I've stared work on Hyper v1.1 and am developing a number of different templates and LST file packages.

Future releases will be split, the Hyper application, template files (.zip files renamed to .hyt) and rom recognition files (.lst files). This will mean that downloads are smaller and you can replace only the bits that are updated (so if you've developed your own template it won't get overwritten - you can just extract the new bit over the old directories).

To save you reading the old updates, Hyper is a new idea in front ends. It discovers what games you have on your hard drive, builds a game database of them, and allows you to build a front end in standard HTML using supplied templates.

Once you have a game database, you can add to it when you add new games and you can use different templates to produce a different look.

Once you have a set of HTML files, you can use a standard browser and the latest version of Play (v1.3) to launch emulators by clicking on links.

The template architecture means that Skins are producable - you can design your own front end design or download one - there's a document guiding you on how to do this in the download. The fact that the output is HTML means that you can do anything you can on a web page - like link to remote sites, display graphics etc.

This version of Hyper can be downloaded from the downloads page, it is fully functioned but I am still developing it further.

If you have any comments, suggestions or maybe design your own skin then drop me a line - feel free to send me any designs and I'll make them available here.

Make sure you download Play v1.3 which is a pre-requisite.

I am working on the WebEnd builder - an application which seeks out the roms on your machine and builds the html which will then constitute a frontend to all of the games on your machine.

I can already do this for all the arcade emulators (MAME, RAINE, CALLUS, M72, SYSTEM16) and may release this on its own - I'm now working on how to get the required information for consoles.

Why do all those front-end writers write all that frontend code when most machines (certainly all those looking at this) have a web browser installed on them. A very sophisticated GUI engine. The next step in my One-machine One-Interface quest is WebEnd an HTML based front end which, in conjunction with Play allows you to click on a game name and play it! Simple (my watch word!) but effective.

Watch this space for a proof of concept download (along with update version of Play). Once it's really ready just think, you'll be able to add links to the web to your frontend - Perhaps emu sites could produce skins for WebEnd.

Remember, you saw it here first.

That's a bit of a sweeping statement - I know, but based on the facts:

• Most emulator junkies have several emulators installed on their system.
• Most sensible people will organise their roms in a directory structure.
• All Emulators require different configurations and rom sets.

It makes a great deal more sense to treat the system as a whole, recognising which emulators are on the machine and using some contextual information (like directory / file name) to decide which emulator and with which options to run for a particular rom set. All with as little effort as possible on the part of the user.

The basic ethos behind this site is to provide tools to make this happen!