WHERE TO START

Alright so you've chosen a PC to use for this project. Hopefully you have a fresh new windows installed. Part of the benefit of having a dedicated PC for this rig is so that you don't need any protection. You will NEVER be surfing the net, or EVER downloading anything from any un-trusted sources. The idea is that we can free up any system resources these programs use.

Free some memory:

1) Un-install any bloatware that often comes bundled onto some specific brands (This step can be skipped if you installed from official Windows DVD). This includes any anti-virus programs, malware scanners, adobe readers... cd-rom writing software. Anything that isn't essential to boot and use your system. Go through the list in Control Panel -> Programs. The bottom right of your screen (Tasktray) should not have that many icons. 1 for Sound, 1 for Video Card, 1 for Internet, maybe a flag (this is where you can turn off notifications about no anti-virus) and a USB icon.

2) Turn OFF windows update! You may or may not want to do at least the critical updates before turning it off. Generally these updates are related to security and they often just add unnecessary processes running in the background and stuff. Exactly the kind of thing we are trying to avoid here. It doesn't matter if "Microsoft Outlook" had a security hole in it that needs to be patched, we won't be using it!

There are some extreme things you might be able to do like disabling UAC but I would advise against it. This is pretty much it. The fastest you system will ever be. :)

Before we get into the actual setup, HS/RL and possibly some of the other programs we will be using have a couple of dependencies so you should make sure these are installed:

1) .Net Framework 4.x (I have 4.7.2 but I believe any in version 4 will do)

2) Visual C++ runtime libraries. I would suggest getting all the versions: 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2017 packages (this is fine to do as well, it just gives your system a wider degree of compatibility with any program written in C+).

3) Make sure you have the latest drivers for your AMD or NVIDIA video card. These usually have "check for update" features right in their GUI.

PREPARATIONS

What systems will I be tackling here? If you read the previous pages it will be clear that this will be a North American games focused build so no consoles that weren't released here. I was hoping to include many PS2 titles but we'll see how it goes. I will be limiting this rig to whatever fits on a brand new 5TB USB 3.0 drive.

There's a couple of things to mention here. First is "portability". At least in theory, it would be nice to use "relative paths" everywhere and have the rig be able to be moved to another PC (providing it has the dependencies installed). But I've run into instances in the past where a program just won't work without an "absolute path".

This leads to the second thing "drive letter". Whenever you plug in a USB HD, Windows will assign the next available drive letter. A and B are reserved system drives (use to be floppies), this made C the defacto OS drive (so system reserved in a sense too). You may or may not have a CD/DVD drive and another internal SATA drive So say D and E. The brand new USB drive you just plugged in would take letter F. This is all fine and dandy if it's the only drive you ever plug into the system. If you use any other drives though, even a thumbstick/card reader, at some point your drive might get mapped to G. What is not well known is that you can right click on "Computer" (right side of start menu) and click "Manage" (must be logged in as admin, this rig should always be logged in as admin!) then go to "Disk Management". Find your new drive and right click it and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths". Choose a latter letter like R (this is what I will be using). One that isn't likely to be used. The nice thing is that once you do this, Windows will remember the drive and always assign R. This will help keep everything in your rig running if we have to use any of the mentioned "absolute paths". It might help with portability down the road as well if all we have to do is map it to R drive (should be an available letter on most PC's). But I am not promising portability, just saying I will try and we'll see how it goes.

I like to be organized so just a couple notes on basic good practice... or at least some things to consider. The first is an odd one that goes back to the early days of computer use, but I don't like to have any program folders in the root of a drive. Always a folder describing the contents of the drive first. So for the sake of this project, I will make the first folder on our new drive "ARCADE". I also like to use all caps. Just lets me know that this is a folder I created when looking at paths.

R:\ARCADE\

Everything will be installed within this folder... in folders of their own! I only say this because a huge number of users would install everything into the HS folder, including RocketLancher. Just NO! RL is it's own program. It has it's own media that is used for different purposes (yes similar folder structure), but different media. It's not tied to HS either, you can use it with other FE's but we can look at that more later, let's get one FE going first hahaha.

Another good idea is that on another drive somewhere (not C: drive!) make a folder called INSTALL or SETUP. This can even be a thumb drive. We are not making a complete backup.

**Install as little as humanly possible to drive C. If for any reason your OS gets corrupted and you can't boot (can happen with a simple power failure), a simple format of the drive and a fresh install of windows will have you back up in no time.

D:\SETUP\

Just throw a copy of whatever install programs you download and use. The first two and probably the most important are of course Hyperspin and RocketLauncher. These don't have any install files per se, just extract them to your desired location:

DOWNLOAD: HyperSpin

DOWNLOAD: RocketLauncher and Media Pack

R:\ARCADE\HyperSpin_1.5.1\
R:\ARCADE\RocketLauncher\

You might as well grab the RL media pack as well. It extracts into the RL folder. It really doesn't have that much media in it but it will lay out the folders and such with examples so you know where to put stuff later when/if you want to use it.

If for some reason you have issues downloading, I would simply try a different browser. Throw those 3 files into your SETUP folder after they are extracted and we are ready to start configuring.

* If you are running an updated version of Windows 10, you may have to grab this file and place it in the same folder as "HyperSpin.exe": sxs.dll

INITIAL SETTINGS

First thing we need to do is make sure HS and RL are properly connected. Start by going into your HS settings ini and switch the path from the old Hyperlaunch to RL. Note that Hyperlaunch only needed a path to the folder it resided in. RL actually needs a path right to the .exe (RL.exe NOT RLUI.exe!)

Next we head over to RLUI to make a couple of settings. There are 2 spots we need to look at:

*use the magnifying glass at the far right to browse for your actual hyperspin.exe

This last pic might be a little hard to see. Basically there is only RL listed. You can click the "+" symbol and add a FE (HS). Set the path to HS again here and choose HyperSpin for the "Name" and both plugins. Beside that "+" are buttons that you can make the selected item the "Default" and "Active" FE.

One last thing to do is navigate to the /RocketLauncher/Settings/ folder. Delete the existing "Global Emulators.ini" if there is one there already (may have been created first time you ran RL.)

Then rename the "Global Emulators (Example).ini" to "Global Emulators.ini".

That's it! You should now be fully connected. We are almost ready to start configuring emulators but first we need to talk a bit about controls. The joystick controls for HS have historically been very bad. It's one of things that will seemingly work and then all of a sudden the wheel will just lock up or start to scroll in one direction very fast. No way to stop it either, have to ctrl-alt-del and kill HS. They did add a "analog deadzone" option in HS 1.5.1 that may or may not help??? If you want to try it, go ahead. But if strange things start happening when browsing the wheel, you'll know why.

For me, I chose to use a program called JoyToKey (JTK) for navigating HS. It's one of the 2 keymappers (other is Xpadder) that RL officially supports. It's also useful for exiting emulators that don't allow you to map an exit emulator key to a joypad. Unfortunately, these are both "paid" programs (although I think JTK only costed me $10). For people looking for a free option, you can use the "Startup Script"to map navigation controls. It won't help with exiting emulators from a joypad but there are ways around that.

For those of you that are going to use JTK, lets take a look at how setup works

JOYTOKEY

DOWNLOAD: JoyToKey

R:\ARCADE\JoyToKey_5.7_en\

** Download the "Zip" version so you can just extract it to the location you want. I added the "_5.7" to the folder name simply as an easy visual as to what version I am running. Yours may be newer or you you can choose to omit it altogether.

If you are familiar with JTK already, you may be tempted to say "I know how it works" and skip this guide. But we won't be using it in the traditional way. We want RL to manage all the profiles so we will make almost all profiles in RLUI not JTK itself!

Now a very important fact about HS/RL is that when you first start up HS, RL is NOT running yet! So it can't handle any profiles yet. Soon as you load your first game RL will start and be able to control all the profiles from that point on. We still have to do something about when you first start HS so we will create that profile in JTK:

When you first open JTK there will be one profile. It may be named "Default" or "Profile1". Just right click the profile and rename it to "HYPERSPIN". Then in the right pane adjust the controls to your liking. In this profile the wheel navigation is mapped to the POV but you can put it on the first analog stick if you wish. Or both and have it controllable by either one. I would advise against mapping HS controls on player 2 though. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Next thing you'll want to do is go to "Settings" and then "Preferences" and make sure these two items have check marks:

** You need to make sure these setting stick! Close and re-open JTK to make sure the above two options are still checked and the HYPERSPIN profile is still there! If it's not saving, it means you ran JTK from another location the very first time you ran it. This created a Windows registry value that pointed to that folder. To solve this, do the following:

click "Start Menu" and type "regedit" in the searchbox
click "edit" ---> "find" and type "joytokey" in that searchbox
edit the value of the "IniFilePath" key from the old location to our new location

** Also make sure your JTK folder is NOT "Read Only".

Now the settings should save. If you are still having issues saving for some reason, right click on joytokey.exe and check the "run as administrator" box. I generally avoid trying to do this so only do it if you really have to.

Finally we just need JTK to start on windows boot. Now some tutorials (including one I wrote a while ago) suggest that you add the path in HyperHQ's "Startup Program" section. This seems to make sense at first and is one of things that seemingly "works". Here's the thing... and I hate trying to explain this because I don't even know the terminology let alone have any real grasp on how it works, but I think it has something to do with "Tabbing order" and the fact that it is being called from another program (HS) and gets placed as a "child process" of HS instead of it's own process. I know people have used HQ's startup program feature for other things but they are run and then stay open. For JTK, RL needs to close an re-open it to load the correct profiles. I had 1 user who was having an issue where he would load a game and none of the controls were responsive. All controls "in-game" are handled by the emulator so this was clearly not a JTK problem. I suggest to click on the screen somewhere with his mouse, wait 2 seconds then try again. Sure enough controls were fine. This is known as a "focus" issue and it's not just an HS thing, it's a Windows thing. You can't input any commands into a window if it doesn't have "focus". Simply having JTK already running before he started HS fixed the issue. In order to avoid any of this happening on my or anyone I help's rig, I simply advise people to not load this particular program in HQ.

The easiest way to have JTK loaded and ready to go is to right click JoyToKey.exe and create a shortcut. Then place this in your Windows "Start Menu" --> "Startup" folder (You can drag it there, just hover over the Start Menu button while still holding down the mouse button).

** Note for those who are NOT running a dedicated PC like we are here in the guide. The HS profile has "enter" and "escape" keys in it so those button presses can be activated at any time! Even when in regular windows apps, explorer, a browser...

Ok let's fire up RLUI and make all this work. Your first stop is setting the path to your JTK exe and setting the Frontend Profile:

Then over in Settings --> Mapping we'll enable keymapper support and tell RL to use JTK.

Finally we'll head over to Keymapper --> JoyToKey and create our fundamental profiles. You'll want to click the "plus" sign (or little drop down arrow) 3 times and create all 3 profiles: HyperSpin, RocketLauncher, and _Default. Then with HS selected in the bottom pane click on the "Edit Selected Profile" button. JTK will open (notice the HyperSpin profile isn't all caps?). It should be set exactly like the HS profile we set up in JTK itself earlier. There is no save button, just close the window. The RL profile is basically only used for RL's "Pause" feature. All you need to map in that one is the 4 arrow keys and "enter" and "escape".

There is no need to do anything with the "_Default" profile. It should be left blank. If you set the above 2 profiles and have a profile for every system you set up, there will never be time when the _Default profile loads.

That's it! That should cover all your basic navigational needs. All controls "in-game" will be handled by the emulators. We have some more uses for JTK but I will cover that when we get to it. We're ready to look at adding systems now.

Please go to "MAME"