Thought about putting this in Project Announcements, but I don't intend to do much more with it and this is the first thread that comes up if someone searches for joystick gun info.
Picked up my gun yesterday. It is HEAVY and it's METAL.
Popped off the top to see if there was a force feedback motor, or room for one and.....
I put 12v to it and it works. Not as jarring as I was hoping for, but it's already in there and works.
There aren't any markings on the motor, so I'm not sure if it could take more than 12v.
It would be nice to have a manual.
For the newbs like me who have never worked on these type of machines before:
The the guns movement is tracked by a pair of potentiometers.
They are driven off a fan gear attached to the pivot points.
(^ underside of gun, L/R movement)
(^ top down, U/D movement)
The first thing I did was measure the range of the pots to see how they matched up to the pots in the act labs pedals.
They topped out at about 60% of the resistance of the pedals. It's good that they had less of a range than the pedals since
that could be fixed during calibration. I'm not sure what would have happened had the range been above what the
act labs encoder is looking for.
At this point, I need a mini-din cable to connect the pots in the gun to the act labs box.
I considered ordering one and leaving the act labs pedals untouched, but eh...I'm impatient and they aren't bringing much anymore,
so I take apart the pedal base and cut the wires.
(inside the act labs pedal base...nothing to it but a couple springs and pots)
I wire the act labs cable to the gun wiring harness using the pots in the driving base as a guide, plug the din cable into the act labs box,
& plug the usb cable from the box into my computer. I expected the gun's range to be limited to a corner of the screen, given that the
range of the pots was reduced to about that. But what happened was that I was limited to a small rectangle in the center of the screen.
It's of no consequence, but I thought it was interesting that everything stayed centered, despite the reduced range.
To fix the range, I needed to calibrate. Figured it was best to calibrate in windows first, so I opened up game controllers in the control panel.
Clicked on the act labs pedals, settings, calibrate. The first screen was joystick calibration. I moved the gun all around and ...nothing.
Click next....Z-rotation axis (clutch pedal, not used...yet). Next - X-rotation axis
. I point the gun to the left and right edges of the screen.
Next - Y axis, point the gun to the top and bottom of the screen. Finish, Apply
And the result......gun tracks 100% perfect.
Now I tried to test it in a game, but I can't hold the base, aim the gun & hit buttons on the keyboard at the same time (fire buttons aren't wired).
So I start looking around for a base & find a little junk table that's been waiting to be scrapped. Cut a hole for the base of the gun to drop into and....
and a big gun would be more fun on a bigger screen.....
Now to start experimenting in MAME. I calibrate the gun in T2, although it didn't seen to need it. Give it a go and....something is just off.
The crosshairs lag behind the gun and seem to freeze up and hesitate whenever I'm near the center of the screen. When I need to move the gun a half inch, it just doesn't go, then it seems to jump too far all at once. So I go into the analogue adjustments in mame and crank up the sensitivity to around 100. Definite improvement, but the gun still hangs in the center, even in the games calibration screen. Then it hits me......JOYSTICK DEAD ZONE!!!!
I'm using MAMEUI, so I go into the control options there and reduce the joystick dead zone to zero. Fire up the game and all is well.
I ended up with the sensitivity at 150. I think it's going to be one of those things where you just have to tinker with the analogue settings until it feels right.
Another thing I learned is that the position of the gun, screen, and your body are extremely important to recreating the arcade feel with these games. Sitting in a chair with the gun just below chest height worked and was comfortable, but it felt nothing like being at the arcade. I knelt down in front of the table, putting the gun at shoulder height and I felt much more into the game. Horizontal gun position is also important. I had the gun in the center of the screen, but the bullets were coming from left of center because the original game had a gun mounted on each side. If I ever do use this gun in a control panel, it will be mounted left of center. The vertical position also made a big difference. It has to be high enough that you are more behind than above the gun, but low enough that it isn't blocking your view and maintains the illusion of the bullets traveling from the end of the gun and entering the bottom of the screen. I know this might not be possible with all games, but the few I experimented with were pretty consistent about what point the bullets seemed to be coming from.
I think I rambled on enough. Hopefully somebody will pick up something useful from my little experiment.
I took some video of the setup in action (still using the keyboard to fire).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25643351@N07/4886932428/#secret2e9a647964
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Topic: "Joystick" Gun Schematics? - Project added (Read 3611 times)
