800 gigs of hyperspun emulated action on a MKII cabinet.

[MTPPC]

So a few months back I "finished" my MAME cabinet. It has  a 25" Hantarex Polo horizontal CGA monitor driven by Soft15Khz and 2 players with 8-way joysticks and 6 buttons each. It runs off or a core 2 duo PC via the fantastic J-PAC. Hyperspin seems to run reasonably. In the meantime, I've acquired an 800GB data collection containing the following emulators:

 <game name="MAME"/>
  <game name="Atomiswave"/>
  <game name="Mugen"/>
  <game name="Atari 2600"/>
  <game name="Atari 5200"/>
  <game name="Atari 7800"/>
  <game name="Atari Lynx"/>
  <game name="Atari Jaguar"/>
  <game name="Colecovision"/>
  <game name="Future Pinball"/>
  <game name="Intellivision"/>
  <game name="Nintendo Entertainment System"/>
  <game name="Super Nintendo Entertainment System"/>
  <game name="Nintendo 64"/>
  <game name="Gameboy"/>
  <game name="Gameboy Color"/>
  <game name="Gameboy Advance"/>
  <game name="Sega Master System"/>
  <game name="Sega Genesis"/>
  <game name="Sega CD"/>
  <game name="Sega 32X"/>
  <game name="Sega Dreamcast"/>
  <game name="Sega Game Gear"/>
  <game name="Sega Naomi"/>
  <game name="TurboGrafx 16"/>
  <game name="Neo Geo Pocket Color"/>
  <game name="Panasonic 3DO"/>
  <game name="Zinc"/>
  <game name="JukeBox"/>
  <game name="Daphne"/>

What I'm finding is that all of these emulators are need some configuration work. I'm slowly but surely getting the keymapping worked out for my cabinet. My J-pac is set up with pretty much the default MAME keycodes, but every emulator seems to need to be configured.

At this point, I have the following emulators working:
MAME
Sega32x
SegaCD (crappy games)
Sega Genesis
Atomiswave (works with occasional crashes)
Daphne (Seems to require key configs for each game)
Turbografx 16
Super Nintendo (Had to manually create keymaps in zinput.cfg and pick a 640x480 video mode in zsnesw.cfg)

Next up I'm going after the Ataris and then the neo geo pocket. I'm leaving the NAOMI for last as it seems to not even want to run. Obviously NAOMI should be the best for newer games if I can get it to run well.

Now for my questions. Is anyone out there running any of these emulators on a cabinet? If so, what do you find you spend the most time on? Is it still MAME? I'm really looking for folks to trade config files with to reduce the work in making the machine as good as it can be. My mame.xml for hyperspin is terribly bloated and chasing down these random config issues is killing me. I don't mind doing it, but if someone has already done some of this work, maybe we can trade some files.

[kahlid74]

My experience has been that every time I build a new cabinet I have to tweak config files anyways.  The next machine I'm building is finally for me, so I'll be aiming for all of the emulators you've listed below, but I'm not there yet.

[mytymaus007]

its pretty hard thing to do my friend. i have 30/50 configured so far in my set up with a 4TB Hard drive i5 2500k set up runs everything great no hiccups. BUT...even if i gave yo my entire hard drive you will still need to remap everything also install certain files in your system that some emulators need. Im sure if was easy there would be alot of people selling their HDs left and right Good Luck in your adventures! OH yeh im not sure with the Jpac but with ipac as long as you have 1st play stick and player buttons wired to the correct inputs also the coin Daphne should work fine with no configurations

[BadMouth]

I have all those except for a couple (never did get Jaguar working, but it sucks anyway).
The only must-have that you're missing is Sega Model 2.  
I started with Uncle T's guide that's stickied in the MALA forum and kept adding from there.

I'm sure I have over 100 hours in setting everything up.
I haven't played 90% of the console emulators beyond setting them up and making sure they work.
There are a couple sega genesis and atari 2600 games that I had as a kid and will play for 5 minutes or so before the nostalgia wears off.
The novelty of playing a gameboy game on a big screen wears off in about 20 seconds.

I'm not bothering with anything but arcade games on my next cab.

[EvilGreenDevil]

why the need to swap files?  The Hyperspin boards and community are very helpful and can get you in the right track to fixing any issues you have. Hyperspin is intuitive enough that you can pick up on the configuration after a few systems.

But if you're the type to go out and get an 800G drive already preloaded, going the extra step probably isn't on the list of things to do.

[BadMouth]

I'm leaving the NAOMI for last as it seems to not even want to run. Obviously NAOMI should be the best for newer games if I can get it to run well.

Not sure which emulator you're talking about.  There are three different emulators that can run NAOMI games and the roms are different for each of them. 
The most common problem for NullDC or Demul is missing Visual C++ and Directx runtimes linked to here: http://code.google.com/p/nulldc/

[yotsuya]

I'm not bothering with anything but arcade games on my next cab.

Amen.

[MTPPC]

I got the NAOMI working. That was pretty important because my cabinet has a MVC2 marquee and move cards. I found a weird problem where Hyperlaunch had a scripted shortcut of Q+S to exit. Changed those letters to 2 unused and recompiled the script. Q and S were buttons 2 and 3 for P2 so every time you mashed on hard punch and help in MvC2 it would crash. That's fixed. I'm going to knock the handheld emulators of my main wheel.

I'm starting to enjoy Dragon's Lair now that I don't have to pump quarters into it to learn. I'm sort of dreading the manual culling of the game lists.

[edekoning]

I'm going to take the opposite approach, as I don't understand having a cab with thousands of unplayed games. When my cab is finished, I'll setup mame with a handful of my favorite games. From there I'll slowly be adding games (+emulators), but only when I really want to play it, or when a friend requests it. That way all the time spend on the configuration mess is kept to a minimum.

[JayB]

That's the most sensible way to go about it as it quickly gets to being more about doing boring admin stuff than actually playing the machine as intended. Also I've found you end up game hopping if you're not particularly good first off on a game than trying to get better.

I'd love to say I take my own advice 

[BadMouth]

I'm going to take the opposite approach, as I don't understand having a cab with thousands of unplayed games. When my cab is finished, I'll setup mame with a handful of my favorite games. From there I'll slowly be adding games (+emulators), but only when I really want to play it, or when a friend requests it. That way all the time spend on the configuration mess is kept to a minimum.

POKéROM


 

In all honesty, I like knowing I have backups of complete collections in case they ever disappear from the internet.
I have complete sets for systems I have never even installed an emulator for.  

I keep my main arcade gamelist limited to 200.  The rest of them are there.  They just aren't in that list and can be added in a few seconds.

[mytymaus007]

I'm going to take the opposite approach, as I don't understand having a cab with thousands of unplayed games. When my cab is finished, I'll setup mame with a handful of my favorite games. From there I'll slowly be adding games (+emulators), but only when I really want to play it, or when a friend requests it. That way all the time spend on the configuration mess is kept to a minimum.

POKéROM


 

In all honesty, I like knowing I have backups of complete collections in case they ever disappear from the internet.
I have complete sets for systems I have never even installed an emulator for.  

I keep my main arcade gamelist limited to 200.  The rest of them are there.  They just aren't in that list and can be added in a few seconds.

No doubt the way things are going thats the best advice get em just in case!

[ChrisK]

There are a couple sega genesis and atari 2600 games that I had as a kid and will play for 5 minutes or so before the nostalgia wears off.
The novelty of playing a gameboy game on a big screen wears off in about 20 seconds.

To each his own, but there are a few Atari games that hold up for me now.  I'll still play Tutankham, Keystone Kapers, and Sky Jinks, and Combat is still fun for two players.

For the Gameboy there are some great GBA games that hold up as well as any SNES game.  The Metroid and Castlevania games in particular are great.  Not sure I'd play them with a stick, but with a gamepad they're great.

I do agree that a big screen with really low res graphics can be kind of weird.  I played the original B&W GameBoy Super Mario on my 60" TV a long time back and the resolution was so low it was hard to visualize the graphics for all the giant pixels.

[MTPPC]

I've had an epiphany since I started this thread. I only want two things on this machine. Things that work and things that will be used. Here is my current configuration:

Mame - set to load favorites on emulator start. Favorites consists of about 360 games that work with 8-way and 6 buttons.
Sega Naomi - 10 games that work perfectly on Makaron - couldn't figure out the nulldc control configuration.
Daphne -


The following all need to have the favorite game lists set and set to start in favorites
Sega Master System - undecided
Sega Genesis - clearly a kids' favorite emulator
NES, SNES and N64 - undecided on whether to keep. All working good. No favorites picked.
SegaCD, Sega32x, Sega Dreamcast - need a favorites list
TurboGrafx - Nostalgic games, but I should probably dump.

I skipped the Ataris because even though I had a couple of those system, I thought they sucked back then so why would I waste my time on them now? I decided I didn't need any handhelds and there were more than enough fighting games so I didn't need Mugen or Atomiswave.

This is my favorites.txt list for MAME for anyone who might have a similar setup:

10yard
1945kiii
19xx
2020bb
20pacgalr0
25pacman
3countb
3stooges
4dwarrio
64street
88games
9ballsht
aafb
abcop
aburner2
actfancr
aerofgt
afighter
airbustr
airwolf
ajax
aladmdb
alcon
alexkidd1
aliens
aliensec
alpham2
altbeast
amidaru
androdun
anteateruk
aodk
aof
aof2
aof3
arabianm
archrivl
armwar
aso
astdelux
asterix
asteroid
atetrisa
avengrgs
avsp
avspirit
baddudes
bagmans2
batman
batmanfr
bcstrya
beastrzr
beezer1
berzerk1
bestri
bjourney
blazstar
blueprntj
boblbobl
bosco
bottom9
breakers
bstars
bstars2
btime
btimem
bub68705
bubbles
bublbob2
bublboblr1
bucky
burningf
bwidow
bzone
captaven
cclimber
cclimbr2
centiped
cfarm
champbb2
changesa
chopper
circuscc
cninjau
cobracom
contra
crsword
crush
ctomaday
cyberlip
defender
digdug
digdug2
dino
dkong
dkong3
dkongjr
dkongo
docastle
docastle2
dogfgt
dorunrun2
dowild
elevator
elim2
excitebk
fantjoura
finalb
flipshot
fredmemus
frenzy
frogger
froggers2
frogs
galaga
galaga88
galaxian
garou
gaunt2
gaunt22p
ghouls
goldnaxe
gorf
gorkans
gowcaizr
gravitar2
gslgr94u
gtmr
guzzler
gyruss
hstennis
indytemp4
invaders
joemacr
journey
joust2
joustr
jrpacman
junofrstg
kangarooa
kchamp
kf2k3pcb
kinstb
klax3
kof2000
kof2001
kof2002
kof2003
kof94
kof95
kof96
kof97
kof98
kof99
ladybug
levers
liquidku
llander
lnc
majtitl2
majtitle
maniach
mappy
mario
martmast
matrim
megaman
megaman2
mhavoc
milliped
missile
mkla1
mmatrix
mp_gaxe2
mp_soni2
mp_sonic
mpatrol
mrdo
mrflea
mshu
mshvsf
mslug
mslug2
mslug3
mslug4
mslug5
mspacman
mspacmnf
mtlchamp
mtrap
mvp
mvscud
mwalku
mx5000
mysticri
narc
naughtyb
nbajam
nbajamte
ncv1
ncv2
neocup98
neomrdo
nrallyx
nss_smw
openice
overtop
pacland
pacman
pacmanf
pacmania
pacmod
pacnpal
pacplus
paperboy
pbaction
pbobblen
pc_rrngr
pengo4
phoenix
pigouta
pleiadce
pooyan
popbounc
popeye
prehisle
preisle2
progear
pspikes2
psyforce
punchout
qberta
qbertqub
qix
quarterb
rallyxa
rampage
rbtapper
redbaron
ribbit
ridhero
rimrockn
ringdest
rmpgwt
rmpgwt
roadf
roadrunn
roboarmy
robocop
robocop2
robotron
rocnrope
rodland
rollerg
rungun
ryga
salamand
salmndr2a
savagere
sbasketb
scobra
scramble
sdodgeb
sf2ceuc
sf2ui
sfa3ud
sfexu
sfiii
sfiii2n
sftm
sfua
sfz2alb
sfz3ar1
sfzhr1
simpsons2p
sinistar
slammast
smashtv
snowbro2
snowbros3
snowbrosc
socbrawl
solomonj
sonic
sonicwi2
sonicwi3
spacedx
spacedx
spcinv95
spdodgeb
spiders
spidman
spidmanu
spinmast
spnchout
springer
ssf2tbd
ssf2tur1
ssi
ssideki
stakwin
stakwin2
starcas
stargate
strhoop
superman
superpacm
suprlocoa
suprridr
svcpcb
svolley
swimmer
szaxxon
tappera
tempest
tetris
tetrisp2
tetrisse
tetrista
thunderj
timber
timeplt
titlefu
tmntu
toobin
tophuntr
tpgolf
trackfld
trally
travrusa
trog
tubep
turfmast
tutankhms
twinspri
umk3
upndown
vanguardc
vanvanb
vendetta2p
venture
venture2
victroad
viewpoin
vspinbal
wacko
wb3
wbml
wboy
wboy3
wg3dh
wow
wschampa
xenophob
xeviousb
xmcotau
xmen2pa
xmvsfu1d
xybots
yellowcbb
zaxxon
zekto
zerowing2
zookeep
zupapa
zzyzzyxx2

[garnerb350]

I had about the same setup as you did... I had a HARD time trying to set up certain emulators (dreamcast comes to mind) and in the end i dint really even use it hardly... My friends that are interested in building one...I tell them to just do MAME... In the end, If i could list how much often i use my cab....

1.Jukebox (a must when I'm working in my garage or people come to hang out in my garage)
2. MAME
3. Daphne (and thats just Dragon's Lair)
4. Atari 2600 (couple of games (Adventure, Haunted House, Berserk) and also to prove to people that Atari had porn games)
5. NES (excitebike, zanac, mario couple others)

The rest, I might have played 1 or 2 games that i cant remember...

If i ever get around to making a new cab... I think i will strickly make it a MAME/Jukebox cab ( with just the classics and must-haves of MAME)