Did I just waste my time, or is this useful?

[mrjah]

I just DL'ed Hyperspin two days ago, to compare it against another FE for my new MAME (and more?) cab. This is my first cab and I'm very new to this whole software side of the MAME experience. I haven't seen all of the FEs yet, but I'm VERY impressed with what I've seen from the Hyperspin demo and I think it's safe to say I'll be using Hyperspin.

I did, however, quickly grow tired of seeing that "NO IMAGE AVAILABLE" placeholder when a game image is not available for display on the wheel. Why not just have a little generic image to give the game name? I have a short attention span and didn't want to do any more reading tonight on settings (although Hyperspin is very easy to use), so I wrote a quick little thing to parse the full MAME XML game list and create a generic .PNG image for each game that didn't already have one in Hyperspin's MAME wheel image directory. Now I can see all of the game names as I spin through the wheel, even the ones that don't yet have a beautiful theme and wheel image.

Due to time constraints and a complete lack of development environments on this computer, I just used the first bit of ActiveX shareware I could find to convert text to PNG, and ran it to make generic looking images through Excel's VBA editor. Ugh. How's THAT for a prototype? :)

It turned out ugly and imperfect, but functional and legible. The shareware I used puts a red watermark on the resulting image, so I set the image background to red to hide (most of) it. I now have a wheel image for each of the 2,653 games in my XML file.

I've browsed through the forums, but I hadn't seen the "official" way to avoid the "NO IMAGE AVAILABLE" placeholder. Did I just waste 30 minutes, or is this generic set of images useful? Is there a Hyperspin setting that just shows filenames or game descriptions instead of the "NO IMAGE AVAILABLE" placeholder?

I'm happy to share a screenshot, the wheel images, ActiveX thingy, and Excel VBA code (again, forgive me) with anyone who wants them and/or wants to improve on them. Again, this assumes that anything I've done is useful.

Thanks for creating such a great FE, Hyperspin folks!

[brian_hoffman]

There are apps here to create an image from a rom directory to use as wheel images. As far as wasting your time it depends on how you look at it. If you want a text based FE that can simply list your games from a directory go with gameex.

Im assuming you chose HS because of how nice it looks.. It looks that nice because games are themed and its not text drivin.
Glad you enjoy the FE.

The thread Im referring to is here
http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum/showthread.php?t=384
:)

[Dazz]

Thanks mrjah. Someone created a similar application some time ago, but it had some limitations and the developer hasn't been back around in a little while. Post up what you have and I am sure that someone will find it useful. I personally have been trying to write a similar application, but I lack the know how and patience to try to learn right now. I'd like to see a screen shot of what you have and perhaps even try out the program.

[mrjah]

Oh -- to be clear, my concern about "wasting my time" pertains only to creating the app to automatically parse out game titles and build the wheel images.

I KNOW I'm not wasting my time by choosing HyperSpin. It looks great and feels very natural. Consider me a convert!

I'll check out the apps that others have already created for making the wheel images. If they do everything my little prototype does (and likely more), I'll just use those instead of posting something new that doesn't work as well.

Thanks for the replies.


Edit: I just tried out HyperLogo. It's definitely better than my tool! Aside from a tendency to crash 1/3 of the way through the job, it's still overall the best way to go for this. Not sure if that bug will be fixed...