By the way, thanks for that reply ThatOneSeong. It was enlightening. I think choices like this get made earlier on in making a program and then get harder and harder to fix later on. So it just becomes the way it is.
Right.
Keep in mind that I'm not trying to be
too harsh (even though I did just call it "dumb") - all the lightgun emulation code was, in all likelihood, developed all the way back in the mid-2000's - when most people already were running 4:3 displays/didn't have a PC lightgun solution at all at the time, so the issue wasn't as prevalent for the person implementing it to take action. I wouldn't be surprised to hear if there's some underlying tech debt left in MAME's code that makes it difficult to resolve--and/or just not enough interested persons around to fix the issue, probably from complacency in the PC light gun community...
coughGun4irCough.
Regardless, glad to hear that RetroArch's been working for y'all!
(And for those of you who haven't used DemulShooter yet, yes, it relies on hooking directly into the individual mouse object - that's how it gets multi mice to work after all. So I'm guessing you'll want to load it up while your software is running? The
-useSingleMouse option effectively just has DS use the general Windows cursor. I only know this because of having to use it as a workaround on Linux, since Wine currently does not expose individual mouse devices yet.)