Can I emulate Operation Wolf? Should I?

[Ian]

A little background is needed here... My buddy got the bug for restoring cabs. He ended up buying a couple cheap Operation Wolf cabs. We are 80's kids and that seemed to be a game everyone has played at one point or another.

If you are not familiar with the inner workings of Operation Wolf, let me sum it up with one smiley..... 
Right now after a few months of work, we have a working game with a gun that actually recoils, the shots now register on the screen (that was a pain in the ass) but no sound. We did eventually get sound for a couple of days but then the gun stopped working. Taito really crapped the bed when designing the hardware of this game. 

So here is what I want to do if it is at all possible. I looked at some threads back in 2005 and they were saying how optical guns have not been emulated properly with Mame. I don't have any guns one way or the other on my cab so I can't say if that is the case or not still.

My idea is to make something very similar to what Le Chuck did (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,152903.0.html)
Emulate 4-5 games similar to Operation Wolf, and just bullet proof the hardware by putting in a computer and stop relying on these crap board sets! Anyone know 1- If optical guns can be used in mame? 2-If so has anyone converted an Operation Wolf gun to usb so it can be plugged into a computer?

Asking for a friend... lol

[Malenko]

well if youre down for better/different hardware , T2/RevX /etc guns can be used with an APAC and I think mamehooker can fire the recoil. You dont *need* to use optical guns if you arent using original hardware.

[BadMouth]

Operation Wolf is one of those weird games where an optical gun is mounted like a positional (potentiometer based) gun.

The most direct route would be to install Aim Traks inside the current guns.
They show up as mice.  Enable multi-mouse in MAME and they both work fine.

The question is whether they will work at that short of a distance?

The good part is that if they do work at that distance, despite being IR guns they'll be dead on accurate since the gun bases are mounted in place.
They'd work with all the gun games in MAME, not just the mounted gun games.