Sunday, December 25, 2011
Day 273
Not much to report, but I had three arcade tokens and set them on the left-hand side of the marquee. As we all from the golden days know, that is proper arcade etiquette meaning that you have the next game.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Day 268
Today since it was getting so close to Christmas and I wanted the unit to be operational, I decided to disable the emulators that were still giving me trouble. Most of them were working fine, but it was always some small detail: Can't start the game without some extra step, can't exit, etc. This included Turbografx 16, NES, Nintendo 64, Vectrex and Visual Pinball.
I also enabled the shutdown feature of Hyperspin so I wouldn't have to quit the program and then shutdown in Windows. Now if I can just make Windows XP more invisible in the startup / shutdown procedure, it'll be just fine.
I also wanted to add a wireless network card to the unit, so I could also add internet radio. Unfortunately the Linksys card I had lying around didn't support the security in my network, so that was out. Odd since that card was way newer than the old Airlink 101 cards we had. But that's Cisco for you.
I also enabled the shutdown feature of Hyperspin so I wouldn't have to quit the program and then shutdown in Windows. Now if I can just make Windows XP more invisible in the startup / shutdown procedure, it'll be just fine.
I also wanted to add a wireless network card to the unit, so I could also add internet radio. Unfortunately the Linksys card I had lying around didn't support the security in my network, so that was out. Odd since that card was way newer than the old Airlink 101 cards we had. But that's Cisco for you.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Day 258
One Game, One Button, One big pain in the butt.
Today I spent the majority of the day trying to get one game emulator to work properly in the cabinet. Kega Fusion which plays Sega Genesis games. Everything thing else in the program works just fine except for exiting the emulator and returning to Hyperspin.
Nothing I tried worked. Consulted with people in the Hyperspin forums, Fusion forums, you name it. The emulator just simply refused to acknowledge what Hyperspin was telling it to do.
So I thought, I'll hack an old keyboard and make one big button that represents the escape key and that should fix it. But I'm too lazy to go through the trouble.
So I found this link:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...dows-xp-vista/
So I told Windows that one button on the X-Arcade Solo will represent the Escape key forever. Done.
Now Fusion behaves itself.
Today I spent the majority of the day trying to get one game emulator to work properly in the cabinet. Kega Fusion which plays Sega Genesis games. Everything thing else in the program works just fine except for exiting the emulator and returning to Hyperspin.
Nothing I tried worked. Consulted with people in the Hyperspin forums, Fusion forums, you name it. The emulator just simply refused to acknowledge what Hyperspin was telling it to do.
So I thought, I'll hack an old keyboard and make one big button that represents the escape key and that should fix it. But I'm too lazy to go through the trouble.
So I found this link:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...dows-xp-vista/
So I told Windows that one button on the X-Arcade Solo will represent the Escape key forever. Done.
Now Fusion behaves itself.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Day 249
Today I worked on the marquee. I could have had it done professionally by a website that specialized in this sort of thing, but I was looking at least $30 for the size I needed.
I tried the local Kinko's, but I was looking at about $22 to get it done. But for now, I was still working on keeping my expenses low.
After leaving Kinko's, I went to the library to pick up a DVD I'd ordered on their website and I decided to ask the reference desk if they did color prints. They said yes, so I grabbed a computer, dropped my flash drive in and opened the graphic image in MS Publisher (yes I know, but it was the only program they had that could print banners).
So after fiddling with the sizing a bit, I sent it to the color laser printer, paid my $2.25 and took my pages home. I had to stretch the image across 3 sheets of paper, so I knew I'd be doing some arts and crafts for this thing.
So I got home, took the remaining plexiglass I had from the bezel, cut and fitted it. Then I cropped and pasted the three pages together and attached that to the back of the marquee sheet and settled it in place and attached the metal bar to hold it up.
Not bad. You can see the seams between the pages, but I don't mind it. Maybe later if I find twenty bucks floating around I'll get it redone, but for now I'm quite pleased with it.
I've been fussing with the Hyperlaunch program to get all of the emulators to exit properly and I almost messed it up completely. My joystick can be reprogrammed to represent any key on the keyboard, so I tried to set up one of the keys to represent the Escape key and did the rest of the buttons as they were before.
It worked out all right, but there was a problem. For some reason there was about a 1 second hesitation between pressing a button and having the action executed. That's no good for video games. The response should be instantaneous. So I set it back to the factory default and left it there.
So I'm back to learning the script code for Hyperlaunch to get all the emulators to work. It's going to be tedious, but as soon as I get the whole thing working, the hard drive is going to be backed up and stored on DVD's in case something catastrophic happens.
I tried the local Kinko's, but I was looking at about $22 to get it done. But for now, I was still working on keeping my expenses low.
After leaving Kinko's, I went to the library to pick up a DVD I'd ordered on their website and I decided to ask the reference desk if they did color prints. They said yes, so I grabbed a computer, dropped my flash drive in and opened the graphic image in MS Publisher (yes I know, but it was the only program they had that could print banners).
So after fiddling with the sizing a bit, I sent it to the color laser printer, paid my $2.25 and took my pages home. I had to stretch the image across 3 sheets of paper, so I knew I'd be doing some arts and crafts for this thing.
So I got home, took the remaining plexiglass I had from the bezel, cut and fitted it. Then I cropped and pasted the three pages together and attached that to the back of the marquee sheet and settled it in place and attached the metal bar to hold it up.
I've been fussing with the Hyperlaunch program to get all of the emulators to exit properly and I almost messed it up completely. My joystick can be reprogrammed to represent any key on the keyboard, so I tried to set up one of the keys to represent the Escape key and did the rest of the buttons as they were before.
It worked out all right, but there was a problem. For some reason there was about a 1 second hesitation between pressing a button and having the action executed. That's no good for video games. The response should be instantaneous. So I set it back to the factory default and left it there.
So I'm back to learning the script code for Hyperlaunch to get all the emulators to work. It's going to be tedious, but as soon as I get the whole thing working, the hard drive is going to be backed up and stored on DVD's in case something catastrophic happens.
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