Act-Labs Gun Problem

[rbtconsultants]

Hi - I'm hoping Calamity or others with experience can help me with my Act-labs lightgun.

When I got my Mame cab it came with the Act_labs Lightgun which worked fine with a Windows XP machine running Mame and an ArcadeVGA card running through a J-PAC to a CRT. The lightgun plugs into a black box that connects to the computer with USB, and also has a VGA in and out so the computer VGA runs through the black box and then out into the J-Pac.

When I got the cab, the lightgun would calibrate when you hit a switch on the gun which made the screen go totally white.  You point the gun at the white screen and move it up and down and side to side and then turn the calibration switch off and it would fire accurately at the screen, like clicking on a mouse pointer.

I upgraded to a windows 7 computer with a Radeon HD8570 graphics card running Groovymame .202, CRTEmudriver, and Atom-15. The machine works great, the display seems truly authentic back to my old 80's arcade days. Thank you Calamity for the amazing work. I sent you a donation in appreciation.

However, my lightgun has a problem. When I hit calibrate now the screen doesn't turn white. It has a white band at the top and then grades to gray to black further down the screen . Most of the screen is black.

The gun is no longer manufactured, but Act-Labs is still there so I sent an email to their support and they answered. This is what they said:

this is a compatibility issue with the Radeon VGA card, we must have the white screen, which is listing the parameter(how many dots for H and lines for V and the refresh rate) of the display for the gun to memorize, Is there any option on the card that can adjust it?

When we switch to calibration mode, we send a “all white” request to the vga card, the issue seems that the driver does not interpret this request properly. In old days this request is a combination of resisters matrix and TTL values.

So, I don't know if this is an issue that can be resolved, but I am way over my head here.

Any thoughts? Is this something that I can configure in the CRTEmudriver? Any other thoughts?

Thanks,

Bob

[Calamity]

I'd never had imagined the all white request is something the box sends to the VGA rather than something the box "overprints" to the signal.

Nevertheless the white signal seems to be showing to some extent. My guess is that it's dependent on the video timings. Could you check it over different video modes using Arcade OSD? This way we'll find whether it's broken on all of them or there's some pattern to it.

If possible, post some pictures.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Necrobump! Since the OP never followed up on this.. I'm running into what's almost certainly the same issue. It's been like 10 years since I've had a working light gun setup I'd really like to get the bottom of this.

Setup is an HD5450, emudrivers beta 15 12.6, WG 25" K7400 using Super Resolutions.
I've just re-wired my vga harness to ensure that H-sync and V-sync are separately connected, since that's been mentioned as being required by Act Labs guns in other threads. Switching to calibrate mode produces a mostly black screen some white lines at the top.

I'll follow up with some pictures of what's going on and try tinkering with ArcadeOSD to see if I can get any clearer idea of what's happening.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

So I get the same behavior in all 16 modes that are installed currently, flicking through them with ArcadeOSD in calibrate mode.
I suppose it's possible there's something wrong with one of the boxes, or one of the guns themselves, so next I'll try only one gun attached, and each combination of gun and box.

Previously when I had a functional setup it was with a normal PC CRT at some 31khz res (probably 1024x768), but I've seen plenty of people reporting it functioning properly on a 15kHz display. I'll have to see if I can find an old monitor to hook it up with as well just to confirm they are still functional aside from GM and the monitor.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

When the calibrate switch is flipped it does start to grow a white screen, but then just stops after the first frame.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/yQc2jGwKDWuL3wiE9

Pulling the trigger produces the white flash, but with no calibration the cursor snaps to the corner.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/kayKP3V7ojKBaw9h7