AND SOURCES

The .ahk hyperloader file that came with Hyperspin was full of errors and many games were setup incorrectly so they would never work(like mame which terminated in an unclean way which prevented you from saving any changes) and many games were missing routines. I wanted to save you hours of programming headaches so I saved my sources where I got roms and files so if you want to build your own version get it in a text file by download HERE. This file also includes my Hyperspin.ahk (for version 1.0 of HS). You can use it to find out how to fix problems with the HS default ahk(like the programming problem that prevents it from saving mess settings when you change anything during a game and exit). It also includes a layout of my control panel with my button choices identified.

Update:

I went back and reworked my drive. This added another 50 hours to my invested time. It has grown two three 3-Terrabyte drives which are all full. The main drive is as described above and I moved Dreamcast to it. The other two drives contain PS2 and Gamecube along with misc files for future updates, manuals etc.

I added games which change the following totals

  • PS2 updated to now include 1567 games
  • TurboGrafixCD now has 507 games
  • Naomi now works with 68 games
  • Updated Mame to 149 with all roms/chds updated.
  • Updated Mess to 149 with full known software collection included(not all accessable by hyperspin but available by the mess front end.
  • Updated Gamecube to 980 games
  • Added more documentary videos about arcade games.
  • ScummVM updated to latest as of my update with all available images.
  • Dreamcast(completely reworked this collection to use cdi files) 328 games.
  • Fixed a few games that were not working.
  • Added a few extra games including the fixed atart2600 ET.
  • Made many updates to the ahk file.

Other notes:

How to setup hyperspin with scummvm
http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum/showthread.php?3926-How-to-set-up-ScummVM-in-HS/page9
To add multiple games to scummvm:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/User_Manual/Adding_a_game_to_ScummVM

 

See the Night Driver Restoration which uses this Hyperspin setup.

See the Computer Space 2-Player Restoration which uses this Hyperspin setup.