Lichtknarre: Unmodified Wii remote as a sight accurate Lightgun using 2/4 LEDs

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BadMouth:

--- Quote from: ZTylerDurden717 on February 10, 2023, 08:36:44 pm ---If a Mame game doesn't have in-game calibration, as long as Vjoy/Mouse plugin offset and axis is dialed in, should that mean the Mame game should play as if calibrated?

--- End quote ---

It will need to be played stretched widescreen. You could also not stretch and set the offsets for the 4:3 image, but then widescreen games won't work.
This is the reason for the discussion earlier about changing offsets on the fly. It is planned for a future update. (might already be an update, I haven't checked.)

I thought you had to be wrong about Lethal Enforcers not having calibration, but hell if I can find it.
Some of the older games have a DIP switch that needs turned on in MAME's in-game menu.
I thought it was just going to be the old Exidy games that lacked calibration.

As far as whether in-game calibration is necessary:

At the very least the "positional gun" games where the gun was mounted to the cab and used potentiometers (Terminator for example) will have to be calibrated.
There were no industry standards for analog controls, so different games had different pots, ranges of motion, digital steps, etc.
Trackball and spinner games need the sensitivity individually set for the same reason. Different cabs had different step counts and gearing on the encoder wheels as does whatever device you are using with MAME.

For the true light gun games, it depends on how the input is handled in MAME. Using a hacked version of MAME that allows fake mouse input should work fine for 1 player. Using virtual joysticks will probably work fine on most games out of the box, but there could be outliers. It is probably "good enough" while individually calibrating would be best practice.

Last time I had two guns fully integrated, it was a CRT screen and both guns (Act Labs) showed up as individual mice.
I've got a lot to learn setting them up as joysticks and using troubleshooter/demulshooter.

CarnEvil rocks!

ZTylerDurden717:

--- Quote from: BadMouth on February 11, 2023, 07:18:22 am ---
Last time I had two guns fully integrated, it was a CRT screen and both guns (Act Labs) showed up as individual mice.

--- End quote ---

I had an act labs gun as well. It worked really dang well. I thought I would keep it, but CRT's are way too burdensome when I've got LCD's everywhere around the house.

Howard_Casto:
Btw guys I'm very much still in the mix on this one but I was in a car wreck last week and I'm still recovering. No major injuries, but I cracked my sternum and the doc won't let me bend over or leift anything heavy. Guess who has a 50" tv they want to use on this project in the floor of their living room.... :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

Regardless I'm still working on the stuff I can work on. I ordered another nyko perfect shot shell and I think I've got a plan of attack to convert those into using micro switches. I'll probably do that tomorrow. I'll also solder up my led harness, although I won't be able to really test until I can get that tv where it needs to go. New mofsets and all the misc junk I'll need to build my guns are incoming. Once I get the hardware built, I'll start a new thread and I'll start posting config files for each game as I add them. I'll add quickie lightgun support to checkered flag/pac-fe. I know most people won't want to use something so basic, but it'll give a proof-of-concept example.

ZTylerDurden717:

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on February 12, 2023, 01:48:50 am ---Btw guys I'm very much still in the mix on this one but I was in a car wreck last week and I'm still recovering. No major injuries, but I cracked my sternum and the doc won't let me bend over or leift anything heavy.

--- End quote ---

Dang dude that's wild. Glad you pulled through.

Looks like 3 of us have nyko perfect shots.

I tested 2 player Lichtknarre on a 65 inch using the gun4ir vendor's IR LED wire harness. They push enough light and work great from 8 feet away, and probably more. I'm gonna assume the aliexpress ones will do the job too, especially their 15 light cluster variant.

Only thing is the distance of the Wiimote's IR blaster view. You gotta use a wide angle or fish eye lens to play closer to the TV. Otherwise, expect about 8 feet back for the tracking to remain stable for a display that size when hitting the corners. From what I understand, wide angle and fish eye lenses are still being programmed for better precision to adjust for lens distortion. My experience was still pretty solid, and best played when centered with the TV while the software gets optimized to play from other parts of where you may be sitting.

Dolphin, MAME and M3 played like champs after some initial setup. PCSX2 (Time Crisis II) 2 player is a no go at the moment since vjoy doesn't work with the nuvee plugin's mouse tracking. Just a matter of time though before more plugins are added.

So cost breakdown for someone starting:
$20 - 2 Wiimotes
$10 - IR Harness
$20 - 2 Nyko Perfect Shots

$50 USD. For a 4 point light gun system. Hell of a party trick.

I lent it to my buddy and he hasn't stopped playing the past 2-3 days.

RandyT:
If anyone is looking for an awesome light gun front end, I highly encourage checking into SimpleTouchFE.

I played with it a bit many years ago, and it sprang to mind as being a perfect FE for this type of application. I wasn't wrong. There's even a light gun skin for 1080p displays available on the site now. The only thing which gave me pause is that my virus checker kept flagging the download for malware. I assume this has something to do with the keyboard and mouse hooking features and it's a false positive, but that's for you to decide. I fed it into VirusTotal and it was only flagged by a few of the checkers. I'm also running it on an isolated and dedicated system, so I took the chance. The latest version w/o Flash support seems to be working fine under Win10 and doesn't seem to interfere with the Lichtknarre software at all.

*edit* I should have given the caveat here that if the gun is using the vJoy plugin, you'll need a mouse to select the game. While this doesn't bother me, as my favorites are happy to use the gun with the mouse plugin, you can get around this issue with some creative batch files/scripts, INI swapping, etc. The FE has the ability to run setup code before launching the main executable in order to facilitate such things.

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