Lightgun Chases Crosshair to edge of the screen: Sega Saturn in Mednafen

[wderbi]

I posted this is a couple of other places and have not yet gotten any response   I will try here:

I have parsed through my Sega Saturn roms to select the lightgun games to add to my wheel. I downloaded and installed the latest Mednafen (09.45.1) on my system (i7, 12 Gb RAM system, GTX 1050ti graphics card), which the new version of Mednafen  can now support Aimtraks and other lightguns for Sega saturn. I run the emulator outside of Hyperspin, it works flawlessly for most games.   If I select a light gun game---like House of The Dead2, it runs just fine if in windowed mode that is less than full screen...I can use lightgun quite well in game play.  If I change the screen dimensions to full screen (or full screen windowed) and use a mouse to position the pointer/crosshair anywhere on the screen, It works flawlessly with no additional issue, and I can play the game and use the mouse to shoot and point to the target with no issues in full screen mode or in full screen-windowed mode.   However, If I just point either of my two Aimtraks at the screen, the cusor/crosshair immediately flies off the extreme outer edge of the screen in either full screen mode.  In fact, if I was to continue pointing at the screen, it actually chases the cursor/crosshair all around the edges of the screen.  It was very difficult to even get the crosshair to move across the viewable areas of the screen at ALL!  It was almost as if the crosshair/cursor was actually repelled by the lightgun!:(  I could chase it around the outside edge of the viewable screen, but it tended to want to go to the corners---as if the middle portions of the screen edge had some type of cursor repellent.  If I pointed the lightgun away from the screen, I could then move the cursor/crosshair back in the viewable area of the screen with no problems using the mouse.  This problem seems weirdly similar to the issues I was having with eXPSE2.05 that I described a few weeks ago...in that case, the cursor/cross hair would just flicker and jump randomly across the screen as long as the lightgun was pointed at the screen...

*Here is a Youtube video I made today to illustrate what is gong on:   

[Titchgamer]

I have never used the emulator you are using so I cant offer any specific advice (sorry).

But as its sticking to the edges/corners of the screen I would guess its a input issue (almost like using a joystick).

Is your aim trak configured as a cursor or a game controller?
Do you have the required input settings set on your emulator?

Its odd that it works in small window but not full screen though.

Maybe a display or resolution issue?
 

[dougan78]

That is how the emulator currently works.  If you read the manual it states:

gun - Light Gun
Virtua Gun/Stunner. Won't function properly if connected behind an emulated multitap.
Emulation of the Saturn lightgun in Mednafen is not particularly accurate(in terms of low-level details), unless you happen to be in the habit of using your Saturn with a TV the size of a house and bright enough to start fires.

So I would assume that it is currently a work in progress, I found the same results, running it in windowed mode worked the best.  Full screen it was not particularly accurate as the documentation stated and I do not have a TV the size of a house.  lol.

Good luck!

[wderbi]

I have never used the emulator you are using so I cant offer any specific advice (sorry).

But as its sticking to the edges/corners of the screen I would guess its a input issue (almost like using a joystick).

Is your aim trak configured as a cursor or a game controller?
Do you have the required input settings set on your emulator?

Its odd that it works in small window but not full screen though.

Maybe a display or resolution issue?

The Aimtrak works by default as a mouse device, but it also registers in Windows as a game controller.  Mine are set up as mice.  I have all of the input settings in my config---In fact, the default config for Mednafen 0.9.45.1 has the lightgun settings already added.  All you have to do is enable them either by command line, front end, or via ctrl+shift+1 (or 2). 

[wderbi]

Dougan my man, once again you are correct...windowed mode is what has to be done.  However, the strange thing is that I have noticed this full-screen/ windowed mode problem with light gun games in Daphne Singe as well.  When running in full screen, the crosshair floats only around the edge, but works well in Windowed mode.  Anyway, back to Mednafen---Here is my followup after playing with this for the past several days:

OK...Here is what I have done:  I had a suspicion that running in full screen was a problem, but If I was somehow able to run it in an enlarged windowed mode, that it would work with the lightgun without the cursor being chased to the edge of the screen.  I first tried manually making changes to the config by changing the resolution values, but the window size never changed no matter what resolution values I tried.  The only thing that would happen was that the actual playable screen changed size (got smaller), and the "dark" area around the playable screen got thicker if I activated full screen mode via ALT+Enter.  The Crosshair still would not stay in the playable area when the lightgun was pointed at the screen...which was weird because the playable screen was even smaller than the default size of the Windowed mode playable screen.  I also tried changing the scaling, but evindently, I must have changed them in the wrong area of the config (more on this later!)

I then tried changing the windowed size in DxWnd.  Long story short, no matter what I did, I could not get the DxWnd program to "hook" Mednafen, and I could never kill the process because the program would report no active processes even though I was successful launching Mednafen-HOTD within DxWnd.  Too bad I could not find a good tutorial to deal with games that are ROMs to be launched via emulators.  I believe that DxWnd would work, so if anyone has a tutorial in launching Roms that themselves are not the executable, I would really appreciate seeing it!

Finally, I tried the latest MedAdvCFG (v0.3.3).  This was a very helpful program to make changes and test them immediately.  After making sure that Full Screen and FS-Stretch was disabled, I set the resolution to 1920X1080 and the scaling factor to 6.36.  Now, I have full screen X-axis, but a little bit long on the Y axis for my monitor.  The GOOD NEWS is that the lightgun works perfectly well in regards to the crosshairs staying in the playing screen.    It does not disappear to the edges as it was doing in full screen (non windowed) mode.  In fact, If I was to enable full screen via ALT+Enter, the crosshair immediately disappears to the edge of the screen.  If I revert back to the scaled up, fullscreen windowed mode, the crosshair returns to normal function with the light gun.  It has bought me to the conclusion that there is some bug in the full-screen mode so that does not play well with my system, but full-screen windowed mode works fine.  For now, I will just use the scaled windowed version until I get further insight from the pros on what seems to be the bug.

I have since gone into the config file and manually changed the Y-scaling to 4.5.  The 6.36/4.5 values for X/Y scaling in windowed mode is perfect for my monitor.  Now, I need to figure out what is going on with the problem where 1 player shooting uses up both players ammunition in 2 player mode!

EDIT:  I have posted a second video to You Tube demonstrating my results in full-screen windowed mode: