The NEW Build Your Own Arcade Controls
Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: excaliburlives on February 12, 2023, 03:27:13 pm
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Hello, i'm upgrading my 15 yr old mame cabinet with a new control panel. I also want to add some light guns and a LCD Marquee. I'm sure i could get it work with a regular monitor or tv but i would like to keep the CRT Monitor. Is this possible?
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light guns are literally made for CRT monitors. the wells gardner D series monitors are still some of the best monitors out there.
you would only ruin into issues if you had an LCD as standard light guns don't work with them... you'd have to go to a camera system with infrared tracking like what the Wii remotes use. there is a thread going on talking about thet here:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,167028.msg1760074.html#msg1760074
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I didn't know that was an option. Looking into that now. I also think i'll be fine with a LCD Marquee.
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The only area of difficulty may be in the light gun system you go with. The LCD marquee will likely be extending your desktop resolution, which could throw a monkey wrench into the software which figures out where the gun is pointing. This is a somewhat common issue with folks who have multiple monitors mixed with touchscreens and digitizers.
Before I got too invested in the LCD marquee, it might be a good idea to make sure the lightgun system you intend to use will support that configuration without issues.
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What kind of LCD marquee monitors are out there? From what I can tell, there is nothing in the 3.5:1 range for aspect ratio...
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ahh, the old cut down lcd panel discussion fiasco again. :banghead:
you want to buy 1000 of them?
http://www.paradoxarcades.com/lcd-marquee
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The only area of difficulty may be in the light gun system you go with. The LCD marquee will likely be extending your desktop resolution, which could throw a monkey wrench into the software which figures out where the gun is pointing. This is a somewhat common issue with folks who have multiple monitors mixed with touchscreens and digitizers.
Before I got too invested in the LCD marquee, it might be a good idea to make sure the lightgun system you intend to use will support that configuration without issues.
If it's a choice between gun or lcd marquee, i'll the lcd marquee. Looks like i have to set all this up before i even put it in my cab. I was under the impression that i didn't need light bars since it was a CRT. But i don't know much about any of this.
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well, a fair number of people when considering a marquee, see the price of what it takes to get it, and then often go with a widescreen monitor flipped vertical, putting the marquee image on the edge and turing the remaining area into a 4:3ish sized area. it involves building a little bit of a weird flat fronted cabinet, and probably works best for a larger tabletop machine... but it is certainly the cheapest... and with some creative 3/4" x 1/4" trimming across the panel, you wouldn't even know it's all one monitor.
think of how nintendo did the 2DS monitor.
but marquees are available pretty cheap now, so i'm not sure what your budget is or what kind of sizes you are looking for...
https://www.amazon.com/VSDISPLAY-LTA149B780F-Controller-M-NT68676-Raspberry/dp/B07QGBL568
dig around on aliexpress, i'm sure you can find an appropriate sized 27 inch wide panel, but it might run you north of 800 bucks.
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I was under the impression that i didn't need light bars since it was a CRT. But i don't know much about any of this.
It's not about the light bars. If the marquee software can address a completely different display with it's own resolution, then you can set up the OS that way and there probably won't be an issue. But the easy way to do it is to extend the desktop across both monitors. This results in a total screen resolution which is the sum of the resolution from both monitors, and is reported as such to any software asking for that information. And if those numbers are incorrect, the software will place your aim somewhere it shouldn't be, unless it is multi-display/extended-desktop aware and has specific code to address this possibility.
Might not end up being a showstopper, but worth checking into before spending money.
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I was under the impression that i didn't need light bars since it was a CRT. But i don't know much about any of this.
okay, i see what's going on here... you asked a few different questions initially kind of all mashed together and now the answers you are getting have you mixed up. let me explain a little bit about how light guns work and hopefully this will clear some things up.
the Wells Gardner D9400 is a CRT monitor. it will work just fine with light gun games using a regular optical light guns. these guns work by flashing the game screen with white when you pull the trigger... and timing how long it takes for the gun's optical sensor to "see" the white be drawn on the screen. this is usually done a few times in succession to ensure the machine is right about where it thinks it is. this process takes about 1/4 to 1/3rd of a second.
this works because the CRT "draws" the image left to right, top to bottom, line by line. we know how long it takes to draw a whole screen this way and by timing how long it takes for the white light from the CRT to reach the position where the gun is, we can guess pretty accurately where it's gonna be.
this type of gun does not work with LCD monitors because LCD monitors wait for a whole frame from the device it's connected to, to be received, and then updates the whole panel all at once. there is no "drawing" the screen, so there is nothing to time against. just a (nearly) instantaneous frame change from one to the next.
if you had an LCD monitor, and wanted "lightgun games" you have to use the camera style guns that track infrared LED's placed around the monitor so the computer can figure out where it's being pointed.
adding an LCD marquee to a cabinet with a CRT will not affect how the optical guns work with the CRT.
in a nutshell if you plan to keep the WG D9400, you needn't concern yourself with changing it to add the LCD marquee or lightgun games.
if you plan on changing the WG D9400 for some other LCD monitor, you will have to go a different direction with regards to light gun games.
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I was under the impression that i didn't need light bars since it was a CRT. But i don't know much about any of this.
okay, i see what's going on here... you asked a few different questions initially kind of all mashed together and now the answers you are getting have you mixed up. let me explain a little bit about how light guns work and hopefully this will clear some things up.
the Wells Gardner D9400 is a CRT monitor. it will work just fine with light gun games using a regular optical light guns. these guns work by flashing the game screen with white when you pull the trigger... and timing how long it takes for the gun's optical sensor to "see" the white be drawn on the screen. this is usually done a few times in succession to ensure the machine is right about where it thinks it is. this process takes about 1/4 to 1/3rd of a second.
this works because the CRT "draws" the image left to right, top to bottom, line by line. we know how long it takes to draw a whole screen this way and by timing how long it takes for the white light from the CRT to reach the position where the gun is, we can guess pretty accurately where it's gonna be.
this type of gun does not work with LCD monitors because LCD monitors wait for a whole frame from the device it's connected to, to be received, and then updates the whole panel all at once. there is no "drawing" the screen, so there is nothing to time against. just a (nearly) instantaneous frame change from one to the next.
if you had an LCD monitor, and wanted "lightgun games" you have to use the camera style guns that track infrared LED's placed around the monitor so the computer can figure out where it's being pointed.
adding an LCD marquee to a cabinet with a CRT will not affect how the optical guns work with the CRT.
in a nutshell if you plan to keep the WG D9400, you needn't concern yourself with changing it to add the LCD marquee or lightgun games.
if you plan on changing the WG D9400 for some other LCD monitor, you will have to go a different direction with regards to light gun games.
Ok, let me see if i have this right? Because i'm using a CRT i don't need any sensor bars as long it's an optical gun? If the LCD is going to mess things up then i'll go without it. The gun is more important to me than the LCD Marquee. I should mention that i'm also using the Arcade VGA Card from Andy. Also, could you recomend the best optical gun for me?
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you only need to use a camera gun if you changed out the CRT for an LCD. adding an lcd marquee changes nothing.
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Well that and if you want to play the positional gun games (terminator 2, ect.) with a lightgun. Of course, the reason is because those games didn't actually use lightguns.
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Well that and if you want to play the positional gun games (terminator 2, ect.) with a lightgun. Of course, the reason is because those games didn't actually use lightguns.
T2 did on the Genesis :lol
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Well that and if you want to play the positional gun games (terminator 2, ect.) with a lightgun. Of course, the reason is because those games didn't actually use lightguns.
T2 did on the Genesis :lol
didn't we already fight about this once? :lol