Optical gun ?

[zirk]

First of, greetrings to you all, as Im new here.
I was thinking I was alone in my insanity making MAME cabs, so I'm pretty glad I found you guys

Anyway. My setup works, the controlpanel was tested individualy on the regular home PC, new harware for cabinet bought, cabinet assembled exept the TV (monitor) I couldnt afford when wife wanted other house addons first, and now its time to complete the project.

THEN. the horrible, creeping, 'no, go away insanity' feeling came.... what if I added an optical gun ??

Anyone have any experience or heard of anyone done this ? Whold an optical E-pac (or whatever its called) and the gun do the trick ?

I have no knowlengde how optical cables works, so any ofnromation about the subject would be greatly appreciated.

[Howard_Casto]

E-pac?  if you Mean the ipac or opti-pac, no they won't work one's for a keyboard and ones for a trackball.  Also this is still the main breakthrough that has yet to happen.  

Here's the obsticles we have so far.

• Mame dosen't support light guns even if we had one to use.   (can be fixed though, if demand is high enough)
  
• Arcade guns are primarily light guns, which will only work on their intended monitor.
  
• Different people use different displays on their cab (see above)
  
• Before you ask, all pc-based lightguns suck, a nintendo/ps/dreamcast one has yet to be successfully interfaced to a pc, and for reasons mentioned above it would be very difficult to make an "i-pac like" device to interface standard arcade guns, which are insainly expensive in most cases anyway.

We are definately trying towards a solution, but for now, the answer is NO.  

I hope to change that if I get any additional spare time though.    
 

[Lilwolf]

as above.

but to add some things.

ActLabs is the closest.  But only works at high refresh (ie, not bgrade monitors), it doesn't work in mame well, it sucks.  It could get support, but nobody is willing to try.  (I offered mine to anyone willing to write the driver)

I think the best generic solution is there is a joystick type thing that uses gyroscopes or something (not optical so it wouldnt be monitor releated).  I can't remember it's name.  But it would have to be mounted on a gun like object (1) and you can only have one (and that really sucks.  Those games are only fun if you can john wo their ass's)

Or better yet.  If someone would come up with a gun solution where something sits on the monitor.  They had some for other game systems.  This would take some adjusting to get it to work with different monitor sizes.  But if it was good enough,  didn't require being right on top of the monitor,  if the device could be hacked easily around a bezel without making it look bad, and 2 player support... I would be all over that

[Howard_Casto]

Yes  there's an ultra sonic device called the techmedia zone master that uses that method available for the pc.  It has an L shaped bracket that rests on the top of your pc/tv/ect and works regardless of screen type since it dosen't use light to center itself, rather ultrasonic waves.  There's a few problems with this gun though.  

• It's performance on mame is adequte at best.  (If  mame was designed to support it i figure it would be better.)
  
• The product is discontinued.
  
• Dirvers are only available for win 95 so if your using 2000/xp then your out of luck.
  
• The bezel attachment interfaces via the serial port, which is somewhat outdated.
  
• It looks more like a star trek tng phaser rather than a gun. (Could be hacked though.)

I think that this would be the best solution out there, but I've had the same probs lilwolf has had, no one wants to write drivers for it.

[Lilwolf]

And another problem I heard (don't own, but asked in the past).  

1 player only.

Most of the shooting games are only really fun with 2 in my mind.  Otherwise I would have probably tried it (and still might, I will check ebay I guess)

[1UP]

The ideal solution so far is to get a pot-based gun from a parted-out machine, such as Space Gun or Terminator 2.  Someone was selling a TRUCKLOAD of T2 guns on Ebay awhile back, and I was lucky enough to pick up 2 of them for $25 each.  Then I got 2 MS Dual Strikes, and hacked them to connect to the original pots in the guns.  This works flawlessly.  (I even have the recoil almost working!  )

As these guns are somewhat hard to come by, here's what I was originally planning to do:  Get the Dual Strikes, turn them on their ends and look--they somewhat resemble guns, especially in the way they aim.  It would take some hacking and possibly re-wiring, but you could pretty much just cut down the handle a bit, attach a toy Uzi and paint it black.  Worth a try.

BTW, I'm still meaning to get the pinout for the DS board up on my site.  I'll get it up someday  

[Agent Davis]

I've been preaching this forever, but I'll repeat it.  Still the best solution for gun games is a playstation, period, with dreamcast being second.  Playstation has many arcade gun games.

[Howard_Casto]

With all due respect AD arcade-like games are NOT the same as arcade games.  Plus ps1 is a very dated and limited system.  Dreamcast would be a much better solution.  

[Agent Davis]

With all due respect AD arcade-like games are NOT the same as arcade games.

[1UP]

I think what Howard meant is that they're not the TRUE original version of the games, although all they may be missing is "insert coin".  A lot of people here are sticklers for having the original games with all the original programming, graphics and features.  There are all kinds of ports of arcade games, like Return of Arcade and such, but there's nothing like the real thing.  We just need to figure out how to interface it...

And the only way so far is with pot-based controllers.

[Agent Davis]

Ok, then why in the world would a dreamcast be better?

The fact is, there are a lot of people on here who wouldn't mind using the method I suggested.  After all, that is all I was doing - suggesting a method for having arcade gun games on a person's mame cab.  I know a LOT of people who like having a psx and dc in their cabs.  Hitting start button instead of coin button isn't that big of a deal to a lot of people.

It's all a matter of preference, and some people certainly don't mind the ever so slight differences, but it's unfair to suggest that all people would care.

[Dr. Jay]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm going to keep trying until we get real optical guns in mame.  Positional guns are great for T2, but not the same for Police Trainer.  Not at all.  I don't want a psx or dreamcast in my cabinet. I'm trying to get everything set up so it's self sufficient, and uses coins, and I don't want to deal with switching cd's.  It's just my preference, and some other peoples preference as well.  SO...people can keep working on positional guns, and other people can use psx, but other people (like me) are stubborn and refuse to give up

[1UP]

I didn't say ALL people would care, I said A LOT of them do.  I personally would prefer to leave the PS on my TV, unless I can get an emulator for it so I don't have to swap CDs all the time.  I'm one of those who would rather not get into the mess of getting the switchers and extra hardware that you need to run consoles on a VGA monitor.

[Agent Davis]

Hey, I'm not giving up either.  I'd love to see the ability to play the Mame arcade light gun games too.  Perhaps Mame will eventually emulate some of the newer gun games eventually too.  But I don't personally think there is any comparison.  Of course, I'm of a different generation than a large majority here and probably enjoy some of the newer games more than some people.  That's not to say I don't like the classics though, and would love to see them all emulated, including the light gun games.