Day 1150

Been a long time since I posted. I couldn't get the button disc to work again so I got rid of it and went the simple route:

Since I wanted to pretty up the tabletop for the joystick and mouse, I made a shelf with a couple of hinges, along with some angled wood pieces for the shelf to rest on. Then I installed another shelf along with a bracket taken from a plastic keyboard drawer for the keyboard to sit on which can retract into the cabinet.

The keyboard was an old one I had that still used a PS2 connector, but it had an analog dial for volume control.

Now it doesn't look quite so ghetto. For the escape function, I took a modified mouse on a pedestal that my Dad used to control the movies he watched and reprogrammed the mousewheel to act as an Escape key. It'll do temporarily.

Day 469

My first summer with the cabinet and I'm finding out a few issues.

1. We've gotten two new kittens and they've taken to crawling inside and messing with the wires, particularly the 3 buttons for controlling the volume and exiting the games. Now I've got to reattach them and put the controller high up, as well as closing up the two holes with mesh so they can't get in again.

2. With the old-style CRT monitor it's getting quite roasty-toasty in there. Since I can't afford a new flat panel monitor yet, I'll have to install some small fan to blow the air to the upper vents in the cabinet itself.

3. I'm going to keep my eyes open for an analog steering wheel game controller for some of the driving games, especially for Spy Hunter. Driving with a digital joystick doesn't quite work the same. Which brings me to where would I set the controller if I had one. I'm going to have to work that out, perhaps a stackable shelf over the joystick. I'm also toying with the idea of using the Bluetooth dongle to communicate with a Nintendo Wii stick, that also might do the trick.

Day 360

I'd forgotten how much I hated doing soldering. I spent a whole afternoon last week trying to get one wire to stick to the circuit board and got frustrated in the process. So last weekend, I picked up a ten-pack of micro alligator clips from Radio Shack and simply crimped the wires and clamped them in place.

Now where to attach the buttons. Whilst rummaging around my garage, I came across the metal endcaps that attached to our old closet doors. So I grabbed one and tested it in the holster hole of the cabinet. The hole was just a *tiny* bit too small. Then I grabbed the Dremel tool and started sanding out the hole and made the whole house smell like a lumber yard. Then I drilled three holes in the endcap and attached the buttons in place and clamped the other end of the alligator clips, fed the whole thing through the holster hole and voila!

Now the left button escapes from any game and the two in the center control volume up and down. Now I can disable the special keys on the X-Arcade Solo so I can stop accidentally exiting a game I'm in the middle of.

Day 351

 After several months of playing games with the X-Arcade Solo, I realized that the buttons I set up for changing the volume control weren't working too well and I was accidentally hitting the escape button too many times.

So I found several instructables and videos on Youtube for hacking (modifying) a regular keyboard to make a custom button set. I went to Radio Shack and purchased a bag of 4 momentary pushbuttons and spent this afternoon disassembling and tracing the button lines to the control board. I had to take it slow as the tightness of the lines make it difficult to follow. I'm pretty sure I traced them correctly.

Now I have to get some wire, solder them to the control board and solder the other ends to the buttons. If the test works, then I'll attach them to a board and attach the board to the left hand hole on the cabinet. Then I can pretty that up, disable the custom buttons on the joystick and everything should be good.

Day 314

Today I thought I'd try a different frontend. The reason for this is that I wanted to incorporate Internet radio and I was having a great deal of difficulty. I spent all this morning installing a program called GameEX (http://www.gameex.com/) from scratch onto its own partition along with all the emulators for all the games. I discovered today that after 6 hours, I accomplished more with it than I had with Hyperspin in the last 8 months. On top of that, ALL of my emulators are working with little trouble.

There are some pros and cons.

Pros: First, the program was intuitive and simplistic. It self installs and it self updates. It gives you a list of all the emulators you want and installs them and organizes the folders for you. All you have to do is drop in the game ROM files into their proper place and that's it.

Next, it has its own built-in jukebox program and reads your library from Windows Media Center. This is a pro and a con, but I'll cover that later. It also has its own built-in Internet radio which you can drop in the URL of any radio station you like.

It also has newsfeeds, weather, Hulu and Youtube access, etc. You can enable and disable these to your whim.

Everything is customizable, including the themes, backgrounds, startup videos, sounds and so on.

Now the cons:

First the jukebox reads the library from the Windows Media Center. Now that is only a pain because I couldn't add my jukebox DVD to the library because "Microsoft knows best" and doesn't think anyone would want that. Basically, I just moved the individual mp3's from the DVD and dropped them into the My Music folder, which sucked up an additional 4 GB of hard drive space. Feh on Microsoft. Once that was done, the Jukebox filled right up.

Next, GameEx, while it is free, does have a nag screen with a wait time when you first fire the program up. The nag screen is to encourage people to donate for the program's development, which is a good thing. While I was trying to keep the expenses to a minimum, I believe the program is a good investment and well worth the measly $17 donation for the quality. The bottom line is the nag screen isn't really a con.

While GameEx may not be as flashy and colorful as Hyperspin, it also doesn't create the incredible jigsaw puzzle atmosphere of putting a cabinet together for having fun. Unless you're into that sort of thing.

Day 311

Well, for awhile it's been a matter of adding more decorations to the side panel:

 Atari 2600 Superman (needs one more sprite).

Galaxian

 Boss Cat from Mappy

Recognizer from Tron. (This one I had to create the pattern myself.











I added a new wireless card to the minitower and I'm now working on adding an internet radio feature next to the Jukebox. I did find a radio program called Screamer, but I'm still working out how to get it to work properly in Hyperspin. It should be a simple command line reference, just the program name and the URL of the radio station website. Passing it through Hyperspin has proven to be a bit more difficult or perhaps I'm not thinking of how the program passes data in the first place.

Almost forgot: I replaced the intro video for Hyperspin when I fire the cabinet up:

Day 290

For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on the side art in Perler fuse beads. I got my Niece Amanda and my wife to help me. It's still a work in progress, but I like it so far.













I've been asked by a couple of people how my set up works. It's not easy, but it plays out like a jigsaw puzzle. Getting so many game emulators to work under one environment and to get them to act seamlessly is quite a trick.

To begin with, you need a central control program. This is where Hyperspin comes into play.  It's freeware and can be found here: http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/ . It's highly recommended that you create a free account there as it gives you access to the forums where you can locate tips and tricks as well as ask for help.

You will need the following:
Hyperspin
Hyperpin (if you want to include virtual pinball machines).
Hypertheme (to edit and create new themes for each game console / game.
Hyperlaunch (This creates a universal control for each emulator that you use. You can also use pre-written scripts for each emulator that is supported. make sure you get at least version 2.0 as this simplifies how each emulator is handled).

* I highly recommend reading the wiki, especially about Hyperlaunch as this will save you a lot of heartache. They also have video tutorials on how to get started.

Now, here are the individual emulators that I'm using so far. Always make sure you use the latest version you can get.

Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (arcade games):
MAME: http://mamedev.org/
Note: This is the reason that Hyperspin initally exists. This emulator works extremely easy with the hyperspin front-end. Each game can be configured to your controller as well as doing so globally across all the game roms you have.

Atari 2600:
Stella http://stella.sourceforge.net/
Note: One of the easiest to set up. Very straightforward.

Super Nintendo:
Z-Snes http://www.zsnes.com/
Note: Also very easy to work with, but the configuration for emulation setting hotkeys are very particular. If you use an Arcade-X Solo, you will have to disable all of the hotkeys that you don't need, as it uses keyboard presses rather than Joystick functions.

Sega Genesis:
Fusion http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/genesis/fusion.html
Note: This one was a dog to work with in terms of exiting the emulator. A lot of people had trouble with it. Otherwise, it's a top-notch emulator.

Laserdisc games (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc.)
Daphne http://www.daphne-emu.com/site3/index_hi.php
Note: This is a very good emulator. However, the agreement they have with Digital Leisure is that you must own the DVDs of the Don Bluth games. I also had trouble getting it to recognize Dragon's Lair II. Very configurable keyboard-wise, but for some reason I had to edit the .cfg file by hand as the program wasn't writing to it properly.

This one isn't a game console, but I wanted to use my arcade cabinet as a jukebox.
DWJukebox http://dwjukebox.com/
Note: Very easy to work with, though I have had a few crashes out of nowhere. Other than that, it works just fine.
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Now, these are the emulators I'm using with which I'm still having trouble:

Nintendo Entertainment System:
Nestopia http://nestopia.sourceforge.net/
Note: Works really well. The only trouble I'm having with it is that when you select a game from the main wheel, you have to make another key press in order for the game to actually start. Haven't figured this out yet. Ditto with Fceux http://fceux.com/web/home.html .

Nintendo 64:
Project64 http://www.pj64-emu.com/
Note: Works just fine, however I'm still having trouble getting it to exit.

Vectrex:
ParaJVE http://vectrex-emu.blogspot.com/
Note: As the manufacturer release all of the games into the public domain, this emulator actually contains all of the game carts in the emulator itself, so you don't need to download the game rom files individually. This one works really well, but I'm still trying to figure out how to launch the game without using the onboard navigation.

Pinball machines:
Virtual Pinball: http://www.vpforums.org/
PinMAME: http://www.pinmame.com/
Note: You need both of these programs to play pinball and getting them to cooperate with hyperspin is still beyond me. There is also Future Pinball http://www.futurepinball.com/ which works better, however will only work properly on your system if your monitor is turned to portrait mode. Meant for full-on pinball cabinets.

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Now, some of the issues I'm still having so far:

Response delay: When you hit the selection button for some games in a particular console (Sega Genesis for example), there's a time delay and if you have an impatient player or if you're not sure it detected the button press, the selection button may be hit a few more times, ending up with multiple instances of the emulator running at the same time which tends to completely mess up the game play. What I need to enable is a key press trap (meaning allowing one key press of the selection buton and allowing no more), along with a "Please wait" screen to at least let you know that the press was detected. This is especially true for the laserdisc games which have a long start up time (about 30 seconds) before the game is playable.

Universal volume control: I'd like to have a background program running that controls the volume for everything, from Hyperspin to the jukebox program to the games themselves.

Windows XP needs to be more transparent: It's not really a problem per se, but I'd like the arcade cabinet to be more seamless.

Autorecovery: If there's a crash in a program, I'd like a background program to detect this and basically click on OK for those annoying crash windows. That way I don't have to plug in a keyboard to fix something.
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My hardware is as follows:

Shuttle SK43G minitower with an Intel processor running about 1.2 Ghz.
512 Mb RAM
30 Gb hard drive (divided into three logical drives. C for Windows, D for Laserdisc games and E for everything else).
Geforce 8400 PCI video card.
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