Manuals Viewer For Hyperspin

As the cabinet I'm building is focused solely on arcade gaming, I thought it would be nice to have an archive of manuals and artwork that would be able to be viewed by launching into a seperate viewer from the Hyperspin menus. It took me a while to figure out how best to do this; I started with the manuals first. The program I've decided to use to view the manuals is ComicRack (a program I was already familiar with due to my love of comics) with the addition of Ghost Script which enables ComicRack to display .pdf files. ComicRack is definitely the best comic reader software out there for many reasons. The first is that it is pretty customisable and the layout of the program interface can be changed around to suit. Secondly, the actual viewer is very slick and just looks and feels really nice. Thirdly, it has a library which has some very useful features suited for what I'm trying to do alongside Hyperspin.

So first I put a bunch of manuals in the ComicRack folder which installed in the emulators folder in Hyperspin. Then in HyperHQ I configured a new item on the main wheel called Manuals which I set to contain a sub-wheel. On the subwheel I wanted to have each letter of the alphabet to make the viewing of the manuals much easier as there will be quite a lot of them. To do this I went into databases folder in Hyperspin and located the, newly created, 'manuals' folder. In here I created a manuals.xml and started to apply the following code:

<menu>

<game name="0-9">

<description>#0-9 Manuals</description>

<cloneof></cloneof>

<manufacturer>Press F11 & F3 for full screen.</manufacturer>

<year></year>

<genre></genre>

</game>

<game name="A">

<description>A Manuals</description>

<cloneof></cloneof>

<manufacturer>Press F11 & F3 for full screen.</manufacturer>

<year></year>

<genre></genre>

</game>

<game name="B">

<description>B Manuals</description>

<cloneof></cloneof>

<manufacturer>Press F11 & F3 for full screen.</manufacturer>

<year></year>

<genre></genre>

</game>

<game name="C">

<description>C Manuals</description>

<cloneof></cloneof>

<manufacturer>Press F11 & F3 for full screen.</manufacturer>

<year></year>

<genre></genre>

</game>

</menu>

This code will give me the letters A,B and C on the wheel plus a 0-9 title for Manuals beginning with a number.

So now I have my alphabet set-up I want ComicRack to launch and display the specified Manuals. To do this I added the folder containing the manuals into the library in ComicRack and then created individual reading lists for each letter of the alphabet. To do this, right-click in the sidebar and select 'New List' and name it accordingly. Then highlight all of the files you wish to put in that list, right-click, and then 'add to list' and choose the desired reading list.

Next, in the sidebar right click on a reading list and select 'export reading list' and save the '.cbl' file in the same folder as the manuals within ComicRack. This .cbl file is what we'll use within Hyperspin to launch the reading list that corresponds to our wheel. When naming the .cbl file in ComicRack, make sure that it matches the assigned letter that we put in the manuals.xml file; e.g. <game name="A"> the corresponding file should be named A.cbl.

Now all that is left to do is to configure the wheel in HyperHQ. Set 'execution' to normal instead of HyperLaunch, then put in the .exe path for ComicRack. Next set the path for the folder of where the manuals are located, enable 'full path to roms' and also 'search subfolders' and finally in the 'extensions' box type cbl.

And there it is, a fully functioning archive and a great resource to just peruse, all that's left to do is to create a custom theme and wheel art. Using pretty much the same method but with some slight changes I'll be adding a viewer for cabinet artwork next.