Player 2 doesn't off-screen reload in MAME

[nongothsean]

First of all, thanks to all for your help!  I've never posted before but I've been reading the boards for a year to get tech help while building my cabinet and found nearly all my questions answered here somewhere.  All except this one....

When I got around to the light guns, I decided to go with 2 TopGun's on my MAME cabinet and they work great for the most part. I'm using the HKEMS driver and it works very well. But I'm unable to get the off-screen reload to work on the player 2 gun in MAMEUIFX. However, it works just fine when playing a CD version of HOD2 through Troubleshooter. So I know the GUN is working, MAME just isn't recognizing the off-screen input. It does, however, recognize the onscreen shots.  And player 1 works just fine.
I'm using Maximum Force as my tester and I've tried all combinations of mouse/lightgun/1/0/off-screen/dual/etc but to no avail. Even stranger though, is that on Carnevil player 2 works just fine. But player 1 won't off-screen reload!
I've cut and pasted config settings between the two and it still doesn't work. Is there something obvious I'm missing?
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Let me know if there's more information I need to provide.

[BadMouth]

It's a problem specific to Area51 & Maximum Force.

I had almost the same problem, but offscreen reload stopped working for Player 1 when I added the second gun (Act Labs).
I did so many things trying to fix it, I can't tell you what worked.

I know in the last round of trying to fix it, I deleted the cfg file for that game and changed some of the input devices in MAME.\
(I use MAME Plus or Mame32, so I'm just checking and unchecking boxes)
I'm not sure what fixed it, but it works now.

I will post all my settings when I get home from work.
Wish I could be more help now.

[BadMouth]

Even stranger though, is that on Carnevil player 2 works just fine. But player 1 won't off-screen reload!
I've cut and pasted config settings between the two and it still doesn't work.

Sorry, skimmed over that part. 

I'm thinking there was something counter-intuitive in my settings.
I'll look when I get home and post my cfg files.

[nongothsean]

Thanks, I appreciate that.  No worries about the timing, I'm at work, too...just got light guns on the brain too much to do any work.  I'm sure these airplanes will figure out where to go on their own, right?

The weird thing is I SWEAR it was working the other night.  The only thing I changed was installing Troubleshooter.  But that shouldn't have any affect on MAME, right?  Or would it?

Anyway, thanks for your help and config files.  Would you mind posting both the maxforce and mame cfgs? 

[BadMouth]

Pretty sure the counter-intuitive thing I was thinking of is that you have to set "Dual Lightgun = 0"  (very bottom of mame.ini)

Anyways, here are my cfg files.
BYOAC wouldn't let me upload cfg files, so I changed the extension to .txt
Just change the extension back to cfg for the games and to ini for MAME.

[nongothsean]

Thanks for those!  I'll tackle it tonight and let you know how it turns out.

[nongothsean]

Rats.  Still no change. 
Can I ask some questions about your setup?  I'm assuming you're using two guns, from the looks of your config files.  How do your guns behave in a normal windows environment?  For example: If I've got just a blank windows screen up, I can use the player 1 gun like a mouse on the screen.  But player 2 doesn't react the same way.  I can't use the trigger to open icons or shoot off-screen as if it were a right click.  I assume this is normal, but I don't know.  Does your player 2 gun react in the same way?
I think this info would help me identify exactly what's happening to the input of my second light gun.  I am trying to figure out if the problem lies in the gun, the driver, or Mame.  Thanks again!

[BadMouth]

I'd try a game other than Area51 or Maximum Force for testing.
Those games gave me fits when adding the second gun.

Anyways, I have two old ray-gun style Act Labs TV Light guns that use S-Video.
Both guns work like mice and they both behave the same in the windows environment.
Trigger is the left mouse button, button on the side of the gun is the right mouse button.
The pointer will move to where I shoot.  If I shoot at an icon, it will highlight it, but it doesn't register
the clicks fast enough to double click to open it.  If I press the button on the side of the gun,
the right click menu will open up.  Then if I pull the trigger while pointing at "open", the program will launch.
It works the same with either gun.

Under Devices, they both show up under Human Input Devices and say "ACT LABS USB TV LIGHT GUN" after the location.
They also show up under mice, but show up as generic microsoft usb mice.

I also have the trackball in the x-arcade that shows up as a mouse and occasionally plug in another mouse.
These things have never interfered with the guns.

The only other thing I can think of is that I don't have the troubleshooter installed (but I was thinking of installing it).

Keep me updated!

[nongothsean]

I'm still playing with it and not getting much further.  Let me know how Troubleshooter works for you, I think my problems started when I installed it.  I wouldn't have thought it would interfere with MAME, but I'm starting to think it might.  Uninstalling it is a last resort for me since my wife really likes House of the Dead.

[BadMouth]

Let me know how Troubleshooter works for you, I think my problems started when I installed it.

Well, I'm definitely not installing it now for fear of it causing problems.  

Still, I would think that there are others who are using both the troubleshooter and mame.
Make sure the troubleshooter isn't running in the background when you launch mame.

[nongothsean]

Just try it!  You know you want to!

The help guy at the TopGun place suggests disabling Troubleshooter.  I'm not sure how to disable it without uninstalling it.  Maybe some sort of batch file to run it only when it's needed.  (Great, now I have to learn about batch files.)  But it's a last resort I haven't gotten around to trying yet.

I did have the Act Labs guns prior to the TopGuns, and I recall they worked with TroubleShooter very well.  But I couldn't make them work with MAME at all!  So I would think, if you've gotten yours to work with MAME, then TroubleShooter shouldn't be a problem.  But I have noticed that these problems/solutions aren't consistant from system to system.  Further proof that it's all powered by magic.

[bigboss]

I have/had the same problem but I am using the Ultramarc light guns, and I solved it.

In Ultramarc case, which may be similar with all guns, the player one gun takes left mouse on screen shot and right mouse offscreen shot. These games seem also to be able to handle that. Probably due to enabling mouse support.

For player two, well you cannot have both guns do left / right mouse or you'd be shooting for player 1. So they take joystick button mappings or such. In Ultramarc case, you have 3 buttons but it registers as 6 because on screen and offscreen are able to be mapped to separate buttons.

To solve my case, I loaded the Ultramarc mapping app and configured the player two gun to have the same button for onscreen and offscreen. Now maximum force works for both players.