Ok we have lightgun support, now what?

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Howard_Casto:
hmm, I checked it out and unless I'm missing something, the "lightgun support" is infact merely mouse support. Other than blanking the screen I can't see any interaction with the gun. All it seems to do is poll the mouse position, which would mean drivers would be required for the gun since something has to tell the mouse to move where you aimed. On the other hand it's using a "getmousepos" call which means that the cursor movement isn't "locked" That means that you don't need true drivers, and can use an app that uses the "setmousepos" call to move the mouse based on where you shot.

Somone on this board mentioned ages ago that they had made a vb app that could detect the position shot from a nes zapper. If they were to take that code and add a setmousepos call it should work in mame as mame will whiten the screen and thus give the pos for the zapper.

Ok that's my take on things so far, please anyone interested in generic lightgun support check over what I've found and see if you can do anything with it.

Dave C.:
OK, now if I am reading this right, the act-lab gun is basically nothing more than a mouse.If that is the case, why can't 2 guns be used in the same fashion that 2 trackballs are used? I realise that there is a screen flashand that detects where the mouse pointer and it registers a "hit or miss". but if you can run two trackballs in MM, you should be able to run two mouse pointers. only drawback that I can see without a change in mame is that If one gun fires, it will register both guns position meaning that no matter where the second pointer is, when P1 fires, where-ever P2 pointer is will register a hit and vice versa. Am I off or do I have something here?

SirPoonga:
The gun also plugs into the video card. It;d be hard to tell which gun was pointing where on the screen.

u_rebelscum:

--- Quote ---OK, now if I am reading this right, the act-lab gun is basically nothing more than a mouse.If that is the case, why can't 2 guns be used in the same fashion that 2 trackballs are used? I realise that there is a screen flashand that detects where the mouse pointer and it registers a "hit or miss". but if you can run two trackballs in MM, you should be able to run two mouse pointers. only drawback that I can see without a change in mame is that If one gun fires, it will register both guns position meaning that no matter where the second pointer is, when P1 fires, where-ever P2 pointer is will register a hit and vice versa. Am I off or do I have something here?
--- End quote ---

To play Marble Madness two players with two trackballs in windows, you need Analog+, right? It only works in win98 & winMe, not the current OS winXP. And I know of only a couple projects that do two mice at a time, none retail.

One way to get around this is have gun one use buttons 1 & 2, and gun two use buttons 3 & 4. (in directX, mice can have 4 buttons). When button 1 or 2 is pressed, the location registers for player 1. When button 3 or 4 is pressed, the location registers for player 2. This means special programming in mame. (unless the drivers does it)

The big problem is hooking both guns to the monitor so that they both can determine where they are pointing. The actlabs monitor attachment is only for one gun. If the attachment dongle was able to plug two guns, then you'd only have to worry about the previous paragraph.

I think. ;D

Lilwolf:
The main trouble is there arent' any standard drivers for a second mouse these days. So what do you use?

When you fire the button, it sends a pure white screen, then it counts until it sees that white pixel.... because of the way the refresh works, it draws left to right, top to bottom... so it knows when the first one was drawn, and it can calculate what pixel was drawn when it saw the flash.

Then they would need to keep track of both seperately. It can be done, but not from the current drivers.

btw, I wish they would look into some other technologies... like the techmaster wireless joystick... it was sonic (no screen problems at all... and no flashing screen).

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