Be Excellent To Each Other

Been looking at setting this up for a while.

Its a really nice front end for pretty much every emulator there is, the interface is a wheel that has all the artwork and a small video preview for each game.

Video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7P_qyrRo-0

Now for the reality of setting it up....

Its very time consuming, there are 3 components to it and you have to book in emulators in one place then set up rom paths elsewhere so you spend a lot of time pasting file paths.

Next is artwork and videos, these are not too much of an issue to get hold off. There is a site you can subscribe to for $30 a year that provides a nice tool where you enter the system you want and then specify what you want art work wise and it downloads it all. Issue here is that the folders you get from the tool don’t always match the artwork folders in Hyperspin so you are left wondering what goes where.

Finally, there are rom sets, Hyperspin has an XML file for each set, so it doesn’t follow that your existing set of roms will work if they aren’t named the same as the corresponding XML. I even found Hyperspin ready sets of roms where not named correctly. There are tools that will rename but I got a 70-80% success rate and that was on small sets of less than 50.

I had a go at setting this up over Christmas as my son still took an afternoon nap then. I managed to get some simple sets done like SNES and Mega Drive, but found that more complex and larger sets where hard work. Not really been back to it since.

This guy provides some really good tutorials on how to set things up if you have the time and it was what I followed https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb4RFF ... 77onViqoDA

So as I still really want this set up. I looked at what the Hyperspin scene frowns on which is buying a pre-configured drive. I found a guy selling an 8TB drive for £350 which by the time you take the cost of the drive away isn’t bad given the work and time needed to set this up.

After looking into it I found I would be looking at another £150 of import charges so kept looking for somebody who might send the drive as a gift.

I finally found a guy who has charged me £130 for an 8TB torrent hosted on fast seed box, it will take 7-10 days to download but the delivery for the drives from the US is 10 days. This guy also does free updates every month.

I reckon I’m a good 2 weeks away from getting this set up as once downloaded I will need to copy it from my NAS to a drive. Once I’m done I’ll be happy to do some copies for people.

There are some rules with the drives, it will need to have a specific letter for the drive and also 2 specific letters for some virtual CD\DVD drives. Not sure what these are yet the guy will confirm.

There are also smaller sets 5, 6 and 8TB. Not sure if I will get access to these as I've bought the biggest set.

This shows what is in each set

This is relevant to my interests. I shall take a proper look when I return from my holidays.

I've had a play with a lot of front ends and basically gave up on them all as too faffy - the only one i really remember liking / working was FeMAME which was a front end for the early command line only version of MAME

Certainly a nice idea to bring everything under one interface, but I wonder how many of the formats even get looked at. I've owned a Supervision and Game.com for instance and they're bloody hopeless. Mind you, the ROM sizes for them are probably tiny anyway so there'd be hardly any space saved by excluding them. At least there seems to be smaller scale versions around judging by Ebay

8 terabytes? There's a lot of CD images in there I expect.

This is the problem with stuff like this, it's like when I got my MEGA COMPLETE MAME collection last year, which the guy sent me on a 500GB hard drive, and the bulk of that is laserdisc images.

ALL THE LASERDISC GAMES ARE FUCKING SHIT. (Well, there are one or two you'd maybe return to for a second play, but that's about it.)

This would be my issue with a collection like this running from a Hyperspin frontend, how much of it is going to even get looked at, or is actually worth playing? 8TB of storage is not an entirely trivial amount for something which IMO is going to be about 97% guff that never gets used.

My current EMU set is around 8TB, its got most of what I'm getting with this Hyperspin set but is all individual sets each with there own emulators.

So this will replace it once set up, also want to build something similar to my Asrock Kodi PC that will just turn on via remote, log into windows and auto run Hyperspin on my TV. That's a stretch goal so to speak!

Only managed to get around 1.7TB down so far as the speeds are never close to my maximum (8MBS) and the guy does updates at the end of the month that kill the speed.

Also quite a lot of set up to do once I have everything, its all simple to do in steps with batch files