DemulShooter (Dual light gun on DEMUL, Model2, Dolphin, Silent Hill, etc...)

[RoLLeR_PoWeR]

Hi Argon and other people!

I have two sinden lightguns that I use to play on emulators and PC, which work wonderfully and thanks to this program I can enjoy with friends or my brother. Well, to the point!

I'm trying to play Silent Scope on PS2. The game was not made to be played with a lightgun, but you can operate the scope with the left stick. I know it's also on Xbox, but of the trilogy only the second one is going well, the others have graphical errors... I use PCSX2 Qt Nightly 1.7. If I configure the mouse as an analog controller it works perfectly, smooth movement, etc... But if I connect my Sinden, it automatically goes to the corners without being able to remedy it when I try to aim.

I'm going crazy trying to get it to work and I think it's because the Sinden lightguns work as RAW Input and not as a normal mouse... And, if I understand correctly, too, Demulshooter makes them "work like a mouse"...

So, is there any possibility of running DS together with PCSX2 to use my Sinden as a mouse and finally be able to enjoy this great game?

Thank you so much!

[argonlefou]

Hi Argon and other people!

I have two sinden lightguns that I use to play on emulators and PC, which work wonderfully and thanks to this program I can enjoy with friends or my brother. Well, to the point!

I'm trying to play Silent Scope on PS2. The game was not made to be played with a lightgun, but you can operate the scope with the left stick. I know it's also on Xbox, but of the trilogy only the second one is going well, the others have graphical errors... I use PCSX2 Qt Nightly 1.7. If I configure the mouse as an analog controller it works perfectly, smooth movement, etc... But if I connect my Sinden, it automatically goes to the corners without being able to remedy it when I try to aim.

I'm going crazy trying to get it to work and I think it's because the Sinden lightguns work as RAW Input and not as a normal mouse... And, if I understand correctly, too, Demulshooter makes them "work like a mouse"...

So, is there any possibility of running DS together with PCSX2 to use my Sinden as a mouse and finally be able to enjoy this great game?

Thank you so much!

Hello,
Unfortunately, no

And it's not on my plan

[ThatOneSeong]

Hey again, arg!

I've just finished adding OLED and life/ammo display support to the OpenFIRE project, so I've been having a play with DS again lately trying out the Ammo and Life outputs.

While it's generally worked well, I did notice a bit of strange behavior at least with Let's Go Island (3D): the reported life bar keeps switching to 0% when cutscenes play, and only switches back to the correct value when control is gained.

I did this testing mostly with my own QMamehook program's verbose output just to see what exactly it's sending; aside from some bugs on my end that I recently resolved, this seems to be a consistent and intentional(?) behavior on DS's end. But for a user who has this active display of player stats enabled, it'll look really confusing seeing the player "dead" according to DS's output but the lifebar (which remains onscreen in most cases) still showing the real value.

Is this intentional? Was the idea to be that when a cutscene is playing that the life display is supposed to be "hidden"? There doesn't seem to be much of a distinction between "hiding" or simply "dead". This doesn't seem to happen in other games like House of the Dead 1 or Virtua Cop, which never change life display outside of damage/bonuses.

I haven't tested much so far, since I'm still barrelling towards public release of OF, but just thought I'd ask to make sure.

[argonlefou]

Hey again, arg!

I've just finished adding OLED and life/ammo display support to the OpenFIRE project, so I've been having a play with DS again lately trying out the Ammo and Life outputs.

While it's generally worked well, I did notice a bit of strange behavior at least with Let's Go Island (3D): the reported life bar keeps switching to 0% when cutscenes play, and only switches back to the correct value when control is gained.

I did this testing mostly with my own QMamehook program's verbose output just to see what exactly it's sending; aside from some bugs on my end that I recently resolved, this seems to be a consistent and intentional(?) behavior on DS's end. But for a user who has this active display of player stats enabled, it'll look really confusing seeing the player "dead" according to DS's output but the lifebar (which remains onscreen in most cases) still showing the real value.

Is this intentional? Was the idea to be that when a cutscene is playing that the life display is supposed to be "hidden"? There doesn't seem to be much of a distinction between "hiding" or simply "dead". This doesn't seem to happen in other games like House of the Dead 1 or Virtua Cop, which never change life display outside of damage/bonuses.

I haven't tested much so far, since I'm still barrelling towards public release of OF, but just thought I'd ask to make sure.

Well, it's not really "intentionnal"....not fully :

Finding output values is not the hardest part on those SEGA games, the hardest part is the fact that at that time, when the game was running the attract demo gameplay, it was using some kind of "scripted gameplay sequence" making the life, ammo (and other character related data) values to change in exactly like in real player gameplay.
(Newer games usually don't have that issue as they are using a gameplay recorded video to play like a movie)

So, to limit the buttefly effect of having recoil, dammaged and other custom events to fire during the attract mode, I need to find a way to "filter" the good/bad moments to use those values.

So, concerning LGI3D : I'm filtering thanks to some value in the player data structure......but it ended beeing a wrong choice :
- It goes 1/0 during gameplay (0 in the cutscenes) so when it goes to 0, life data is filtered out by DS
- It goes 1/0 in the same way in attract mode so you should see the life changing in the attract mode (if the demo is loosing life)

I lurked a little more in the binary and may have found a beter way to find if the game is playing or displaying attract, I'll have to try to play with it to make things  better.

On a side note, displaying that kind of values (that were not meant to be visible at all to the physical player) sometimes has some side effects. You will surely be able to see some amo going to 0 in cutscenes, or changing values in game over screen or other weird things in some games.
A recent example was someone pointing out the fact that, in HOD2 (flycast or Demul) the ammo account is decreasing and can be reloaded during cutscenes, where no GUI is displayed on screen
It's fun to see sometimes the "BEhind The Scenes" of the game and have clues on how the devs are handlings things in reality

[ThatOneSeong]

I see! Very informative - yeah, it would make sense that the autodemos are just normal gameplay sequences but automated, and having things firing off in the attract sequences would get very annoying. 

Obviously, it's not the biggest deal in the world or anything, as external screen display support is optional and only really supported on printable guns (what's shown is the PiCON with WIP adjustments for OLED), but it's fascinating nonetheless to see these behind-the-scenes happenings regardless (which I've caught at least a few instances of, and surely will find more as the firmware goes public and people start exploring the fuller library of DS's supported games with such feedback channels). 

[phasermaniac]

Hi Argon.
Some years ago I told you about Ad cop and Bon bon Paradise.  Both games are msdos but have win95 versions.
I tested Ad cop win 95 version and I couldn't get it to work.
But just noticed that Bon bon paradise works. You just have to mount Cd, install the game, Open cd and run Main95.exe.
There is SETUP95.exe, if you select lightguns game doesn't launch but if you select keyboard and /or mouse it starts normally.

Just in case you are interested, it is a good Point blank game like.

I don't know what happens with Ad Cop, gonna investigate this days

[argonlefou]

I see! Very informative - yeah, it would make sense that the autodemos are just normal gameplay sequences but automated, and having things firing off in the attract sequences would get very annoying. 

Obviously, it's not the biggest deal in the world or anything, as external screen display support is optional and only really supported on printable guns (what's shown is the PiCON with WIP adjustments for OLED), but it's fascinating nonetheless to see these behind-the-scenes happenings regardless (which I've caught at least a few instances of, and surely will find more as the firmware goes public and people start exploring the fuller library of DS's supported games with such feedback channels). 

I tried to fix it, this will be available in the next release. Finger crossed for the change to work as expected... 

Hi Argon.
Some years ago I told you about Ad cop and Bon bon Paradise.  Both games are msdos but have win95 versions.
I tested Ad cop win 95 version and I couldn't get it to work.
But just noticed that Bon bon paradise works. You just have to mount Cd, install the game, Open cd and run Main95.exe.
There is SETUP95.exe, if you select lightguns game doesn't launch but if you select keyboard and /or mouse it starts normally.

Just in case you are interested, it is a good Point blank game like.

I don't know what happens with Ad Cop, gonna investigate this days

The issue is, with those old DOS games, to run them without any issue on every computer....
I personnally had a lot of trouble to make BONBON start, but unfortunatelly I cannot get past the main menu because of some MSCDEX error on 2 computers.
So...for now.....I will let it sleep on my NAS