gone baby gone

Not continuing this blog, there are far to many places to get the info and I started linking stuff and realised how useless it would be.

It LIVES! 4-20-09

Finally some success. After getting a English text file from the author of AtomicFE i now have the correct menu's. But another problem has came up. It appears the installer does not like me picking any drive but the C: drive. I have tried on another drive and the Install fail es at the end. One of the reasons I wanted to use the Ultimate Distro was so I could just drop the roms in and go, but since I cannot install on the Large drive I have I guess i will have to dig a bit deeper and learn how the Front End is setup. Well an Install on the default C drive, copy the MAME roms into the AtomicFE dir and fire it up. MAME games! I must admit the dir structure is a bit odd to me, but I'm sure the guy putting the package together had a reason. Took me a bit to understand the 2player Start button took me backwards in the front end. Seems this is sorta standard, but I didn't know it. So once again I'm sorta bogged down till I find out why it wont install on a different drive.

4-17-09 - AtomicFE solution

The author of Atomic FE has found my problem, a config file in the distro is in French. He has offered a english list as soon as he can get one (an older one, but hopefuly will work). So most likley no updates Untill Monday. This is the problem with French text for sure. Now if we can just get it fixed.

More with AtomicFE

Some more reply's from Author (thanks) and more testing. One thing I must Note, the disto I'm using of Atomic FE is not done by the author or supported by him (but he has been helpfull with it). English is not the first language of the Auther or the person who set up my distro, so there may be some problem in that area, very understandble, as I do not know a 2nd language at all, heck, I mess up my first as somebody has already pointed out (insulated!, its been fixed). I thought maybe when installing the two choices got swithced around (french or English) So i tried installing French. Same result. I did install the Standerd AtomicFE and it does come up english, I will be using this if I cant make the Ult Distro work. I did notice the Intro Movie in the standard edition plays way, way to slow. I have seen Youtube Videos of it and I would say its running 1/4th speed. Again, I'm guessing its something I may need to tweek or set up. I have not done one ounce of setup on the Standard.

4-16-09 Downloads and first attempts

I downloaded the Ultimate Disto of Atomic FE off the web page, and HyperSpin off of its web page. I installed both on the C: Drive in default dir's.

First Up AtomicFE Ult: The install took awhile, pretty easy, most defaults are simple, has a language selection but otherwise is like most any installer. At the end there is a warning that you will have to configure a couple emulators manually. You click exit and a dos box will come up and will in Dos Txt explain what you will need to do. LEAVE the dos window open and follow its instructions. Pretty easy again. I was confused in the Rom path on 2nd emulator you manually set up, but it seems it was already set to the correct path. Once you do this you should have the Bare bones setup. I then proceeded to fire it up.

First Hicup It did not install in english even thouhg I selected english (or so I assumed). I then uninstalled, painless, but for a large program it does take some time, and there is one dialog (maybe just for me as I installed from a thumb drive) about removing read only files. I then reinstalled making sure I selected ENGLISH. Once again the text in the Front end was french (I think?). I uninstalled and retried one last time. Same result. SO for now I'm stuck there. I have a help request in on the Official boards, and some un offical ones. I have had a reply from AtomicFE's programmer (he has been nothing but helpful from what I have seen and is one reason why I chose Atomic FE as a new FE to try). But as of right now I'm just waiting on answers. Its very possible its not an ENGLISH release, but it did ask for ENGLISH as an install option. So for right now Atomic FE is in a holding pattern.

HyperSpin: Once again a very easy to understand install, and all went very smooth, I chose the HyperSpin 0.8.0.0 release. Firing up Hyperspin shows its configured for most emulators (wheel graphics) and is very pretty. I then fired up HyperHQ, a very slick looking configuration tool for Hyperspin. Pretty easy to understand. I pointed it to Mame.EXE and the roms folder and made sure the ZIP extension was listed. I then Fired up Hyperspin and tried Mame, games all showed up, possibly the game list is built into HyperSpin , so I'm not sure if names wuld be there reguardless or not. But when a game was selected i just got a blank black screen. Some arranging of settings still showed nothing but a blank Black screen. So a question was asked (and an answer suggested) and I have yet to try the solution.

SO overall, not a very good start, all the emu's and roms did work in GameEX, so its not a problem with the parts, but the FE are currently not working. This could very well be due to my settings (and most likely is). As I have read nothing on setting them up. PLEASE READ THAT!!! I have skipped the most basic step of any installation, READ THE MANUAL/HELP file. So please don't take this as a Knock on either FE, its not. I said I was going to go through exactly what happened when I set these up. And that is what has happened so far.... More to come.

4-15-09 first steps

My machine currently has GameEX on it, which I like for the Media Center plug in, but Media Center is falling out of favor with me and like any person, new and different always seems more fun. So my goal is to get AtomicFE and HyperSpin both running on the PC. I have my roms and almost everything working with GameEX so moving to another front end should be fairly simple (ya right). Currently the main OS drive is where i store my EMU's and Front ends, the 2nd drive contains all ROMS (and MP3's , movie rips, etc). I had My roms on two external 500GB USB drives and yesterday Moved them to internal 2nd TB drive. It burned up most of the day.

Start 4-14-09

The goal of this blog is to post the process of setting up an frontend on a PC for playing arcade/console/computer roms. I have a fairly good understanding of PC's, programmed commercially in Visual C++ for a few years (about 10 years ago) and work as support for several software packages custom made for a large company. I feel I may have a little more understanding of of this type of thing then the average PC user. I am setting this up as I had tried several front ends (2-4 years ago) with little success, mostly due to lack of patients on my part. Most write ups on setting up frontends are hard to find, or wrote by people who made the Frontend so while very nice to have, are generaly from a person who has exstensive knowledge of the program. I'm going to point out where i feel steup is lacking , and also where my own stupidity/lack of understanding gets me in trouble. I have set up (succesfully) a couple front ends, and failed at a few also. The machine I will be setting this up on is a Intel core 2 duo machine running at 4mghz, 4 megs of ram, 2TB's of space on 2 drives, with a HD-DVD and DVD drive and a GForce 8800 GTX. I will be running Vista 64 with all updates and all drivers will be current as of about 3 months ago (1-1-09). Specific emulators and Front end versions will be noted when there relevancy is needed. I will be useing a MS 360 gamepad to run the frontends and the emulators.

I will go into more detail on actual settings and such when I get to that point, I plan on posts specific to each emu in each front end. So if you are looking for details, the part I think is lacking from most help things I have read, they will be here when I actuatlly get to a point where they will help.