HyperSpin interview with BadBoyBill

Its safe to say HyperSpin is the best looking front end there is. We had a little chat (question and answer) with one of the hyperSpin authors BadBoyBill. You can also read our HyperSpin review here.

1. What are some of your first video game experiences?
The first games I played were on the TI-99, we had a few in the house with a lot of cartridges. I remember games like Parsec, Congo Bongo and a wide variety of text based adventure games which were really fun, but it wasn’t until I got a NES that I really started to get into games heavily.

2. Any favorite systems or games past or present?
My favorite games of the past would probably be the NES Dragon Warrior series and LoLo series. I was mainly interested in fighters in the arcade. We would
wash cars and mow lawns just to get money to play Street Fighter 2 and MK1. Killer Instinct is also one of my favorites.

The crowd surrounding the machine screaming and yelling was pretty insane. I would really like to have one of those machines. I also like shmups, but don’t have any personal
favorites. Today I like my PS3 and my Nintendo DSi, but I rarely have time to play it seems.

3. What made you interested in emulation, and why?
Probably when I first say the NES being emulated. I didn’t even know about MAME yet when I saw that. Once I saw MAME I thought it was pretty cool.

What really set it off though is when I saw people building arcade cabinets to put their emulators in. From there I knew that this was going to be a great hobby.

4. What made you decide to create the HyperSpin?
HyperSpin was made because I wanted to bring the Ultracade style experience to home users that couldn’t afford to have one themselves. I talked to the UC creators and they liked it alot and even helped in some ways. The individual animated themes for individual games really caught my attention.

This was something not done in any FE that I knew of. I then started adding a lot of features that I knew would make the interface even better and handle multiple systems.
I thought it would be the perfect community project where people could come together to create and share themes. Today there are many theme creators and contributors.

4.5 HyperSpin amazing, but how will it mature?
Some people think that because HyperSpin doesnt have views for detailed game info , statistics , history etc.. that it fails or that we can’t add it in.

One of the key things to HyperSpin’s success is its simplicity. HS is entertaining, you arent entertained when you are sitting there reading and navigating tons of menus and bloat.

As HS matures it will keep maturing in what makes it great in the first place and thats taking its entertainment value to the next level by adding more features that give it an even more arcade feel. HyperSpin is a fun arcade frontend.

If we ever added things like checking the weather or reading books, then we fail to do what we set out to do, which is entertain the user and their guests.

5. How old are you, also do you have any other hobbies?
I am 32 and I enjoy home improvement and working on cars.

6. Do you have any other side projects going on that we should know about?
Just working on the next HS.

7. Have you ever built an Arcade Cabinet?
I haven’t built an arcade cabinet yet, I have several Candy Cabs and am about to start building my first showcase style machine. I have built a digital pinball machine called HyperPin. I have also built several control panels.

8. Is there any way that we as a community can help you guys out more? How about a donation Link?
We have a donation link at the top of our forum. www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum

9. Biggest pet peeve in this scene?
People that complain about free products.

10. Anything you would like to say to the fans?
I would like to say thanks to the HS team for all the hard work they put in and I would like to thanks all the HS supporters out there for their contributions and donations. This has been a very successfully project. Stay tuned for the next HS and thanks for the interview.

You can grab HyperSpin and find all the support you need over at the official site.