Sega Model 2 Emulator Full Screen Shooter fix - RamjetM2Borderless - App

[Howard_Casto]

I took a minute this morning to implement something that I thought might be useful. 

I've mentioned before that native joystick support in a lot of the pc games (or emulators for that matter) sucks.  One of the reasons the the fact that most of them default to passive polling, meaning that gamepad data only gets updated if the joystick sends a message to the program.  Why is this a problem?  Well many older joysticks or joysticks with unsigned drivers require active polling.  Plug a classic xbox controller in to see how many games are playable and you'll see what I mean. 

HOTD3, again, the only pc game I care about at this point, doesn't support active polling. 

So optionally you can now turn on active polling, which fixes a lot of joystick issues. 

[Howard_Casto]

Another idea that's been floating around in my head. 

There's that menu problem in the pc games and I'm trying to think of good solutions. 

One idea that I thought of was having hot key zones.  If you move the lightgun to the absolute bottom of the screen and leave it there for a second, the "down" key will be pressed once, if you hold it to the top, the up key will be pressed ect...  Now for real lightguns "holding" would mean simply firing in that area.  Pressing the fire button or reload button, in either instance, cancels the hold. This would work well for hotd3's map selection. 

I had initially thought that I fixed the problem when emulating the system mouse, but apparently the cursor doesn't pop up in keyboard mode for selection (didn't play that far). 

I would like some feedback on this idea.  I know it has the potential to interfere with gameplay, but I don't think there are many games where you fire at the extreme edges of the screen repeatedly. 

[BadMouth]

Another idea that's been floating around in my head. 

There's that menu problem in the pc games and I'm trying to think of good solutions. 

One idea that I thought of was having hot key zones.  If you move the lightgun to the absolute bottom of the screen and leave it there for a second, the "down" key will be pressed once, if you hold it to the top, the up key will be pressed ect...  Now for real lightguns "holding" would mean simply firing in that area.  Pressing the fire button or reload button, in either instance, cancels the hold. This would work well for hotd3's map selection. 

I had initially thought that I fixed the problem when emulating the system mouse, but apparently the cursor doesn't pop up in keyboard mode for selection (didn't play that far). 

I would like some feedback on this idea.  I know it has the potential to interfere with gameplay, but I don't think there are many games where you fire at the extreme edges of the screen repeatedly.

meh, sounds like unecessary bloat.  Most people are going to have a full CP in front of them.
Even on the original light gun cabs, you had to reach to the cab for the start button.

I played vcop all the way through last night for the first time and had reload issues during the second two boss shootouts.
I was trying to keep the gun on-screen and reload with a button (right mouse click).
The game would keep yelling at me to reload and I would keep hitting the button, but it was as if the emulator was overwhelmed and the reload wouldn't register until the third or fourth try.  This was v.9 on a 2.9ghz Athlon X3.  I imagine it will be worse with 2 players. 
Figured I'd mention it in case someone reports it as an issue with your app when it is really an issue with the emulator.
EDIT: guess it's also possible that I was pulling the trigger at the same time I was trying to reload.  It seemed to work better if actually shooting offscreen, at which point I probably wasn't hitting both buttons.

On the logo:
If someone else wants to have a go at it:
Here is the original picture I started with: http://www.clker.com/cliparts/9/3/1/3/1194989450326225818blue_gun_alex_fernandez_01.svg.hi.png
I recolored it to get the red one.
The troubleshooter font is DENISE

I may or may not have time to tinker with it this evening. 
Depends on how much later I have to work to make up for screwing around on BYOAC.

[Howard_Casto]

Well the problem though is people aren't using lightguns anymore... they are using ir guns. 

Those things have to be recalibrated every time you move around.  I've already added the option of having your start/coin/esc buttons on the gun (in other words mapped to mouse or joystick buttons) to help combat this issue. 

It doesn't suprise me that you had trouble reloading.  Mouse support in the emulator, with all due respect, seems kind of hacked in.  If you hold down a mouse button in the emulator and then look at the value in a memory editor, you can see it constnatly being set back to off.  My memory injection doesn't do this, so it's slightly more reliable, but that only pertains to joystick input. 

[Endprodukt]

That's why I requested an on the fly calibration setup from ultimarc, Andy said he would support - though he has no time to do it himself. Idea was to get a screen popup before the game launches. Player 1/2 would have to calibrate the gun on the fly on a target (shoot upper left, shoot upper right etc). That would only work for the aimtraks though. It sucks that whenever someone else is playing the calibration is possibly a little off due to the ir guns beeing so sensitive to their actual position.

[Howard_Casto]

That's why I requested an on the fly calibration setup from ultimarc, Andy said he would support - though he has no time to do it himself. Idea was to get a screen popup before the game launches. Player 1/2 would have to calibrate the gun on the fly on a target (shoot upper left, shoot upper right etc). That would only work for the aimtraks though. It sucks that whenever someone else is playing the calibration is possibly a little off due to the ir guns beeing so sensitive to their actual position.

My wiimote scripts do this as well.  You press up on the d-pad and it prompts you to shoot the corners.  The old act-labs guns support this as well.  I honestly am suprised to learn that the aim tracks don't have this feature... it's butt easy to implement, although with "real" guns  like the aimtrack, it has to be done at the hardware level. 

[Endprodukt]

Well there is an configuration tool. You can setup the aimtrak to start the setup by holding the there for 5-60 seconds. This leads to problems with games that require you to hold down the trigger like terminator. What I hoped for was something more like a prompt that everyone who's standing on the cabinet understands immediately. No hidden setup. A small guide that's launching the game after configuration.

[helltraum]

Hi all,

I've been following this thread for a while but have only just registered on the forum, the work that you guys have done and are in the progress of doing inspired me to purchase 2 AimTrak guns with recoil    .  So I thought it was about time to register and get involved.

If you look in the AimTrak configuration software you can disable the 5 second configuration on the trigger and set it to one of the left or right red buttons on the AimTrak and also set it to apply either when the gun is pointing at the screen or when it's off screen, this would solve the problem for games where you have to hold down the trigger.  The red buttons by default are set to game pad buttons for the AimTrak device, button 1 for the left button and button 2 for the right button, I was just wondering if these buttons could be used via the new Troubleshooter for menu navigation / selection on PC Games and for coin / start M2 games?

[Endprodukt]

Wouldn't solve the problem with the invisible setup and people who don't know about this. Also, I hacked up namco guns from the arcade so... No second button

[RamjetR]

So I'm in the market for some lightguns now too... whats the recommendations?

Aimtraks? Top Guns? Really want recoil as a feature... not worried about laser pointers.

[helltraum]

Well I've just got my AimTraks (with recoil) and I think they're brilliant, they're really easy to setup and calibrate and they see pretty accurate in games, much more than my experience with using Wii motes or Playstation Move.

[Howard_Casto]

Well the problem about the aimtrack recoil method is it's fake.  I talked to andy a couple of years ago about making the recoil bit writeable, so mamehooker can send the game-controlled signals, but I don't think anything ever came of it.  Seriously MH can do raw HID writes.... all I need is an address and some data to send. 

[Howard_Casto]

Sorry, didn't finish my thought (gold rush is on) right now I'm looking for a good shell.  There are these generic wiimotes (cheap chineese knock-offs) you can get, with nunchuck for around 4 dollars.  I've tried them and the only snag is they don't work right with glovepie unless a nunchuck is installed.  That's actually ok for me because I wanted to be able to plug in a foot padel anyway for soem of those oddball sega shooters. 

So the plan is to hack one of these up a little.  I wanted to use the triggers from the nunchuck and put them inside a shell, hack the rumble and make it to where I could change out shells (maybe a machine gun shell with a fiercer ff for the analog gun games, and a small pistol version for the others). 

I wouldn't nearly be as seamless as an aimtrack, we still have bluetooth issues, but 4 dollars+shell as opposed to 50 dollars +shell. 

[Howard_Casto]

Ok I got the Virtual On Hack in place and it appears to work.  I can jump now at least.    It still needs some finishing work.  Right now only keyboard inputs are hooked up, I want to optionally allow for joysticks.  Since it's possible that the user could use a single, two axis joystick, or two seperate joysticks, it will require a bit of special code. 

Anyway, while working on that, I stumbled upon an idea to fix Behind Enemy Lines.  You see each m2 game has three banks for the inputs, one for the start/coin/ect, one for p1's controls and another for p2.  If I NOP any part of the mice input, it crashes m2, so that flat out won't work.  It's one of the reasons getting reload to work was so tiring... reload is a mouse only input.  But I started thinking... the gun games only use the player one bank for the triggers... player 2 just sits there.  So I took the assembly code that reads bank1 and modified the pointer to read bank 2 instead.  BAM!  Truely redefinable trigger/reload inputs! 

Now they show up a little wonky in M2:
M2 Description:     Actual Input:
P2 Button 1          P1 Trigger
P2 Button 2          P2 Trigger
P2 Down              P1 Reload/trigger 2
P2 Up                  P2 Reload/trigger 2

The import thing though is that they work.  That essentially fixes BEL!

I'll have to write a special function though... as of now only NOPs are supported, I'll have the add the option in the NOP section to change each byte into a specific value.

I had thought about re-directing the memory space when ramjet suggested it, but sharing a space across two apps is potentially dangerous.  If one of them screws up it could lead to a BSOD... or at least it could in Xp systems.  But since I'm using an existing memory space within M2, it is much safer and I feel, doable. 

Not only that but this trick should work for all the other lightgun/gun games as well.  So no more fighting m2's mouse code or jerry-rigging the triggers, I can handle the whole she-bang on my end. 


So yeah, I'm going to have to implement this function and change things a bit, it's going to take a few more days... but it should be well worth the wait.

[Howard_Casto]

*Update*

Implemented a very simple "replace" option in the NOP section of the INI files.  Added this little bit of code to bels ini file and it indeed fixed the triggers!  I'll try it on the other gun games tomorrow. 

I'm not sure how I feel about this.... I had intentially made the memory editing portion of the ini files NOP only.  The reason being if you give people the ability to not only disable code, but also alter it, you've essentially built a cheat engine.  I'm not against cheat engines or cheat codes.. so long as everyone is in on it.  Online cheating is a pita though and I don't endorse it.  Hopefully people will use this "feature" responsibly. 

[Howard_Casto]

*Update 2*

The true lightgun games require a couple more NOPs, but moving the input section over the 2p bank indeed works for them as well! 

This will make configuration of Model2 even easier for the user as it will require no special settings or the use of m2's rawmouse options. 

What I will do is include to pre-configured cfg files for the lightgun/gun games to place in the m2 folder for key remapping.  The user won't even have to touch them unless they wish to change the mapping of the start/coin buttons. 

[Howard_Casto]

Well now that all of the games are figured out, I guess it's time to actually get the thing functional. 

Worked on the raw mouse button code this evening.  I really get the feeling that the "raw data" format was made without multi-button mice in mind.  The windows message system sends a power of 2 value if a button is down, or twice that value if it is released. 

So Button 1 down is 1 and button 1 up is 2.  Button 2 down is 4 and button 2 up is 8. 

Not so bad right?  Well if we were still in the 3 button mouse days no, but today a mouse can have up to 16 buttons! 

So button 16 down is 1073741824 and button 16 up is 214783648!!!!! 

That's a lot of data to send though the pipe. 

Anyway, I wrote a little function to define the power of 2 constants and compare the messages... converting everything into a nice array with the state of each button. As of now, all of my rawmouse code is in that little test app I sent out.  I'll transfer the whole thing over once I've gotten it completed which should be very soon. 

[vandale]

Well I've just got my AimTraks (with recoil) and I think they're brilliant, they're really easy to setup and calibrate and they see pretty accurate in games, much more than my experience with using Wii motes or Playstation Move.

Hi, regarding the wiimotes.

I use 2 wiimotes hacked into Guncon 2 shells with 3.3v hardwired which means no disconnect due to flat batteries, combined with a good bluetooth chipset and Howards wiimote scripts, I couldnt ask for anything better.

Connects via the guncon side buttons, calibrates via the guncon d pad, never disconnects, works in MAME and Model 3, and soon Model 2 

Pics of  wiimote/guncon2 mashup:

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah I think a lot of people have only messed with wiimotes/move via the game consoles and are judging their experiences on that. 

This isn't a fair comparison because the home consoles do NOT treat these devices like a lightgun, they just throw a cursor on the screen.  IR gun accuracy is all about the software... we could probably even push accuracy even further with a custom ir led array and better software.  That goes for the aimtrack as well. 


Nice setup btw.  I've been thinking about doing the same thing, only slightly different.  I want to put rechargable batteries in the wiimote guns, but use a telephone cable as a power receptacle.  The phone cable (or perhaps cat5) would pass 5v for charging and 24v for a recoil solenoid.  I could unplug it and go wireless whenever I want, I'd just lose the recoil. 

[helltraum]

I wrote a simple GlovePIE script for my Wiimote linked to the mouse, it was OK but the accuracy was a little temperamental at times, I'd be interested in giving Howard's scripts a try, where can I get them?

[Howard_Casto]

Man this rapidly chaning weather sucks!  It's like 17 degrees here. 

Anyway, that means I'm stuck inside today.  I applied the much cleaner bel nops to vcop 2 so I could make sure it works universally.  Fortunately it does!  This makes my code a heck of a lot cleaner.  All that remains of the custom functions I had to add in for m2 is a tiny little bit of code that resets the reload bit for the lightgun games.  It's 4 lines long, so I can live with that. 

Last time I borked up some of my ini files because I was working too fast.  I'm not going to do this today.  I did vcop2, just now... I'll do the rest throughout the day as I feel like it.  I need to take the time to test each ini as I complete it to make sure it is working properly. 

So every game is 100% at this point, but I do need to update the inis to the cleaner code, as I just mentioned. 


The scripts are on this board, just search for glovepie. 

[Howard_Casto]

Ok so alll the M2 games work now.  I've still got to write a function for joystick support for von, but other than that. 

Still lots of little stuff and cleanup work to do.  I'm going to tenatively say it'll be ready next week, unless we run across some crazy issue again. 

[Endprodukt]

Awesome!!!! Lightgun-Party at my place ahead!

[TIGER8855]

Ok so alll the M2 games work now.  I've still got to write a function for joystick support for von, but other than that. 

Still lots of little stuff and cleanup work to do.  I'm going to tenatively say it'll be ready next week, unless we run across some crazy issue again.

Awesome! Great work.

Are you still planning to include M2 output support for the VR buttons and race leader lamps in this release?

[BadMouth]

Logo attached with room for tag line added.
Probably need to fine tune the alignment, but thoughts on it?
Did we decide on a tag line?

Troubleshooter 2 - The Wrath of Casto
Troubleshooter 2 - The Search For El Semi

[RamjetR]

How about Troubleshooter 2 - Double Trouble!

?

[vandale]

Twice as much gun is my favourite

[Howard_Casto]

Ok so alll the M2 games work now.  I've still got to write a function for joystick support for von, but other than that. 

Still lots of little stuff and cleanup work to do.  I'm going to tenatively say it'll be ready next week, unless we run across some crazy issue again.

Awesome! Great work.

Are you still planning to include M2 output support for the VR buttons and race leader lamps in this release?

Yes, but keep in mind that outputs work by communicating to mamehooker.  So I'll have to release a new version of mamehooker before outputs will work. 

[Howard_Casto]

Logo attached with room for tag line added.
Probably need to fine tune the alignment, but thoughts on it?
Did we decide on a tag line?

Troubleshooter 2 - The Wrath of Casto
Troubleshooter 2 - The Search For El Semi

Heh..... I'm leaning towards shoot harder myself.  It makes absolutely no sense, like all the titles to the die hard sequels. 

[Howard_Casto]

RamJet... I've got a question for you. 

I never did find out where the cross hair data was stored, so I figured I would just draw them via LUA script.  Did we ever figure out how to read regions in memory outside of the emulator space?

Here was the code I was going to use (eventually weeding out the hardcoded values and using a image instead of a "+" text)
==============================================================================
XPOS = I960_ReadByte(0x58f7b4) / 255;
XPOS = XPOS * 1024;

YPOS = I960_ReadByte(0x58f7b6) / 255;
YPOS = YPOS * 768;

Video_DrawText(XPOS,YPOS,"+",0xFF0000)
==============================================================================

But the value of these memory addresses are static and whenever I try to read them, they come up as 0.  These are the addresses in artmoney though.  So if m2 supports reading outside the space it should be quite easy to get them. 

[Howard_Casto]

Well I would still like an answer to my question BUT I did manage to find some redundant addresses elsewhere for vcop and managed to draw some crosshairs. 

I'm just using a "+" now, but there are scripts in lua to load png images.  I see no reason why we couldn't implement a toggling system like mame uses.  Heck we can even use the same cross hairs. 

[Howard_Casto]

I ran into a wierd issue and I need you guys to check something out for me. 

Go into Virtua Cop 2 in m2 and press f2 to get into the test menu.  Go to the input test.   Is p2's trigger stuck in the ON position?  If not I think my exe may be corrupted in some way. 

[Endprodukt]

No it's not stuck on my system.

[DarthMarino]

Not stuck on mine either.  I press the "X" key and it turns on.

[Howard_Casto]

BAH!

Yeah I replaced the exes and they are working again. 

I'm trying to figure out how that could have happened.  I'm changing these guys in memory, so it shouldn't effect the exe. On top of that it was doing it in BOTH exes. I'm wondering if maybe my computer has a virus or something. 

[BadMouth]

BAH!

Yeah I replaced the exes and they are working again. 

I'm trying to figure out how that could have happened.  I'm changing these guys in memory, so it shouldn't effect the exe. On top of that it was doing it in BOTH exes. I'm wondering if maybe my computer has a virus or something.

Weren't you making changes with a hex editor at some point?
Being that you have been fiddling with the controls and it's an issue with the controls, the fiddling is a much more likely culprit.

Anyways, I'd like to finish the logo tonight.
 I'm going with the "Shoot Harder" version of the logo with the two-tone blue chrome lettering(last one posted), unless you say otherwise.
The only thing I plan to change is make the alignment more precise and maybe make the "2" slightly bigger.  I'll also whip up an icon.

[Howard_Casto]

Well yeah, I was messing with things in the hex editor, but not on both exes. 

It was definately a exe issue... I even re-started my pc, p2 trigger was stuck in both exes.  I copied the exes from the website and they started working properly again. 


Anyway I guess my hex editing adventures aren't over.  Remember those analog control wierdness you and vandale were playing with?  Well when I moved the control bank to p2 it caused issues I wasn't aware of.... just in vcop and vcop 2 mind you.  I'm going to have to find an empty byte somewhere in the code and move the inputs there for those games.  Btw that junk was apparently in the original game... because when I went into the test menu I didn't run into any issues, thus why I thought they were working. 

The issue doesn't effect hotd or any of the other games though, just the vcops. 

[BadMouth]

Remember those analog control wierdness you and vandale were playing with?  Well when I moved the control bank to p2 it caused issues I wasn't aware of.... just in vcop and vcop 2 mind you.  I'm going to have to find an empty byte somewhere in the code and move the inputs there for those games.  Btw that junk was apparently in the original game... because when I went into the test menu I didn't run into any issues, thus why I thought they were working. 

Yeah, I think it was player 2, button 2 that activated the weird joystick controlled crosshairs.
In Gunblade, one of the other buttons pauses the game, but I don't remember which one.
It's too late to do any testing tonight, but I can go through all the games tomorrow evening if need be.

Attached is a logo and some icons. 
I'm considering them final unless you really want something changed.

[Howard_Casto]

Fantastic work!  That should do it, the only thing is the icon format.  The Visual Studio 6 languages don't support icons with an alpha channel (32 bit) So save em as 24 bit and we are good to go.  Normally I just use a resource editor to hack them in, but since this will most likely evolve into a taskbar app (I have to render my own icons), I doubt that will work. 

Speaking of icons.  We are going to need to figure out what kind of icon to use.  I tried the MAME ones, and they are a tad bulky imho.  The good news is lua is loading a alpha-based png texture, so translucency can be added.  I don't like the one's in m2, but I think something spindly like that would be best.  The user can make their own icons for that matter, I'm loading an external png in the lua script. 

I tested the other games, they aren't effected.  It's just the vcops.  On the virtua cop games you can get the wierdness even if you press the keyboard key. In other words it's at the game level..  This isn't the case for the other games afaik and keep in mind, I'm controlling the joysticks at this point. 

There could still be issues with the other games... I've only got so many combinations of joysticks afterall, but worst case scenario I can just NOP the registration of directinput and it will make joysticks fall silent on the  m2 end. 

I'll see what I can do.  Probably the safest location to make a custom buffer would be the second output byte.  It isn't used for anything in the lightgun games so hopefully it will stay empty. 

[Howard_Casto]

I found a few places that might work... unfortunately the only way to know is to implement and try things. 

0x50169D seems to be inert, it's the byte over from the output byte in vcop.  I can change it's value in a memory editor and it doesn't change back, telling me the games aren't doing anything with it.  Hopefully the code it overwrites doesn't do anything important. 

I'll work on this tomorrow or this evening.  For now I'm ignoring the problem.  I need to get the user interface finished so that a beta can be released.