act light gun help!

[JKD The Lad]

I'm having some trouble getting my act labs light gun to work with my betson west 27 inch multi sync
when I first start up my computer everything is fine, I pull the trigger and the screen flashes, naturally the aim is way off so I have to go to calibration mode and swipe the gun across the screen horizontally and vertically.
after I do this not only is the aiming still a inch off but every time I pull the trigger the screen jumps forward sort of zooming in on itself and then zooms back to its original size!
what could I be doing wrong?  I have it running at 60hrz in 800x600!
what could be the problem? 

[kegger]

I don't know what the problem is but I have the Betson also and I ended up sending the gun  back for a refund. I had the same problem.

[JKD The Lad]

 
well then we should defiantly try and find a solution!
I know others have managed to get act lab light guns to work with there cabs.

[RetroACTIVE]

Was your light-gun purchased recently or is it an old one?

The reason I ask is because there was a time (a while back) when they first released the new version of the gun (when they went away from the ray-gun look) when they had problems with their vga interface... I had to return my interface box for a new one... that fixe the problem for me...  If you got it within the past couple of years your fine though.

[JKD The Lad]

Its brand new, a red 2 player gun model

[Fozzy The Bear]

Its brand new, a red 2 player gun model

You're not doing anything wrong, apart from using that monitor. The problem is not with your gun..... It's a problem with the monitor. I'm afraid that it's a problem that you won't be able to solve.

That's not a monitor for gun games that flash the screen. It's simply not designed to cope with that. The problem lies with the voltage regulation on that design. That's why, every time the screen flashes the image zooms slightly then returns to original size. All monitors do it a little bit, but those particular monitors are not able to cope with very rapid high intensity screen brightness changes.

I've seen this problem several times.

Sorry!! But your only solution is to use another monitor.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[TPB]

... your only solution is to use another monitor.

Or alternatively :

Buy some LCD Top Gun's.   

[JKD The Lad]

thanks for the help, but seriously?
I have to return the guns?
this along with my fake dragons layer cd and defective arcade vga means I'm going to have to do a lot of shipping!

that cant be right! I read on retro blast : http://retroblast.arcadecontrols.com/reviews/betson2.html
that the act labs light gun works perfectly with the monitor!
Are you sure that I have to return it?

[Fozzy The Bear]

that cant be right! I read on retro blast : http://retroblast.arcadecontrols.com/reviews/betson2.html
that the act labs light gun works perfectly with the monitor!
Are you sure that I have to return it?

The retroblast review says "The area where the Betson monitor seemed the weakest was in screen regulation, which is a measure of how well the monitor holds a picture "steady" while large changes occur in the displayed image."

That monitor will simply not cope with the screen flashing that occurs when your act labs guns fire. We have two of these in the arcade, or at least we did until this poor regulation caused too many problems with them. There simply is no way to fix that zooming problem that you described. It's all down to cheap design and low grade components. That's why the Betson monitors are cheap to purchase in the first place.

They're great as a general arcade use monitor, but absolutely useless on gun games that use screen flashing, like most of the earlier Namco shooters. That's how I discovered this problem. So basically, if you want to keep that monitor, then you need to invest in an LCD Topgun instead of the Act Labs one.

Sorry that I can't give you better news than that. It's just not possible to fix that problem. So you need to choose to change the monitor or change the gun.

Kortek generally produce reasonable monitors, but my experience of the Betson badged ones is that they're a real duff design. We still have them on Fast & Furious and they really do suffer badly from instability and also suffer from colour purity problems.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[JKD The Lad]

alright, I guess I do.
Thanks for the info. I'll make sure to call act labs in the morning