Hyperspin vs GameX

[vaderag]

Thanks for the detailed response and story. Really interesting!

One question I have - is RetroArch an alternative to RocketLauncher?

Again, I'm fairly new myself, but from what I gather RetroArch is an "emulator" that can be run in RL.  In fact, that's what's running most of my console systems on my setup right now.  Emulator is in quotes because I guess some say it's not truly an emulator itself, but instead kinda runs other emulators or some such.  Hopefully someone with more knowledge than myself can elaborate if necessary.

This is mostly correct. RetroArch is technically a Front End. However, people often refer to it as an emulator. RetroArch is not actually an emulator itself. Rather, a muli-platform front-end for the libretro API. In other words, it aggregates many other emulators as "cores".

It's basically a FE with built in emulators.

So, this is making my head hurt

Hyperspin is a FE and people are using HS to run RocketLauncher which loads a different FrontEnd to load that specific rom in a different emulator (core)...

I don't see the benefit - you have to add the systems to RL anyway so that HS can launch it, so why add the additional layer? The modules in RL make setting up different emulators a bit of a doddle...

[Milky]

The nice thing for a newbie like me was that I only had a couple of emulators to hassle with installing on this first time setup.  Mame and Retroarch were the 2 main ones that covered the arcade and early console systems.  Mame obviously took care of the arcade classics, but RetroArch prevented me from having to get a separate emulator for Nes, Snes, Genesis, Gameboy, etc.   Once I installed RetroArch I simply had to use that as my "emulator" for those various consoles without having to get a separate emulator for each one.  Not too mention, one of my favorite aspects of RetroArch is being able to size the screen to any dimension I desire to fit my bezels as opposed to something like Mame with the preset resolutions.

[vwalbridge]

Thanks for the detailed response and story. Really interesting!

One question I have - is RetroArch an alternative to RocketLauncher?

Again, I'm fairly new myself, but from what I gather RetroArch is an "emulator" that can be run in RL.  In fact, that's what's running most of my console systems on my setup right now.  Emulator is in quotes because I guess some say it's not truly an emulator itself, but instead kinda runs other emulators or some such.  Hopefully someone with more knowledge than myself can elaborate if necessary.

This is mostly correct. RetroArch is technically a Front End. However, people often refer to it as an emulator. RetroArch is not actually an emulator itself. Rather, a muli-platform front-end for the libretro API. In other words, it aggregates many other emulators as "cores".

It's basically a FE with built in emulators.

So, this is making my head hurt

Hyperspin is a FE and people are using HS to run RocketLauncher which loads a different FrontEnd to load that specific rom in a different emulator (core)...

I don't see the benefit - you have to add the systems to RL anyway so that HS can launch it, so why add the additional layer? The modules in RL make setting up different emulators a bit of a doddle...

Well sort of...If you are a guy like me, then you can just configure every system inside retroarch then just set retroarch as your "emulator" for all your systems in HS/RL.

You have to be OK with retroarch being your "emulator" for all your systems but it's a 6 one way, half a dozen the other type of thing.

[vwalbridge]

The nice thing for a newbie like me was that I only had a couple of emulators to hassle with installing on this first time setup.  Mame and Retroarch were the 2 main ones that covered the arcade and early console systems.  Mame obviously took care of the arcade classics, but RetroArch prevented me from having to get a separate emulator for Nes, Snes, Genesis, Gameboy, etc.   Once I installed RetroArch I simply had to use that as my "emulator" for those various consoles without having to get a separate emulator for each one.  Not too mention, one of my favorite aspects of RetroArch is being able to size the screen to any dimension I desire to fit my bezels as opposed to something like Mame with the preset resolutions.

^THIS...EXACTLY.

[vaderag]

Hmm, fair enough. It does sound nice only having to set up 2 Emulators... I've already done about 10 now (half of which I didn't need to but was still learning how HL works and cant be bothered to change now as its working)

I'm not sure whether I'm going to use bezels yet - I find them a bit distracting and I like the cleanness, tho may change my mind...
I know mame only has 2 sizes on most Roms but don't they represent the original resolutions and messing with them would distort the play area?

[Milky]

Hmm, fair enough. It does sound nice only having to set up 2 Emulators... I've already done about 10 now (half of which I didn't need to but was still learning how HL works and cant be bothered to change now as its working)

I'm not sure whether I'm going to use bezels yet - I find them a bit distracting and I like the cleanness, tho may change my mind...
I know mame only has 2 sizes on most Roms but don't they represent the original resolutions and messing with them would distort the play area?

I'm pretty sure that's true about the Mame res, but I wasn't intending to skew it wildly.  It would just be nice to make small adjustments to fit some of the bezels I have.  However, the bezels mostly line up anyway so it's just me nitpicking the details. 

On the bezels, in case you change your mind I'm pretty much using big10p's bezel packs for Mame.  There are some really nice looking bezels for particular games as well as some generic arcade bezels for all of the other games.  It's worth checking out in case you may be interested.

[vaderag]

Hmm, fair enough. It does sound nice only having to set up 2 Emulators... I've already done about 10 now (half of which I didn't need to but was still learning how HL works and cant be bothered to change now as its working)

I'm not sure whether I'm going to use bezels yet - I find them a bit distracting and I like the cleanness, tho may change my mind...
I know mame only has 2 sizes on most Roms but don't they represent the original resolutions and messing with them would distort the play area?

I'm pretty sure that's true about the Mame res, but I wasn't intending to skew it wildly.  It would just be nice to make small adjustments to fit some of the bezels I have.  However, the bezels mostly line up anyway so it's just me nitpicking the details. 

On the bezels, in case you change your mind I'm pretty much using big10p's bezel packs for Mame.  There are some really nice looking bezels for particular games as well as some generic arcade bezels for all of the other games.  It's worth checking out in case you may be interested.

Ah man, they do look nice! Now I might have to change my mind!!

[Farmboss]

I will probably get lambasted for this but here goes.  I tried Hyperspin at first and tried to figure it out but only had marginal success.  The tedious bit was getting the media-images and videos.  I could get it to run but it sure did not look like any of the you tube videos

I ended up getting a prebuilt USB drive (Mame only).  Now this USB drive does not have all the Mame games.  But the games provided gave me all the media and videos and looked great. 

Here is the secret surprise.... When I added new roms to the set provided THEY HAD THE CORRECT MEDIA immediately .  That is right the USB disc ($50) had tons of the media files for roms not even on the disc.  I suspect the website I had ordered from, which also sells a hard drive for a couple of hundred, just forgot or did not care to delete all of the media files when they copied to the USB drive.

This is a quick way to get a good looking interface and was well worth the $50.  The thing is that by reverse engineering what they provided on the USB disc I finally figured out the correct way to structure the files.  You may need to figure out some of the XLM files still in order to add the new Roms.  But it is a simpler way to get started.