Home made Arcade Machine???

There are also a couple of things worth noting about displaying the games and vids when you do get them working. There are a couple of options in the settings for HS that allow you to display clone roms as well as parent roms, or just parent roms on their own, and also to display only games that have artwork, or display everything and just use text names based on your XML file.

Specifying artwork only is good and looks better, but you lose out on games you don't have title pics for. Not displaying clones keeps your wheels a lot neater, but you lose out on some unique games, which are actually technically clones of other ones (for example street fighter 2 turbo is an official clone of Street fighter 2 champion edition, but they're two totally different games, and most people think the clone, which came later, is the better game). Also some clones of games are better than others-some versions of games were bugged, more difficult, easier, etc. You'll want to be able to choose which ones you want displayed individually.

You can manually mark clones as originals by removing the text between the "<cloneof>" and "</cloneof>" tags in the mame.xml database file for your games. If there's a game name between those two tags, then your game is seen as a clone of that game by HS, if there's no text between them, it's seen as an original and is shown on the wheel even if you've disabled displaying of clones. Most ROM sets have lots of clones for many of the games in them (bigger games often had multiple cloned releases worldwide) and the clone ROM uses the same artwork and video as the parent, so enabling clones means you can have several games on your wheel that all look the exact same one after the other when scrolling, and kick in the same videos and sounds. It's messy.

I'd recommend first displaying all clones, then going through your wheel and seeing which ones you want to show and which ones you don't. Then set HS to display parents only and games with artwork only, and do these 3 things.

1-Edit the <cloneof> tags in the database file as described above for the clones you like, so they get displayed. Just open the file in notepad, make your changes and save. (it's manual data entry and is a bore to do, so back up your original and save your work regularly. Use copy/paste rather than typing the same values each time.)

2-Edit the title artwork for the clone, so it looks different to the parent's artwork on your wheel (use a colour balance in photoshop to change the colours in the parent title image, or just do a google image search for a different PNG file that has transparency), then save it as a new image named to match your clone and drop it in the artwork folder with the rest.

3-download an alternate FLV video from youtube and rename it in the same way, to match the clone. The original video sets you download will only have videos for the parents. Clone ROM videos typically don't exist, so you've got to make your own.

This way your wheel will be tidy and won't have multiple copies of the same art and videos kicking in, you'll have all the games you want, and each game on it (including clones) will have their own unique media and titles etc.

Steve SI wrote: »

I have clones turned off to keep it clean but have loads of custom genre lists that I use. Solves that prob for me and sometimes I just want games from the 80's or 90's or 1986 etc.

I have clones off, but with a good few of my faves marked as parents. Certain versions of games had cool bugs in them (SF2 guile walk forward flash kick FTW!).

I got genres working for mame, but it was a pain in the bum to sort out. Loads of fiddling with XML files and separate downloads for every genre list. I still don't think i have them sorted out for the console emulators and i'm not sure if i ever will. It's just too much hassle.

andrew241983 wrote: »

i dont mind having all the parents and clones there doesnt bother me coz im just gonna have all my favs setup anyway...

p.s thanks for all the help so far lads

you're welcome. You can edit the hyperspin .ini files for each emulator to start on favourites by default if you want. Just go in and find the line that says "start on favorites=NO" and change the no to yes and re-save.

You can also make a master favourites list if you want, which launches games from all your different emulators all from one wheel. I havent done it myself but as far as I know its just a bit of list editing to redefine what .exe file hyperspin launches for each game on the list. I'm sure somebody in here could help more than I could.

Steve SI wrote: »

I've used captchas in the past and they are very easy for spammer bots to get around...

Plus they f**king suck and are seriously annoying! Please don't put them anywhere near your site.

It is worth the fee to download everything in one go, it takes a lot of hassle out of the process and you'll be spending far more on the cab than the $25 it will cost you for the software.

Be aware though that most of the console games don't have their own custom themes. Unless you create your own from scratch the games will just use the same default theme most of the time. Most mame games generally have custom themes, but don't sign up expecting to download hundreds for the various consoles, because they aren't there.