Help with the Aimtrak

[kjbalto]

I just got my aimtrak in and I have the Guncon 2 guns.  I just wanted to hook up the trigger and a second button if necessary so I copied the installation that Drakin posted over on the Hyperspin forums. I don't have pics of what I did, so I'll post a link to his here. Anyway, the problem I'm having is that I have it installed, and I did the calibration. The gun moves with the crosshairs and when I pull the trigger it fires.  However, it doesn't shoot where I'm pointing.  So everythign seems calibrated, it moves around the screen where I'm pointing the gun, but when I pull the trigger, it fires dead center every time in the screen.  It's as if it ignores where I'm pointing the gun and where the crosshairs are pointed.  I tried changing the settings in mame to have the lightgun used as a mouse and the light gun used as a light gun. Nothing changes this.  I'm thinking I soldered something wrong, but it fires when I pull the trigger.  Any ideas on what could be wrong here?  Here's Drakin's pics. Hopefully you guys can tell me what I'm doing wrong here.

http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4797

[angryred]

It sounds like to need to do the calibration on the individual game you're playing-- what game(s) have you tried?

Some games are more finicky than others. Arcade games had several types of lightgun systems, which with the AimTrak, we're trying to emulate using one system to cover them all.

Once you find a game that obviously responds to your tweaking, the rest will be much easier to figure out.  Still, there will likely be some gun games that still just won't work; for example, I'm using MAME v112, and off-screen reload doesn't work for me in Lethal Enforcers.  Works in other games, just not in LE.  Beast Busters is another one-- I can't get the gun calibration in BB to save properly, so my shots on screen are nowhere near the MAME gun cursor.

The two things (beyond what you said you already did) that I have to do on most games to get the gun games to work:

1) Figure out how that individual game handles gun calibration.  It's usually through the test menu (F2), but it differs from game to game. For example, one I set up yesterday accessed the test menu via F2, but to access the gun calibration portion I had to hold the service switch (9) while I pressed F2. The info in the MAWS database can often help with this.

2) Tweak the mouse sensitivity settings in the Tab menu (analog controls).  I'm using an ArcadeVGA hooked up to an arcade monitor, and I've noticed that when I run games at their native resolution-- 320x240 as opposed to the desktop at 640x480, say-- the MAME gun cursor is restricted to a small area at the center of the screen, and I have to increase the X and Y axes sensitivity until the MAME cursor matches my gun sight. If I run a game using hardware stretching or Direct3D at 640x480, the cursor usually starts out with a much larger range than with the games running in smaller resolutions.

But if you have a properly aligned MAME cursor, and your shots aren't going to the cursor, it's almost certain that you need to activate that particular game's gun calibration.

[kjbalto]

Thanks for the tips, but I'm still confused here. The games I tried, which I know work, because I've seen others post videos of aimtrak with these games, are Police Trainer and Area51.  When I went into the menu settings on each game, is shows you the x and y axis and all of those settings that I thought you just leave and don't want to change.  What settings are you talking about that I shoudl change?  You don't think it's possible I soldered the wrong wire or something like that?  I thought it was possible, but then the gun wouldn't work properly, right?  It moves around and fires when I pull the trigger, it just doesn't shoot where I'm aiming at.  I'll try and play around with it when I get home from work, but I still don't understand what settings you're talking about.  There were a few axis setting lines for the light guns in each game.  I thought those stay as is?

[kjbalto]

Okay, got a chance to look at it again just now with a fresh head, since it was late last night when I first setup my gun. So I see again that the gun is shooting when I hit the trigger but hitting dead center. I'm testing this on my pc, before I hook it up to my arcade, I forgot to mention. Anyway, so I think for a second as to why it's aiming dead center on the screen and duh, I see the mouse to my pc, I move it and that's where it was. So I moved my mouse around and pulled the trigger, sure enough, that's what was happening. Back to my calibration page to change the settings in the Aimtrak tool and when I make changes, and hit calibrate and it crashed. I'm rebooting now, but I just wanted to post this in case anybody's curious as to what my problem was.  I'm hoping everything will work fine now.  

Edit: Problem solved. I had to make the Trigger GP Button 1 and the P1 I had to set to GP Player 2.  I guess having my mouse plugged in screwed up the order?

[Drakin]

Glad you got it figured out...disreguard my PM on Hyperspin.

[angryred]

When I was setting up my Aimtrak, I couldn't find any chatter about the axis settings-- I didn't know if I should leave them alone or what.  But like I said, on the games that were running in their native resolutions, the MAME gun cursor wasn't moving at a 1:1 movement like the desktop cursor was; instead, it was slower and would not reach the edges of the screen.  Usually, I had to double the axis sensitivity to achieve a 1:1 movement.

Now that I think about it, though, I have no idea if the axis settings I was adjusting were at their defaults. Prior to the Aimtrak, I had some gun games controlled by my analog sticks. It's possible I had already adjusted those settings when setting them up to work the analogs, so for all I know I returned the axis settings to their default.

But yeah, it was the X and Y axis sensitivities in Analog Controls in the Tab menu that I was playing with. Most of the time I was adjusting them from a 20-30% value to somewhere around 75-100%, depending on the game. I raised the values until the cursor was able to reach the edge of the screen, then bumped the values a bit until the MAME cursor followed my gunsight perfectly. Once that's done, then I use the in-game calibration.  After those 2 steps, I can turn off the MAME cursor completely and get good accuracy.

Now, if somebody out there knows for sure that that's not how I was supposed to set things up, I sure would like to know how it really works. Working fine for me, though.