Well, for the people having trouble, my conclusion about the TopGun is that it is finnicky. But once you tame it, it works as advertised.
IF you can 'tame' it.
For those that got it to work, I say great and fantastic. For the price of the gun with shipping though, it's a mess.
I am a network/electrical engineer by trade, so I know my way around computers and electronics and this isn't ready for prime time in my opinion.
I tried every driver, every combination mentioned on here and on other sites and in the end my Mame cab is down. It can be fixed no problem, but it'll be extra time wasted since it was all working before and does annoy me. Why is it down? From all the un-installs, reinstalls... try this, try that... system restores... eventually my system said enough is enough.
I couldn't even get the LCDImage to load and work properly.
Looking through my digital cam I only saw one IR dot. Maybe I have bad hardware, and that's the most likely scenario, but when you spend $60 or more on something you expect it to work. If I had spent $10-$20 on this I wouldn't be too upset because you get what you pay for. Yes I expected this to work after reading reviews and watching UTube vids of it, everything I bought so far for my cab has worked right out of the box and as advertised except this.
Guy's, I'm not talking about problems in Mame, (although as I mentioned I ended up crashing my cab) this thing just wouldn't work with the company drivers or Smog's. It did get a bit further with Smog's drivers, but still failed. To call a spade a spade, there is no reason why this shouldn't work out of the box and with the company's own drivers and setup. I understand for some it does, but keep in mind for many it doesn't, and that's where the problem is.
I scoured the web and even the company website and as I said in an earlier post, 8 pages of people having problems out of the box. When a company sends people to a private individuals home grown driver over their own that says volumes and that there are problems. Even this thread is more about people having problems than successes. Eventually barring any hardware issues if a person is persistant enough they sometimes get it to work.
Again, for those that got this to work and love it, I applaud you, but in my opinion on doing many HT equipment reviews, and my experience with computers and electronics- This isn't a finished product by no means. I have seen the PS2 version of this gun and this one looks a lot like a thrown together gun to try and fill a niche and snag some market money. Sometimes it works for people, a lot of the times it doesn't or it's buggy, and if you step back and are honest, that's really unacceptable today.
I apologize to those that love it, but there are too many bad guns shipped and too many setup problems to really recommend this for everyone. It's more of a 'if you're lucky' maybe the money you spent will be worth it for a few months.
I really wanted to like this gun. It looks good and feels good but just doesn't work for a lot of people, myself included.
Oh, I was looking at my cab before coming upstairs and those wires hanging down in front of the bezel... there really has to be a better way than this. Who wants a nice cab and then wires dangling all over the place?
Yes I am a bit negative right now, but seeing how well other guns setup and work and all the problems with this one, it's not worth the money.
Now I will tear it apart and see if I can do something with it. Personally, I'm not too happy spending $60 plus with shipping for something that's still not even in the beta stage of functionality.
I'd play with it some more, but now I have to fix my cab, so no more time will be spent on this thing. BTW, before calling it a night, I fired up my PS3 and Time Crisis 4 and was up and playing in less than five minutes, including calibration. I spent $70 for the gun and game and it works flawlessly. It's everything the TopGun should have been right out of the box.
The bottom line is that I fully understand that with Mame there does come a learning curve as well as setup, configuration, and trial and error. This exceeds any reasonably tweaking in my opinion and as good as the gun looks... buyer beware, it has problems and some guns may work for some people, but that's no guarantee it will work for you.