Some HyperSpin Themes

I've been spending a lot of time learning how to use Photoshop recently so I could create my own themes for HyperSpin. The themes are what you see when you navigate to a particular game or system within HyperSpin and are the key thing in customising the look of the Kitchen Arcade. Below are some photo's of what I've come up with so far:

Great 100 Mile Rally

Battle Garegga

I've also started playing a quite a bit of Gyruss and I'll post my first go at a review soon...when I stop messing about in Photoshop :-)

Pictures of the Kitchen Arcade

Dreamcast Update: I've managed to get nullDC working and successfully booting games so Jet Grind Radio is now playable on the Kitchen Arcade.

Whats running on the Kitchen Arcade?

The whole point of replacing the PC in the Kitchen Arcade was so it could run the HyperSpin front end and a number of different emulators. Installing HyperSpin was really simple and there's full instructions on their website (link shown in My Favourite Gaming Sites at the bottom). The site also includes help on getting some of the more popular emulators running as well.

The current list of emulators running on the Kitchen Arcade is:

• MAME - Arcade games
• ZSNES - Super Nintendo
• Nestopia - Nintendo Entertainment System
• Project 64 - Nintendo 64
• Virtual Boy Advance - Gameboy Advance
• Stella - Atari 2600
• Kega Fusion - Sega Megadrive/Genesis

I've also got some jukebox software installed so I can listen to music when cooking and washing the pots :-) I'm in the process of trying to get the Sega Dreamcast emulator nullDC working as well but it's not quite there yet. It keeps crashing when I try and boot a game but I think I've had a bit of a breakthrough this evening so hopefully it won't be long before I'll be playing Jet Grind Radio!

I'll put some more pics of the cab up next time.....

The New PC

I needed to replace the aging P4 system in my arcade cab if I wanted to run HyperSpin to the level of quality I was after and chuck some other emulators on there. I already had a spare 600W power supply that I could use so placed an order for the following bits to build the new machine:

• Intel Core i3 540 CPU (3.06GHz)
• Gigabyte H55M-UD2H Motherboard
• 4Gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM (2x 2Gb)
• 500Gb Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler
• Coolermaster Elite 360 Case
• Samsung DVD Drive

It all went together pretty easily, although the CPU cooler is a tight fit in that case, and the system posted first time :-)

Once I'd installed Windows I spent a bit of time overclocking it to see what I could get out of the CPU. At the moment I've got it running at 4GHz with headroom to go higher if needed, but tbh nothing I've put on there so far has come close to struggling and the system's running quite cool so I think I'll leave it for a while. The only other work I've done is to wire the button in the arcade cab, which is top right in the pic (Push to Eject Coins), to the Power On/Off header on the motherboard. So now, when the cab is sealed up, I can turn  it on and off using the old coin return button :-)

That's it for the hardware, HyperSpin and emulators are next........