Alien extermination guns - ali express - UK - trusted sellers and tips

[ant2]

Hi all,

I am really interested in mimicking this set up:
https://youtu.be/Vl34l1122RA?si=kuZFu8LKZgtVYB7y
Those guns look a  lot of fun!

1.)
Have any of you purchased these guns, if so which seller do you recommend?

I found this link on a retro ralph clip- https://bit.ly/2YG5pkw
Any one used them, is there a cheaper supplier?

2.) What power adapter would you recommend, the one retroralph recommends I can't source from the uk - https://amzn.to/3jaQiZQ

3.) Are there any good documents videos for getting this wiresdup/configured. I saw a video from brad that looks helpful for once the wiring is done and having this integrate with mamehooker - https://youtu.be/Vl34l1122RA?si=NV7ml4Os9yIAswrw

5.) Has any one integrated this in to a standard cabinet, looking for ideas. Was wondering if I built the guns in to a shelf that I could atrach to the front of the cabinet, sitting infront of the control panel, that could be disconnected,

I did try and search through the forum and couldn't find any relevant posts.
Thanks

[esoteric_rt]

I'm going through this process myself at the moment.....

I ordered 2 of the guns off aliexpress from this seller:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32856457183.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.10.6d221802RUCJY8

Those were the cheapest I could find because the shipping cost is so high to New Zealand. The seller has sent the items in 2 packages. The first package arrived yesterday. I thought they simply would have sent 1 gun in each package but no, only the gun shells and screws arrived in the first package. Obviously the heavier parts are in the second package which was sent via a cheaper postage option. I hope they are all there when they arrive.

I've also watched the Retro Ralph and Brad videos on Youtube. That's about all the info there is on wiring these up. Its going to be a long process of trial and error to get the recoil function working in game.

I can add some more info here once the other parts arrive and I've had a chance to work with them.

[MrThunderwing]

Well, colour me interested in future updates to this topic. Look forward to seeing how this progresses!

[ant2]

I made some progress, there is little information about these guns and people using them and I am going to write up some information that took me (days + weeks) to get answers.

1.) I ended up sourcing 1X https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001167723575.html?spm=a2g0o.order_detail.order_detail_item.3.5b77f19c62DQOt
This gun works fine, no issues with seller, my gun game complete. I have ordered another one

2.) Ensure you order a gun with "USB" output, other than that the product seems the same.

3.) I found no information of how many amps is required to run the guns. Bandicoot was the only member here whom I messaged (who has the guns) and answered some of my questions. He suggested a 6amp supply for the 24v recoil, others seemed to be using 5amps, but I did read someone whom stated they were having issues with a 5amp supply with 2 guns.
The USB is plugnplay. It required no drivers and powers the rear LED output of the ammo count.

 The red wire is for the recoil, this requires a 24V power supply. - I used https://www.ledkia.com/uk/buy-indoor-led-strip-power-supply-adaptors/72595-180w-24v-universal-power-supply.html
 The yellow is for the LED's and required a 12v supply - https://www.ledkia.com/uk/buy-indoor-led-strip-power-supply-adaptors/189-12v-60w-universal-power-supply.html
The LED's are for the grenade front left button and the flame thrower. I saw others had an LED output from the gun strip, but on Aliens (the only one I have tested so far) mine does not illuminate.
The black is the neutral/ground. - I know little about electronics but because I was running 2 PSU's and I had only one ground output that is sharing it my dad suggested connecting the 2 power supply neutrals together, bandicoot confirmed the same, this works without issue.

4.) After plugging in the gun test it with Alien extermination. The gun was made for this game and it will detect it natively at startup (do not run it via teknoparrot). Ensure you calibrate the gun in windows first to all directions, then calibrate the gun within game (press 5) to get full range of motion.
The recoil works natively in this game (good game to start with)
The recoil is pretty strong (and fun). I haven't done any further testing as I want to get the guns in a pedestal, as it's annoying having 1000's of wires and the guns resting off bolt threads resting on a desk and having to keep tidying it away

5.) I am now building a pedestal to house these huge guns. The idea being is my kids and I will use it off a TV and I will bring down my PC downstairs (until I upgrade my 15 year old windows XP arcade cabinet) then I will wheel it up to that.
The pedestal will have the 2x guns, the internals will be housed in a wooden box and covered with leather. I have finally finished the boxes, which took quite a bit of fiddling to make sure I had the correct heights and didn't foul the internals.
It will have a joystick running off a zero delay encoder and around 6 buttons. I have built a hidden shelf which will house all the amps, the bolting of the guns, joysticks, buttons etc

They do sell the plastic on aliexpress to house the guns, it's about £110, which seems a lot for plastic. If someone had a 3d printer then that would be a good option

6.) The software is a bit of a pain. What I have done here is use the "biohazard" gun build, then removing all but the rail shooters. - Nearly complete
We then need to pass the teknoparrot, sega model etc via demulshooter so we can get the guns to work. I need to create individual bat files for each of these to do this.
We can then use mamehooker to grab the recoil outputs and use them to output the recoil on the gun. This will require many mamehooker configs.
I haven't done the above yet, but I know people who have got this working with the Wii games too. 6 has already consumed a lot of time looking at "how" this can be done.
mamehooker and demulshooter need to run in administrator mode or you won't see outputs (took a while to figure this out)
You also need to enable the "outputs" in demulshooter so mamehooker can see them.


Will update this thread with more tricks/tips as I get through this. Very time consuming

Attached pictures of my shelf I had on my phone (in progress) and gun enclosures, the melamine top is in the back of the picture and will be placed on top of that shelf.
I have painted the gun encasements black, but they will be covered in leather, it was just to seal the wood.
The fronts of that shelf will have P1/P2 + P1/P2 credit buttons, the rest of the buttons + joystick will be on that melamine piece at the top
<a href="https://ibb.co/QmyMb2x"><img src="https://i.ibb.co/3hgcrDP/20231108-133054.jpg" alt="20231108-133054" border="0"></a>
<a href="https://ibb.co/DVxDhKP"><img src="https://i.ibb.co/f1hYf0V/20231108-164952.jpg" alt="20231108-164952" border="0"></a>

[ant2]

Update, finishes the pedestal. Still waiting on my second gun so there is a hole where this is mounted.
https://ibb.co/DGJjSPJ

After that's mounted screws going to be painted and that's complete. Will take some better pictures once it's complete.
The pedestal has a metal frame allowing height to be adjusted. the front panel comes off so the gun connections and joysick controller can be maintained without unscrewing the whole top.
The front has credit P1, P1 start, credit P2, P2 start.
The buttons on for the front end, joystick, button1= enter/select game. button 2=back in menu. Button 3=exit game.
Otherwise the middle button is used for "service mode"

Software, wow, i've spent over 40 hours trying to get everything working. I forgot how much of a PITA to get this stuff done and how everything breaks in weird ways.
Lessons learnt, ensure demulshooter,mamehooker are started in admin mode when you are first hooking.
supermodel and model2 also had issues when first hooking if not in admin mode.
Mamehooker needs this to be installed or you will get weird issues when hooking or trying to edit the current ini file - https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/richtx32_ocx.html

Windows10 assigns USB devices upon plug in, there appears to be no way in pinning this. Ensure when you are configuring you have plugged them in the same order, or waste 5+ hours like me going back to old games and wondering why they are now no longer working.
This is extremly annoying with alien extermination as I can find no way of getting my gun1 to recoil anymore and it's set to gun2, no matter if I switch usb inputs. I worked out this if you use demulshooter to call alien extermination, this fixes this issue.


Perform keybinds -> joysticks with joy2key, this seems to be the most reliable way.

Some games do not recoil right even though the output is hooked (transformers) and some others, this can be hacked around using keystates and joy2key sending 8 presses a second.

mame needs to have dsp output set to win in the global config, also run mame in admin mode when first hooking.
teknoparrot needs to have all gun outputs set to none and unbound or it demulshooter does not pass correctly.
supermodel does not have native recoil outputs, but can use keystates using the joy2key as mentioned above
Nintendo wii doesn't work in mamehooker so we can't get any rumble -> recoil etc here.

I have got mame, model2,supermodel and 4 teknoparrot games working so far

Let's go island 3d gets stuck asking for the dongle when using the first map under easy mode, I have found that resetting the game using (c) fixes this. I bound my pedestal middle button to that to work round that.

If you are using the biohazard build, some of the existing exe's are using a local demulshooter inside the rom dir, ensure you modify those ahks to your own demulshooter exe instead of wasting hours like me working out why the guns don't work.

Ensure you "calibrate" the guns in any game you set up via the set up menu.

Issues thus far not yet resolved:
Teknoparrot. I cannot get haunted museum 1 + 2 to work with the guns. I can see it hook to demulshooter and see outputs in mamehooker but the guns do not work, I can't even see the axis change in the "calibration" set up menu when moving the guns. If any one figures this out let me know.
EAPD I cannot get to hook, I think this may be an issue with the name of the binary that demulshooter is expecting - http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,168052.0.html

RPCS3: Tried to get deadstorm pirates to work, I got it to load a few times but now I get a black screen and it fries my computer with interrupts that starts hanging up the machine. I tried rebuilding the cache several times and still no dice. Given up on this.

Have about another 10-15 teknoparrot games to go and then I think I will leave it there and do a video.

Once I finish this up, I am happy to share all the ahk scripts, configuration files and mame hooker ini files, to save someone else the 50 hours.

[bandicoot]

for RCPS3 , you need to launch demulshooter after game is load
Look on the demushooter
https://github.com/argonlefou/DemulShooter/wiki/System-357
best way is an ahk with a sleep after RCPS3 is launch ( time is depending of your computer )
 

[ant2]

Still waiting on my second gun and alien extermination poster.

Front end now complete.
All games linked to guns with recoil (except wii)

https://youtu.be/b-05KTxAppE?si=lOxDkCxx1wSy4sHl
https://youtu.be/yAp-_LPIXc8?si=otxQzg-8dXQ_3__O

[esoteric_rt]

Still waiting on my second gun and alien extermination poster.

Front end now complete.
All games linked to guns with recoil (except wii)

https://youtu.be/b-05KTxAppE?si=lOxDkCxx1wSy4sHl
https://youtu.be/yAp-_LPIXc8?si=otxQzg-8dXQ_3__O

Great work, you move fast!

The rest of my gun parts arrived. Sadly the bolts and plates were bent but I managed to get them looking OK and assembled the guns. The hardest part was working out how the spring sat in the gun for the trigger.

Completed a quick test yesterday, using Aliens Extermination first of course. I got several other games running through Teknoparrot, including House of the Dead 4, which works pretty well with a positional gun once configured;



If you are able to share your config files once ready, it would be a massive help for me!

I will start building a cabinet in 3-4 weeks. It will likely be a full integrated unit and not a pedestal.

Thanks

[ant2]

wow, nice arcade room. Good job on putting those guns together, I am quite glad mine came complete.
I am still waiting for my second gun, been 3 weeks so far. My first one came in just over a week.


Attaching the mamehooker files , joy2key and rom AHK scripts here. These are what took an age. Everything hooks via demulshooter.
Really wish others had shared there configurations as it takes so long. PM me if there is anything else you need

For some reason mamehooker switches between creating/reading the "mame" directory and "supermodel" directory for me. i.e teknoparrot may start saving files in the "supermodel" directory.
I just copied the files to both directories to get round that issue.

For the mamehooker configurations where you see "keystates":
RefreshTime=25
Y=nll |ghd 1 &H04B4 &H6870 2 &h02:&h01
U=nll |ghd 2 &H04B4 &H6870 2 &h02:&h01

You will need to map the gun trigger via joy2key to "Y" for player 1 and "U" to player2. This then means any time Y or trigger is pressed, the keystates within mamehooker sends the recoil motion to the gun.
This is done this way because some of the games recoil outputs don't work/are not consistent etc and this is how to get round it.

Keep us updated on your build.

[esoteric_rt]

Thanks very much for the files,

I spent about 2hrs on this last night and managed to get Transformers and HOTD4 running with recoil and gun lights. I'll admit, this was a frustrating experience as its a bit complicated, instructions/info is limited and I had no experience with Mamehooker or Demulshooter before. But once I understood how all this worked together, its relatively straight forward. All the AHK files need to be altered as the paths in your AHK's are based on that Biohazard PC build and don't match my file locations. But that's easy enough to sort.

One other oddity that confused me. When testing the Aliens guns in Demulshooter, the crosshairs would not reach either side of the box, which limited the gun range in game. I then figured out that you can override the analog guns value in the Demulshooter drop down option. However after I saved the new values, the range in the demulshooter test didn't change. But once I start a game through the AHK file, the crosshairs reach the full limits of the screen, so all good.

I'll keep plugging away and look to finalize the computer side of things before starting on the cabinet around Xmas time.

Cheers!

[ant2]

It takes ages, especially when things don't work properly and you are not sure why. Things like missing visual libraries, not in admin mode, files being read from different locations etc.
Running the wrong demulshooter exe, running with incorrect flags/systems
I got the hang of it after some grueling hours..

You could always just download the biohazard build?

Yes, for the guns, calibrate in windows, then demulshooter,  then use the analog control overrides for the limits and i get full range.
Then some games will need to be calibrated within the service menu before they work.

The only thing I haven't done, that can be, is we can modify the rear gun output for each game. I.e in alien extermination it states ammo left, for one of the model2 games i modified it for remaining life (as ammo is unlimited).
If someone gets the time to adjust each of those in mamehooker ini files, then please upload. The issue is if we try and add a function that is incorrect/not supported it can crash the game.

If you find any other games that work well that I haven't got configured please let me know!
I am pretty impressed with the guns, they are really fun and work very well with the games I've configured.
 Hoping my second gun may arrive by next week...

[ant2]

After waiting 6 weeks for my second gun, it never arrived and was apparently returned to sender.
Was a lot of back and forth with seller and ali express, eventually got a partial refund, excluding shipping (shipping was  £35).
Ordered another one and it finally arrived.

Another thing I really hate is the lack of usb binding in windows 10.
 Because i built the cabinet on my main pc, i have several mice,  keyboards etc and when taking it downstairs to play on the tv i could never get the same plugin order.
Ended up reconfiguring all the emulators.  Mame i set up the mapping to physical devices.

Really happy with the set up, but was very time consuming figuring everything out!

[dhoyosg]

Thanks for info

[ant2]

How to fix the USB devices from moving around:
Within mame you can hardset the gun orders using "devicemap" - so I did that.
example:
<mameconfig version="10">
   <system name="default">

      <!-- X-Arcade Version 1.0 input configuration file -->

      <input>
      <mapdevice
      device="Generic   USB  Joystick   product_00060079-0000-0000-0000-504944564944 instance_e2d070b0-7e62-11ee-8001-444553540000"
      controller="JOYCODE_1" />
      <mapdevice
      device="XinYeDigital product_687004b4-0000-0000-0000-504944564944 instance_62a17e60-7d5f-11ee-8001-444553540000"
      controller="JOYCODE_2" />
<mapdevice
      device="XinYeDigital product_687004b4-0000-0000-0000-504944564944 instance_ffd1f1c0-a644-11ee-8001-444553540000"
      controller="JOYCODE_3" />


      </input>
   </system>


</mameconfig>

For the other emulators there is no way of binding them. I got my labeller and printed the following on each of my USB's "gun1,gun2,cabinet,keyboard". I then put them in the order gun1,gun2,cabinet in to my front ports (this is just easier for me) and then usb keyboard in the back. I then configured everything i.e all the emulators,demulshooter, making sure mamehooker was sending to the right gun etc. Then that's it. just make sure you start your PC or plug in everything in that same order.
The bigger issue for me is that I am using my main PC and unplugging it from my desk and bringing it downstairs just to play.
IF you have it housed inside a permanent cabinet then i'd buy a USB hub, this way each of the ports will be powered on in the same sequence and never change from initial set up.