Hyperspin, finally done.

Optimus Prime · 25-03-2011 1:34pm

Cool, yeh i was just confused because i was thinking that the ones with logos should have a theme. Thats grand maybe they are all working so. After i set it up last night, minus the videos, i messed around with that scanlines thing. Im delighted with how it looks, i found a website with some different scanline images and settings for the mame.ini file that work great, the images where different than the ones you had in that zip file. I tried a few of them but found one on the net that works brillliantly. I know it cant replace the look of an original arcade monitor but the games look way better with the scan lines.

Quick question on the wheel. Im only going to have mame and a jukebox on mine, for now anyways, i was wondering, you know the way if you only have two things on the wheel it repeats them? like - mame, jukebox, mame, jukebox, mame, jukebox etc. is there anyway to just have one mame, jukebox on the wheel and only scroll up and down once instead of the whole wheel spinning around repeating each one? Not sure if that makes sense!

Steve X2 · 25-03-2011 6:01pm

Yeah the scanlines make a big difference. It can take a while to get the perfect scanline artwork to look good with the monitor your running it on but it's totally worth it, especially if it's a lcd screen.

My main pc screen is a 27" lcd and mame looks really bad until I load up the perfect scanline for that monitor, I ended up making my own scanlines as the ones i found just didn't look right to me on that screen.

As for the repeating main wheels, I'm not sure how you disable that as I haven't come across anything about it on the hyperspin or other forums. If you just had the one wheel then that would be fine as you could set hyperspin to single mode and it loads right into whatever wheel you select in HyperHQ

keithgeo wrote: »

Cool, yeh i was just confused because i was thinking that the ones with logos should have a theme. Thats grand maybe they are all working so. After i set it up last night, minus the videos, i messed around with that scanlines thing. Im delighted with how it looks, i found a website with some different scanline images and settings for the mame.ini file that work great, the images where different than the ones you had in that zip file. I tried a few of them but found one on the net that works brillliantly. I know it cant replace the look of an original arcade monitor but the games look way better with the scan lines.

Quick question on the wheel. Im only going to have mame and a jukebox on mine, for now anyways, i was wondering, you know the way if you only have two things on the wheel it repeats them? like - mame, jukebox, mame, jukebox, mame, jukebox etc. is there anyway to just have one mame, jukebox on the wheel and only scroll up and down once instead of the whole wheel spinning around repeating each one? Not sure if that makes sense!

Optimus Prime · 30-03-2011 6:45pm

Right heres another one for you!! whats the story with "High Scores" I would like to keep my high scores in games like donkey kong, pacman etc. not too bothered about street fighter 2and that, more the retro ones like those two and space invaders etc. can it be done?

Steve X2 · 30-03-2011 7:05pm

keithgeo wrote: »

Right heres another one for you!! whats the story with "High Scores" I would like to keep my high scores in games like donkey kong, pacman etc. not too bothered about street fighter 2and that, more the retro ones like those two and space invaders etc. can it be done?

MAME should keep the high scores for you if you have the hiscore.dat file in the mame directory. You can use HiToText to display them on hyperspin if you like. I had it set to display the high scores for a while but disabled it as it just didn't look good to me.

MAME definitely does keep my high scores. You do need to do a little bit of messing around with the HyperLaunch.ahk file as if you run MAME through Hyperlaunch it wont save them by default as you are not exiting MAME in the normal way and that's when it saves the high scores.

You need to remove the hotkey line in the MAME part of HyperLaunch.ahk which will let you exit MAME normally when ran from HyperSpin and will save the scores for you. And of course always backup that .ahk file before editing

Edit:
This the hotkey line by the way.

Hotkey, %exitEmulatorKey%, CloseProcess

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Relikk · 30-03-2011 7:20pm

Standard MAME doesn't save the high scores even with the DAT, anymore. You have to build your own version to support it. =/

Steve X2 · 30-03-2011 7:25pm

Relikk wrote: »

MAME doesn't save the high scores even with the DAT, anymore. You have to build your own version to support it. =/

I use and as far as I know keithgeo is using MAME 0.137 in hyperspin and this version still supports hiscore.dat.

I find 0.137 the best version for hyperspin, good balance between game compatibility and playability.

I always have the latest version with a full romset as well for use outside of hyperspin. It's easy to compile MAME anyway to add the support back in and to do "other" things as well

Myrddin · 30-03-2011 7:31pm

Steve SI wrote: »

I use and as far as I know keithgeo is using MAME 0.137 in hyperspin and this version still supports hiscore.dat.

I find 0.137 the best version for hyperspin, good balance between game compatibility and playability.

I always have the latest version with a full romset as well for use outside of hyperspin. It's easy to compile MAME anyway to add the support back in and to do "other" things as well

Actually I always wondered was there a way to compile a variant that told you what was missing (cross reference between the ALL & AVAILABLE tabs)?

Relikk · 30-03-2011 7:32pm

I'm sure they stopped (officially) supporting it fairly early, 0.107, or so. Hmm, I'll have to look into the next vanilla build and do a few tests.

Steve X2 · 30-03-2011 7:38pm

Relikk wrote: »

I'm sure they stopped (officially) supporting it fairly early, 0.107, or so. Hmm, I'll have to look into the next vanilla build and do a few tests.

Actually your correct. I think 0.107u1 was the last to support hiscore.dat.
Think I had a brain fart :eek:

Anyhooo,
MAME now officially use a folder called "Hi" to save high scores in individual files.

You will still need to remove the hotkey line in HyperLaunch.ahk

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Optimus Prime · 30-03-2011 7:44pm

Ok haha.. it seems i have to compile a diff high score file into 137 is that right??

Steve im using your version so do i need to do that or is there an easier way? as of now its not saving highscores for me in donkey kong etc..

Steve X2 · 30-03-2011 7:50pm

keithgeo wrote: »

Ok haha.. it seems i have to compile a diff high score file into 137 is that right??

Steve im using your version so do i need to do that or is there an easier way? as of now its not saving highscores for me in donkey kong etc..

If you play a game in MAME directly without using hyperspin does it save the score?

Optimus Prime · 30-03-2011 7:51pm

Not sure to be honest i didnt think of trying that. Ill be able to take a look in about an hour or so.

Optimus Prime · 30-03-2011 10:26pm

I tested Donkey Kong US Set1 direct from mame and it DOES save it!! happy days. so something with hyperspin is stopping it.. would love to get this sorted out. any ideas??

FYI. got my highest donkey score testing it there

ill be copying that file over haha..

Optimus Prime · 30-03-2011 11:26pm

Triple post sorry, but just figured this out.

In hyperspin, wheelsettingsm select mame and choose execution "normal" as opposed to hyperlaunch and it works with mame 137.

Steve X2 · 30-03-2011 11:50pm

keithgeo wrote: »

Triple post sorry, but just figured this out.

In hyperspin, wheelsettingsm select mame and choose execution "normal" as opposed to hyperlaunch and it works with mame 137.

Or you can just edit that file I mentioned earlier if you want to use hyperlaunch with it.

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Optimus Prime · 30-03-2011 11:55pm

what does hyperlaunch do anyways?

just looked at that file, what do i have to edit there?

Steve X2 · 31-03-2011 12:20am

keithgeo wrote: »

what does hyperlaunch do anyways?

just looked at that file, what do i have to edit there?

You can define a lot of advance scripting for your emulators and apps. It doesn't do a lot with MAME usually as its not really needed. But for other emulators and apps ran within Hyperspin you can define what you want to happen when you click that button to load the emulator/app.

You can tell it to mount an ISO using daemon tools before it allows the emulator to load up for example or to blank the screen for a few seconds while an emulator is loading up so you cant see the windows and dialog boxes opening up and things like that. There is so much you can do with it really.

Basically that HyperLaunch.ahk file with all the scripts in it gets compiled into HyperLaunch.exe any time you make changes . It doesn't do it automatically though, you must compile it yourself.

I'm sure you can find a better explanation for it on the hyperspin forums as they have real experts on it there who know it better than me.

Steve X2 · 31-03-2011 12:39am

keithgeo wrote: »

just looked at that file, what do i have to edit there?

Basically your MAME section in that file probably looks like this:

;*************************************MAME**************************************

else if (systemName = "MAME" && executable = "mame.exe")
{
    hideDesktop()
    Hotkey, %exitEmulatorKey%, CloseProcess
    Runwait, %executable% %romName%, %EmuPath%, Hide UseErrorLevel
    Process, waitClose, %executable%
    exitapp
}

Change it to look like this and it will now save your high scores when hyperlaunch is used:

;*************************************MAME**************************************

else if (systemName = "MAME" && executable = "mame.exe")
{
    hideDesktop()
    Runwait, %executable% %romName%, %EmuPath%, Hide UseErrorLevel
    Process, waitClose, %executable%
    exitapp
}

You will have removed this line:

Hotkey, %exitEmulatorKey%, CloseProcess

You will need AutoHotkey installed to compile the file.
And I highly recommend Notepad++ to edit the file itself as Notepad++ plays friendly with the scripts.

So with AutoHotkey and Notepad++ installed you will open the HyperLaunch.ahk file with Notepad++ (After you have backed it up) and make the changes and save.

Then right click on HyperLaunch.ahk and select "Compile Script". This will create a new HyperLaunch.exe file (check the time stamp on it to make sure its new)

And that's it really. It may sound a bit complicated but it really isnt as you will see yourself if you do it. It's harder to explain it than it is to do it.

To be honest you probably wont need to use any advanced scripting if you are just using MAME. But you have a Jukebox set up as well and you could do a few things with that if you wanted to.

.

Optimus Prime · 31-03-2011 7:23am

Did that there no problem, once again thanks for the help!

Andrew76 · 31-03-2011 8:18am

Cheers folks, there's some really useful Mame info on these pages. Much appreciated.

Steve X2 · 31-03-2011 8:25pm

keithgeo wrote: »

Did that there no problem, once again thanks for the help!

Happy days

Optimus Prime · 04-04-2011 12:57pm

Yet another Hyperspin question!! :pac:

Its running a bit sluggish for me, not the games, the menus loading, and the video at the start is blocky. i currently have it turned off. Now im running this on a dual core with 4gigs or ram, the graphics card is an onboard intel so im not sure how good it is. Would you say the problem is with the graphics card?? it runs no problem on my laptop! This pc is fairly decent so its kind of annoying! any ideaS?

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 1:51pm

keithgeo wrote: »

Yet another Hyperspin question!! :pac:

Its running a bit sluggish for me, not the games, the menus loading, and the video at the start is blocky. i currently have it turned off. Now im running this on a dual core with 4gigs or ram, the graphics card is an onboard intel so im not sure how good it is. Would you say the problem is with the graphics card?? it runs no problem on my laptop! This pc is fairly decent so its kind of annoying! any ideaS?

I'd imagine its the on-board graphics letting you down. I've the same specs except for a budget Ati pci-e card & well you seen it running on my cab its perfectly smooth.

Its a process intensive programe, but the specs you have are more than enough to run it perfectly (minus the gfrx card)

Optimus Prime · 04-04-2011 1:55pm

cool ill have to pick one up off adverts so, what would you recomend spec wise?

Steve X2 · 04-04-2011 1:57pm

The current version of hyperspin is 100 percent CPU driven. Meaning it doesn't use the graphics card for the frontend at all.

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 1:58pm

keithgeo wrote: »

cool ill have to pick one up off adverts so, what would you recomend spec wise?

A PCI-e card with 256MB should be more than enough. I've run all the big emulators on my cab with these specs through Hyperspin & it hasn't missed a beat. Anything more powerful is a waste

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 1:58pm

Steve SI wrote: »

The current version of hyperspin is 100 percent CPU driven. Meaning it doesn't use the graphics card for the frontend at all.

What version is that? I think I'm still on 0.9 or something similar.

Optimus Prime · 04-04-2011 2:04pm

I shouldnt have a problem then realistically and yet its jumpy? i have the latest version installed, its really annoying I think i might copy off the entire Hyperspin\emulator folder onto an external and rebuild the pc fresh.

Steve X2 · 04-04-2011 2:05pm

EnterNow wrote: »

What version is that? I think I'm still on 0.9 or something similar.

0.9 and 1.0 are 100 percent CPU driven.

v1.0 is the current version and v2.0 is coming soon, hopefully the new version will use the graphics chips as well. I'm sure it will as they will surely be compiling it with a newer version of flash that supports GPU acceleration.

.

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 2:07pm

Steve SI wrote: »

0.9 and 1.0 are 100 percent CPU driven.

v1.0 is the current version and v2.0 is coming soon, hopefully the new version will use the graphics chips as well. I'm sure it will as they will surely be compiling it with a newer version of flash that supports GPU acceleration.

.

Well there you go Keith, software driven would indicate something related to your setup.

Intel Core2Duo @ 2.6Ghz & 4MB DDR2 400 RAM for me runs it perfectly well. What OS are you using?

Steve X2 · 04-04-2011 2:08pm

keithgeo wrote: »

I shouldnt have a problem then realistically and yet its jumpy? i have the latest version installed, its really annoying I think i might copy off the entire Hyperspin\emulator folder onto an external and rebuild the pc fresh.

Do you have any antivirus software running on the machine? Sometimes that will kick in and slow things down when you first load up hyperspin.

My main PC has antivirus and all that but the machine I'm setting up for hyperspin has nothing on it, for increased performance. Everything is scanned before it gets to that machine

.

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 2:10pm

Steve SI wrote: »

Do you have any antivirus software running on the machine? Sometimes that will kick in and slow things down when you first load up hyperspin.

My main PC has antivirus and all that but the machine I'm setting up for hyperspin has nothing on it, for increased performance. Everything is scanned before it gets to that machine

.

Same here, the pc in the cab is a barebones install with everything non essential removed or disabled.

Optimus Prime · 04-04-2011 2:17pm

Its just your standard XP install, nothing else on it at all really other than hyperspin and mame. I might just rebuild it because ive messed around with it a lot in the process of setting things up, eg i went from a later version of mame to 137 and i was using max arcade on it originally and now hyperspin, it might just need a fresh install, ill try that first before i go getting a graphics card.

Steve X2 · 04-04-2011 2:20pm

I have a fairly beefy gamer pc setup(i7 970 CPU, geforce 580 dual sli, 12gb ram) but when I run Hyperspin on that PC it will sometimes run a bit jerky for a few seconds as all the security stuff kicks in and then go back to normal.

I think its all the flash content within Hyperspin. It might depend on what antivirus you use as well. I'm using Microsoft security essentials as its very good and also fairly lightweight.

.

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 2:38pm

Does the standard XP installation see all 4Gigs of ram? I used XP64 because the version I had would only see 3GB (file system limitation or something).

Optimus Prime · 04-04-2011 2:41pm

Yeh your right, you need 64bit installed to see the whole 4gb otherwise you only get 3. Ill see if i can get my hands on 64bit, shouldnt be a problem.

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 2:49pm

keithgeo wrote: »

Yeh your right, you need 64bit installed to see the whole 4gb otherwise you only get 3. Ill see if i can get my hands on 64bit, shouldnt be a problem.

I have it here somewhere if your stuck, but it means your losing 25% of your ram by using the 32 bit version. That being said, why don't you use Vista/7? The only reason I chose XP64 is because Soft15Khz isn't compatible with the later OS's yet, & I needed Soft15 due to my arcade screen. Your using an LCD correct? I'd be going Win7 all day long if I were you (assuming HS runs under Win7?)

Steve X2 · 04-04-2011 2:49pm

Just a quick note on the operating system.

I did a test with windows xp 64bit and windows 7 64bit running on a core 2 duo 3.06ghz with 4gb ram and integrated graphics @1080p.

The system with windows 7 ran hyperspin and MAME a whole lot better than the XP one. Just something to think about.

.

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 2:52pm

Steve SI wrote: »

Just a quick note on the operating system.

I did a test with windows xp 64bit and windows 7 64bit running on a core 2 duo 3.06ghz with 4gb ram and integrated graphics @1080p.

The system with windows 7 ran hyperspin and MAME a whole lot better than the XP one. Just something to think about.

.

Well it would, its a more polished OS & far more efficient with process management etc. Try run Soft15Khz under Win 7 though

Optimus Prime · 04-04-2011 2:53pm

Hmm looks like i have some choices to make! Yeh originally i had xp installed because i first had a graphics card installed running soft15hz hooked up to tvs! I then sold the graphics card and bought an arcadevga, which i then sold too and just decided to go with an lcd. Just wondering can you autlogon windows 7? I think you can, actually i know you can so ignore that. yeh maybe ill go with 7 so if hyperspin etc is compatible with it.

Myrddin · 04-04-2011 2:55pm

keithgeo wrote: »

Hmm looks like i have some choices to make! Yeh originally i had xp installed because i first had a graphics card installed running soft15hz hooked up to tvs! I then sold the graphics card and bought an arcadevga, which i then sold too and just decided to go with an lcd. Just wondering can you autlogon windows 7? I think you can, actually i know you can so ignore that. yeh maybe ill go with 7 so if hyperspin etc is compatible with it.

Absolutely, if your not using Soft15 then Win7 is the way to go man. Install it & cut it back to thye bare minimum, no anti-virus etc.

Optimus Prime · 04-04-2011 3:37pm

The more i think about win7 the more im wondering how much hassle it will be, like can you bootskin it, change that windows logon screen to generic background colour etc. I can be a bit picky about stuff like this, i mean i want it booting up without a trace of microsoft and at the minute with xp i can do that.

Steve X2 · 04-04-2011 6:20pm

keithgeo wrote: »

The more i think about win7 the more im wondering how much hassle it will be, like can you bootskin it, change that windows logon screen to generic background colour etc. I can be a bit picky about stuff like this, i mean i want it booting up without a trace of microsoft and at the minute with xp i can do that.

Well the Windows 7 logon screen is easy and you don't need to run any theme software either. Grab a copy of TweaksLogon and change the logon screen to whatever you want and apply, then it saves it and leaves nothing running in the background. I use the attached image on my logon screen at the moment on my main pc and it looks well @1080p, if you like that sort of thing.

As for the boot logo, I think thats a bit harder to change in win7. It would be easier to have no boot logo at all but I'm sure the logo can be changed as well, somehow.

.

Optimus Prime · 05-04-2011 10:15am

Looks easy enough to change it:

http://www.coderforlife.com/projects/win7boot/

Optimus Prime · 07-04-2011 9:30am

Rebuit with Windows 7 Last night, 64bit. its still sluggish on the video at the start and loading the themes. So i guess its the graphics card. Going to Grab a couple of new pcs later and build them and see if it makes a difference. The graphics card (onboard) was 256mb card with 64 Video Memory according to the specs showing in Windows 7.

Myrddin · 07-04-2011 9:42am

keithgeo wrote: »

Rebuit with Windows 7 Last night, 64bit. its still sluggish on the video at the start and loading the themes. So i guess its the graphics card. Going to Grab a couple of new pcs later and build them and see if it makes a difference. The graphics card (onboard) was 256mb card with 64 Video Memory according to the specs showing in Windows 7.

Very strange that, & no anti-virus or anything installed?

Optimus Prime · 07-04-2011 9:52am

Nope nothing at all except Windows764bit, Hyperspin and mame. Its strange because windows itself runs exteremly fast, ie i open windows explorer and it pops up instantly, 0 waiting. Im half thinking it might be the speed of the hard disk maybe? I dunno, ill try a different pc later.

Myrddin · 07-04-2011 9:58am

keithgeo wrote: »

Nope nothing at all except Windows764bit, Hyperspin and mame. Its strange because windows itself runs exteremly fast, ie i open windows explorer and it pops up instantly, 0 waiting. Im half thinking it might be the speed of the hard disk maybe? I dunno, ill try a different pc later.

What is your video file directory structure? Ie does HS have to navigate many folder levels to find the videos?

Optimus Prime · 07-04-2011 10:03am

No its basically c:\hyperspin\ then the videos are in there wherever the folder is, so its about as top level as the folder structure could get.

Steve X2 · 07-04-2011 4:20pm

Thats weird alright. Maybe do a quick video or something to show us how slow or jerky it is.

I'll make a quick vid later of how it runs on a medium spec pc with integrated graphics.
Specs are:
Dell optiplex usff 755
4GB ram, i might take out 2 an see how it runs.
core 2 duo 3.2ghz
1TB external drive (so if anything is running slow it will be this as its over usb 2 and not an internal drive)

This pc has antivirus/firewall and all that stuff so it should be as jerky as your hyperspin.

Will stick it up later.

.

Hyperspin, finally done.

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