not alot

well not alot has happened in the world of the cab or even the project over the past month as too busy sorting the PSX stuff out. database and dat done tho. was a night mare.

Solving the problem

Well the gameboy problem yesterday has been fixed seemed ok with tat DX update so problem solved and vba-m seems to be alot smoother and updated more compared to original vba. Only thing that needed to be done was make sure the GUI was setup first and full screen activated as then everytime its accessed it goes into full screen auromaticly. The Gameboy theme is screwy tho i can here the video from EmuMovies.com but dont see it. Think it was originaly setup with the video not active. Intellivision Default Theme seems little messed as well as the console is infront of the wheel art awaiting on jhabers to upload to check out what people have submited see if its just an out dated one i have. Used mess for this as it seems 100% compatable but we'll see how it plays out over time.

Now for the mother of all of this M.A.M.E i compiled my own mamesrc to being 64 bit along with a no-nag script so when i load up the games i dont get the blahblah blah illigal to rub your nuts against this machine in blahblah contry press my joystick Left And Right then i'll let you in BS.

Well had the gut feeling it wasnt going to work straight away but i was wrong straight in on the classic Gauntlet.

for those who cant remember this classic here you go

Plus little history

Mugen now, tricky to setup from what i was guessing when reading the tutorials but ended up that you make a shortcut to the game in the rom directory and link it to that. problem i had was it couldnt close when i hit escape. more testing needed.

Seems like you can only exit the game via the game itself. hittint the Esc key only closes 1 instance of hyperlaugher :S there is

altho this is a give away for when i revisit when i build the CP

(NOTE 1) Some Mugen games use "esc" to get to their options menu.
"Esc" will close Mugen down cleanly but you may want to use another key to shut it down (so you can access these options) by changeing the default (at the top of the original HyperLaunch.ahk or search in hyperlaunch.ahk):
exitEmulatorKey = esc
to another key or a (2) key combo
exitEmulatorKey = ~2 & ~4 ;for example


thats it for tonight Neo Geo CD next

the Life of Commadore

Start of the day was pull together all the TOSECAmiga and the C64 roms down. started it off as no-intro then realised that wasnt right. so tosec it was and thats what the guys who wrote the database files were using and i should have guessed by the file format of the game name they used :S. so downloaded all the roms then building them back up on my seedbox to make sure i have everything and its taking some time. would never have thought the Amiga set would be so big the whole tosec set was 15gb but hopefully once its all down and corrected it will be smaller.

The C64 seems to be complete not as big but thats a good thing so will start looking at that at a later date to make sure we have everything in the database.

So back to the coding. Brolly made the sugestion on using stella for the Atari 2600 so i downloaded that to give it a try and it seemed to work flawless. Only problem was is that i read theres fullscreen problems will have to look more into that  and also have djvj tell me how to change the config to not look in the roaming directory but to look from the stella directory itself.

Also downloaded WinUACLoader set it up as well just not looked more in untill i get the amiga roms to try it. So back to the codeing. There was nothing on HS-fe or UG about setting up Emerson Arcadia 2001 so had to use my own ideas of getting it to run and it was simple. just like a WoW GM copy and paste FTW heres what i used

;**********************************Emerson Arcadia 2001***********************************
else if (systemName = "Emerson Arcadia 2001" && (executable = "mess.exe" ))
{
hideDesktop()
Hotkey, %exitEmulatorKey%, CloseProcess
RunWait, %executable% arcadia -cart  "%romPath%%romName%%romExtension%" -skip_gameinfo -nowindow -nonewui, %emuPath%
}


worked as well ^_^

Channel F next.

;**********************************Fairchild Channel F***********************************
else if (systemName = "Fairchild Channel F" && (executable = "mess.exe" ))
{
hideDesktop()
Hotkey, %exitEmulatorKey%, CloseProcess
RunWait, %executable% channelf -cart  "%romPath%%romName%%romExtension%" -skip_gameinfo -nowindow -nonewui, %emuPath%
}

this is so easy lol but theres probably errors with it :S but will see once i have a proper look when i go throught it all once i know everything loads the emulator up as i need to go through what controls they use.

I'll not bore you with more code but list what is completed unless it dont use mess then i'll put the code.

FOr GBA i use VisualGameboyAdvance-M seems to be more up to date few issues wehre popups of mising dll and XAudio2 Googled for fix and it said to download DX9Runtimes you'd think a win7 PC would be more up todate with that but the link was

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en#QuickInfoContainer

i'll test this properly tomorrow

Also managed to get Atomiswave working as well tested it on a main box and flawless. if you dont know what atomiswave is heres it running in HS-fe

The Update

What a fool i was getting stressed over MESS not working. who'd have thought you need bios files to get the games working. not me lol. Also managed to to get mame64 to output the full games xml out so i can start looking at that with djvj to get a getter minted version instead of having all the bios and clones in there.

mame64 -listxml

that brings the list to the window but we dont want to do that

mame64 -listxml > games.xml

There we go an output of 44mb of all the infor we dont need lol but easy strip down in xmlspy and excel.

Cracked on with setting up the rest of the systems in alphabetical order and set them up with mess to then its easy just to update the 1 emulator instead of multipule. heres the errors thats came across so far

Atari 2600 feels to be over screened on breakout need to try it on a main box see if i get the same issue

Atari Jaguar tried running the games zipped wouldnt work till i read on UG thanks to djvj that the games need to be unziped. worked straight away with Project Tempest

Atari Lynx tried to setup in mess altho it said on site it was ok checked my roms for the bios and get this

lynx    : lynx.bin (512 bytes) - NEEDS REDUMP
lynx    : lynxa.bin (512 bytes) - NEEDS REDUMP

so either my bios roms are broke or its still not 100% working. gonna try Handy see if that works better

in handy again tried failed kept saying not a valid lnx file :S till UG to the rescue with this comment

Author: djvj

    *  Handy cannot load roms in zips that have a . (period) in them. Keep these games unzipped (I only found 2)
   
Time to unzip and waste some space :P

Well that didnt work it could be 1 of 2 things either its the stupid header isnt in the file as i remember this was an issue we had with the NES roms and LYNX is the same or its because handy needs the LynxBoot.img googleing now on phone since no net at the parents house :S

And i've sorted it needed the Lynxboot.img and my roms were screwed. need to create a dat and match it against the HL dat and xml and if it needs changes gonna have to sort it :S  ^_^ gonna revisit this one as dont think handy was working right.

need to check gauntlet as it has its screen rotated. will look into how you rotate the screen on certain games on load

Atomiswave now the fun one. using demul    V55 64bit version coming back to this one tho as the system wont full run on laptop and seemed very buggy

ColecoVision Easy as it was mess setup straight away altho the default theme doesnt play the video altho i can here it

Commodore 64 got the ahk inserted but no emulator need to find what CCS is as that is what it uses. No default theme either in the wheel

Commodore Amiga theme is a bit screwy as Zool is infront of the wheel but with art that might change will need to check the setup of it. need to look into this part

    * Run WinAUELoader.exe, select Paths tab, set WinUAE exe path, set WHDLoad path to point to your zipped games. Select Settings tab, I used 720x576 to get games as close to full screen w/o losing any part of the picture, select Center Horizontal and Vertical, also select Full Screen if you like that better. I had to make this change in my HyperLaunch.ahk to get games to work:

Run, %Executable% -mode whdload -game "%romPath%%romName%%romExtension%" , %EmuPath%, Hide UseErrorLevel

Once you are done right-click the ahk file and select Compile Script. Note: some games make the screen black and ESC doesn’t work, have to alt-tab out and possible end HyperLaunch process to continue.

    * Be sure WinUAELoader is set up properly, specifically, the paths section.  Also, you will need the kick roms as well.  I grabbed them from the Amiga Gamebase torrent also found on UG.  Then, some games went to black but some worked.  Try Lemmings specifically as it seemed to work without issue.

Here's my script:

else if (executable = "winuaeloader.exe")
{
;hideDesktop()
Hotkey, %exitEmulatorKey%, CloseProcess
Run, %Executable% -mode whdload- -game"%romPath%%romName%%romExtension%" , %EmuPath%
Process, WaitClose, winuaeloader.exe
}


What i dont seem to have is winuaeloader.exe i have winuea.exe need to check if its two diffrent things as if so need to change the AHK

Daphne all done without a breeeze only did the txt run for them

well thats took up a good 5 hours tonight along with the connor coughing alot but he seems alright. might let him have a play with all this tomorrow if he's good lol

what a night

Well had an apple mac to sort out as soon as I got in. What a pain they are to get into safe mode without sound. Luckly youtube helped there so I could get the timing right. Its all sorted now and there happy they can now get there ipod working on the latest itunes.

Tried to setup mame what a pain that was too till shane said about the mame.ini file and to edit to were the roms were. After a good old goole search the fix was

Mame.exe -cc

That created the ini and it listed all the roms. No time to do HS config tho but weekend nearly here so get through quite a bit then

The Start of a long journey

Well here we are after 13 years and still no cab. Well since helping the guys out over at Hyperspin-FE on creating databases and validating sets things have started looking up. Met some new people who have been help full and gave me the push to start this progect which started being looked at back in '98.

So first step before i create the cabnet or even control panel is to setup the front end. which im using Hyperspin-FE and also linking it with EmuMovies.com as Circo and the guy have been hard at work assisting with creating intro videos to the sets. Since i came along Minting the new databases to be 2.0 compatable and creating new databases for extra systems there now up to there eye balls.

So far AAE is setup with a few problem and also Action Max is setup too

Issues i came across

AAE - on setting up had to edit the AAE.ini file and tell it where the roms were as HS-fe was not feeding it over when executing from the front end. needs to be revisited at a later date.

Action Max - the saveme.wav file was missing and would not load up any of the videos so had to copy from the Daphne Emulator which fixed the problem. All seeded to work fine.

Here is an example of what the final product will be