As a child, the very first game system my parents bought for me and my brother was the Sega Genesis. Bundled with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, it provided many hours of play as I worked to reach the final boss stage and complete the game. That actually didn’t happen until after a few years, when both of us became seasoned Sonic gamers. Strangely enough, Sonic 2 was the only game we would ever own for the Genesis until many years later, when Genesis games were so cheap that I picked up a few select titles from the used bin at Blockbuster video.
That was the late 90s. Fast forward to 2014, when I discovered HyperSpin, a multimedia-focused frontend for game emulation. As a frontend, HyperSpin provides an interface that links together a number of different game emulators to create a single point of access to play any console, computer, or arcade game. Since then, I have been working on creating a HyperSpin setup that is controllable entirely from USB joypad controllers so that I could one day create a tabletop gaming arcade. This blog post documents my progress.
Right now I am still working on completing the computer-side setup – making sure emulators run properly, configuring game bezels, removing games that don’t work, etc. I’ve included the following set of consoles/arcade systems, all of which can be played with a USB gamepad controller:
- MAME
- Atari 2600
- Atari 7800
- Atari Jaguar
- Atari Lynx
- Bandai WonderSwan Color
- Casio PV-1000
- Commodore Amiga CD32
- Entex Adventure Vision
- Epoch Super Cassette Vision
- GCE Vectrex
- Mattel Intellivision
- Microsoft MSX
- Microsoft MSX2
- NEC PC Engine
- NEC PC Engine-CD
- NEC SuperGrafx
- NEC TurboGrafx-16
- NEC TurboGrafx-CD
- Nintendo Entertainment System
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System
- Nintendo Famicom
- Nintendo Famicom Disk System
- Nintendo 64
- Nintendo Game Boy
- Nintendo Game Boy Color
- Nintendo Game Boy Advance
- Nintendo GameCube
- Nintendo Super Famicom
- Nintendo Super Game Boy
- Nintendo Virtual Boy
- Nintendo WiiWare
- Panasonic 3DO
- Sega SG-1000
- Sega Master System
- Sega Genesis
- Sega CD
- Sega 32X
- Sega Dreamcast
- Sega Game Gear
- Sega Naomi
- Sega Saturn
- SNK Neo Geo
- SNK Neo Geo AES
- SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color
- Sony PlayStation
- Sony PSP
The system can be expanded to include many more gaming platforms with varying requirements for successful gameplay – the only limitations are harddrive space!
I also created a set of game bezels using HyperSpin user nosh’s original artwork that show how the original game system’s controller has been re-mapped to the USB joypad controller:
Eventually, the plan is to build a desktop gaming cabinet akin to this one:
