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Ultimarc AimTrak Light Gun Module reviews

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romshark:
The much anticipated AimTrak arrived today, and I had a chance to try it out before I have to go to work.

First, what's in the box? Exactly what the site said it would. The actual module, the LED board, trigger wires, USB cables for both the module and the LED board, and a USB extension cable. The module comes in a small protective box, like a fine piece of jewelry. The sensor on the board looks like it's bent back a little, but I think it's by design. I don't dare try to bend it.

I temporarily mounted the LED board on my laptop and plugged everything in. Connected a spare microswitch to the trigger harness and plugged that in. Lo and behold, moving the board around caused the cursor to move.  A quick online read, and I calibrated the thing. On the Windows Desktop, it appears to have very good accuracy (note I'm just holding the board in one hand and the microswitch in a pushbutton in the other. No gun casing yet.)

That was the easy part. Figuring out how to get MAME to see it took some time. But, after changing lightgun control to lightgun (didn't seem to work as mouse, but I might have had something else set wrong), the ducks were falling (VS. Duckhunt) and the aliens were exploding (Area 51). Since I'm not exactly the best at gun games, and it's still just the pcb, I didn't fare too well, but I plan to have plenty of practice in the future. :)

The only real problem I had (my fault) was testing the Aimtrack sideways. then I tried to calibrate sideways. It didn't like that, and got stuck in calibration mode. I had to unplug it to stop, and when I did, my trigger button stopped working. Hopefully, the downloadable software (when released) will help restore the trigger. The trigger still can activate the caibrate mode, though.

Other than that, this is much better than the LCD topgun. Less hardware, no drivers to load (that seemed to conflict with each other), and better accuracy for me. Just add a gun shell, and things are good to go!

The LED bar only draws power from the USB. Using a USB charger (for an iPod or similar) makes no difference. So in theory, if someone only had one open USB port, they could rewire it off 5 volt power elseware.

Please add additional reviews. Others can cover things I missed.

Ginsu Victim:

--- Quote from: romshark on September 24, 2009, 02:26:16 pm ---The sensor on the board looks like it's bent back a little, but I think it's by design. I don't dare try to bend it.
--- End quote ---

Yes, it is intentionally that way. Definitely don't bend it.

KonkeyKong:
How do different posistions affect the accuracy?

Cananas:
Well, tested a little, without gun case. Similar to romshark, I connected a pushbutton to act like trigger.

The most important think: It's the first 64bits OS light gun compatible!!!!!. Tested on Vista 64.

It seems it tracks very fast. Good. Tracking is at least as good as LCdTopGun, with one diference. To can stand closer to the monitor.

In MameUI (64bits) the trigger is recognized like Joy 1 Button 0, not mouse 3 button 0 (remember we haven't the software to configure it). Anyway, this is good, because the mouse buttons limit.

Fow now, the 5 second trigger pressed to calibrate can be a problem playing games like Operation Wolf or Terminator 2... But this time will be configurable with the software.

I will update this post after I test more things.

TheShanMan:
I am very interested to hear what you guys have to say about how much accuracy is affected by height of the gun. The product info says if it's not held at the same height as calibration, it loses accuracy. I'm wondering how quickly the accuracy diminishes because recalibrating every time someone different holds the gun would not be ideal, particularly for my kids who want it to "just work". OTOH accuracy won't be as critical for them anyway, so if the loss in accuracy is small from where I calibrate to where they would hold it, then I'd be perfectly happy.

Regarding holding it sideways: the product info says that tilting it reduces accuracy but there are different modes (3 I think) that allow you to optimize the gun in different ways, one of which I think eliminates the tilting accuracy problem.

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