Act labs guns stopped working

[doctorhifi]

I've got the USB version of the guns and they have been working great.

However, I recently added a wireless mouse to my pc and had to shuffle the various USB connections on my pc (including both ACT lab guns) to make room for the mouse's USB wireless receiver.  Just discovered that now the guns don't reload. 

The only thing that has changed is the guns are plugged into different usb ports on the back of my PC.  I can't remember for sure which ports they were in before I added the mouse, and I've tried a few different ones with the same result: I can get them to shoot but not reload (using Area51 as a test).
Any advice?

[doctorhifi]

Oops- I forgot I did make one other change and that was I added a third mouse button to my 3" Happ trackball.

[doctorhifi]

Problem solved.  Had nothing to do at all with the usb stuff.

Problem was, Off screen reload was not enabling on a game specific basis as I had previously set it up.

Normally off screen reload is set to off (0) in mame.ini

I have game specific ini files that enable off screen reloading (for example area51.ini) so when I run area51 mame first grabs the mame.ini but them overwrites it when it finds area51.ini in the ini folder.

Not exactly sure how it happened but the .ini files I made for specific gun games that required off screen reload to be enabled were somehow gone from the ini folder inside mame.  I added them back in and now it works fine.

Guess I should have done more investigating before firing off a post, but at least perhaps what I found may help others in the future.

[nickynooch]

Have you been overall happy with your Act-labs guns?  I'm debating on getting guns soon and act-labs simply look the most old school arcade-ish.

Do they work with any emulators other than MAME?

[doctorhifi]

I have been and am still pleased with them.  I have not, however, tried them on any emulator outside MAME.

[Visitor Q]

Heard these don't work well through smoked glass, any input?

[doctorhifi]

Yes, I previously posted about this. 

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=85182.msg921009#msg921009

 I had dark tinted plexiglass at first and the guns worked very poorly.  Switched to clear glass and they worked 100%, so my experience says dark tinted plexiglass causes problems with these guns.