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DUAL PC Virtual Guns and Mame Analog+ success!!

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1UP:

I guess OK accuracy is OK with me...  ;)  My main consideration at the moment is that I am planning to bring this machine to work with me soon.  A lot of people will be using it, so it needs to be as dummy-proof as possible.  I can't ask the company to come to a halt so I can explain to 30 people how to calibrate a lightgun.

There is also the fact that there are ready-made Happ cabinet holsters that will fit an automatic-type gunshell.  Their Uzi holster might hold the Act-Labs, but I don't have any way to know until I buy it.

In the heat of  a fast-paced arcade shootout, there really isn't enough time to use line up the sights perfectly, so my typical method is to aim with both eyes open, centering my target roughly between the two images of the gun (one from each eye) and rattle off 2 or 3 shots.  My shot accuracy stats may be a little lower that way, but I always hit the target with one of those shots.  Supposedly the Virtual gun stays reasonably calibrated as long as you always use 640x480.  That's not a problem and is easily configured.

Anyway, I played many a game in ardcade where the guns weren't perfectly calibrated.  Actually, I'm sure they are rarely calibrated.  What's good enough for the real thing is good enough for me.

I'll let you know how it goes when I get the guns.

Trenchbroom:


--- Quote from: GamingGreg on January 27, 2004, 08:01:45 pm ---On a related note.  Does anyone know the best place to buy a couple of PC Virtual Guns? (I'm in the US)

I've found it here on the lik-sang site for $25.
I've also found it here on the Hong Kong Toys site for $20.

I know next to nothing about these companies.  Are they ligit? are they realiable? Anyone have good or bad experiences with them?

--- End quote ---

I'm in the US and I've ordered from Lik-Sang a couple of times before.  The shipping is a bit much straight from Hong Kong (I bought one of those PSX-USB adaptors when they first came out and paid $18 air mail for a parcel that only weighed about 10 oz.) but they seem reliable and they are respectible, as Hong Kong outfits go.  Your experience may vary of course  ;)

1UP:

Lik-Sang is good.  I ordered the guns from Hong Kong and they arrived in Los Angeles in 2 days.   :o  No delay in filling that order!

As for the guns...well, they were a pain to set up.  When GSXRMovistar said the instructions on the box were in very broken english, he was putting it mildly.  I got about as much info from the english as from the chinese instructions.  Basically all you need to know are these two numbers: 640x480, and 60Hz.  Set MAME to run your gun games at these settings, and you're halfway there.  Any other resolution, and the screen may not flash properly.  Any other frequency, and your calibration will be way off.

Oh yeah, calibration: there is none.  I learned right away that the crosshairs would never match up at all with the sights except near the bottom-right corner.  But I was able to get pretty darn good accuracy just by changing the Lightgun X & Y Sensitivity settings in MAME.  I cranked the X up to about 75%, and the Y up to 105%.  This got the crosshairs almost dead on with the sights about 75% of the time.

The other 25% of the shots tend to drift off from the sights by about 5-20 pixels at random intervals, in random directions.  This seems to be due to loss of sync when the screen flashes white.  When the gun is fired, it draws a bunch of white horizontal lines, about 3 or 4 scanlines apart.  This seems to freak out my monitor, as each line appears to be a different length from the others, and some protrude beyond the edges of the game screen.  I believe that the lines are being drawn slightly out of sync with each other, causing the occasional miscalibration.  Anyway, 9 times out of 10 when take the time to sight in an alien in Area 51, I get him with one shot.  There is the occasional miss, but usually the shot is close enough.

One good thing: the video passthru quality is excellent.  I saw absolutely no signs of ghosting or fuzziness after hookup.

I have yet to try dual guns, as this requires a download and setup of Analog +, which will have to wait until tomorrow...

1UP:

OK, I'm having a bit of trouble getting two guns to work in analog+.  I found the -mouse -multimousexp option that must be used, which allows mame to identify two separate sets of mouse buttons.  But when I run in dual mouse mode, the crosshairs are nowhere to be found.  Also, it is impossible for me to hit anything, although I hear gunshots.

Not sure what to do about this.  Although I thank dear sweet jesus for that urebelscum and jake has made this possible, documentation on the process of configuration could be better.  I would welcome a walkthrough on this...I have only one day a week to do anything on my cab, and I have spent all day just trying to get dual guns working, rather than all the cab finishing stuff I need to do so I can bring this thing in to work next week!  :(

Another problem:  the Area51.chd that used to work just fine under mame.71b now refuse to work under newer versions.  It reports a checksum error.  Any way to get mame to just ignore the checksum and just play the damn thing?  I'm tired of having to re-download megs and megs of stuff everytime a new mame comes out.  >:(

1UP:

Hold the phone--I got 'em working!  12 hours later...

It finally dawned on me...something that Einstein said: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results."  Or words to that effect...

So I did a little basic troubleshooting.  I took out the lightguns, and plugged in two USB mice.  After a quick chdman -update (to fix the problem with Mame not recognizing the HD image), I launched Area51, and voila, dual mice!  I almost jumped out the window when I saw those two crosshairs moving!!!  ;D

So I quit Mame, pulled the mice and put the guns back in, launched again using the exact same commandline (mameanalogxp -mouse -multimousexp area51) and damned if the thing didn't finally work!  The crosshairs were a bit off, but I finally had two guns aiming at two different spots.  A quick tab to "controls - this game" revealed the problem: MameAnalog+ had been seeing the two guns as mouse2 and mouse3.  Thru some miracle, the reconnecting of the guns brought them back as Mouse1 and Mouse2.  This was verified by remapping the buttons, as the names of the mice/guns changed.

Went back to the "analog controls" setting, and tweaked the settings to calibrate the guns as best as possible (x sensitivity 75%, y sensitivity 110% on both guns).  Hit F1 to hide the crosshairs, and I'm a happy camper. :)

All I'm waiting for now are my two holsters from Happ...  Funny, I paid the same for shipping, but the guns from Hong Kong came almost a full week before the holsters are due to arrive...  :P

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