recently got an LCD topgun, impressed, installed smog's drivers, works ok, except for one thing:
i read somewhere this gun has a resolution of 1024x768
my htpc screen res is 1024x576.
therefore mouse tracking should be capable of moving individual pixels, right?
well it jumps more like 5-10 pixels at a time.. the res is more like 160x120.. not sure, but its a lot lower than 1024x768 anyway!
is this a driver issue (havent tried others, not keen to mess as i had a BSOD once already), a hardware problem, limitation or something else?
ive tried the sensitivity option in smog's drivers, that makes the pointer less jittery but doesnt seem to change the res much.
haven't tried the gun in games yet, but for windows navigation its not as good as i hoped.
Hi,
The resolution of the guns is lower than 1024x768.
The gun actually has a hardcoded range of values that it reports (in a guncon2 compatible way) that are:
X Min = 160
X Max = 672
Y Min = 32
Y Max = 224
However you calibrate the gun, these are the range of value its sends. This is from a previous post - you should use these values in Smog's driver, unless he has already added a "TopGun" selection box. These values are hardcoded into the Linux driver.
So it has a range of 512 'units' in the X and 192 in the Y.
When you do a hardware calibration with the gun, it will simply map the distance and over that range, whatever resolution you are using (The gun never knows what resolution you use - it simply sends x/y values within the above range and driver does the rest.
So technically, in 1024x768, you should be able to move 2 pixels at a time in the X, and 4 pixels in the Y, although I suspect the error margin of readings will make this less accurate.
(Incidentally this is probably significant for people mounting the LCD mounts above/below the monitor not to the side - do you calibrate rotated 90 degrees as well? Or calibrate as normal?)
This is still as good/better than any other lightgun I've used. I believe a high-end camera track device (TrackIR products) could beat it, but these are not as viable (or cheap) for mame.
I currently own dual PC USB actlabs (not the new pistol version), dual scorpion guncon2's (including a mod to work on PC monitors) and dual Topgun's. Once calibrated, all can be quite accurate. I would suggest the Topgun's are the most accurate. They certainly do not have the glitch problems I have with all the others - based on the White Screen flashing approach, where some shots are missed, and P1 and P2 can mixed when firing at the same time. The Topguns are also the only that definately require no re-calibration between resolutions and reboots. It is a shame they are also the cheapest in terms of build quality.