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aimtrak guns installed, nearly satisfied with the results.

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yotsuya:
Do you have any lamps or bright lights directly across from the AIMTrak sensor? That can cause issues.

eds1275:
My issues with the aimtrak are nearly gone. They are very good FOR SENSOR BAR GUNS and pretty much the only option we have available - they are a lot of fun but far from perfect (if you define perfect being a proper lightgun.)

First, I found that I had to tilt my sensor bar down a bunch to get it to register in all corners. Then, I turned off the lights in the room to calibrate. The only light fixture in the room with the machine has a light fixture sort of right between where the player stands and the machine is. I added a lamp in the corner of the room, no more problems. I also leave my guns plugged in to stop the headache of reassignment. If some jerk actually unplugs them and things get weird, I turn it off, plug them back in, and boot up. No problems with this so far.

SpatzST:
did you change all the recommended settings in the mame.ini? theres 3
in the Aimtrak software, you should be set to mouse input, not joystick. 

i also just got aimtraks! They are pretty good, some games still aren't possible to play such as Police Trainer since you have to act very quickly, but the lag time between the IR and the screen is too obvious for any fast reaction shots.

Connorsdad:
I think they are awesome but I too have problems when using two guns. I can never get them to work together perfectly, one calibrates perfectly and glides around the screen as expected but I can never get the 2nd gun to calibrate perfectly, it goes pretty much where ever it wants. Another problem is if I aim off screen to reload or lower my arm, when I bring my aim back upto the screen I have to wave the gun around like a mad man to get the gun registering again.

dkersten:
Yup, the hub is powered.  I got frustrated last night and pulled the back off the cabinet and moved the iPac to one of the PC ports.  This seems to have cleared up the glitchiness.. But while it was glitching, it deleted games from my gamelist, would randomly open and close programs, and even when I was got home last night from work it had managed to run task manager.. wtf.. Every time I came out of games not only would mala lose focus, but a right click on the start menu was up that wouldn't go away.  VERY annoying.  I moved the USB but then I had no buttons at all.  So I unplugged and replugged both usb and power, and nothing, so I rebooted.  Then the buttons worked, but then my P1 joystick (u360) registered left or right for down, which was weird.  So I reloaded an 8 way profile and suddenly everything worked again and no more glitches.

I figured out one MAJOR issue that I don't know how to get around.  When you configure in windows, you are configuring at that resolution.  When in Mame (on a widescreen), your monitor is at 16:9 but your game screen is at 4:3 and you have black bars on either side.  So mame is looking for the position that relates to 0,0 (top left), but when you are pointing at the top left of the game screen, it is NOT the top left of the monitor, so it is effectively telling mame that you are at maybe 35,0, or about two inches to the right of the top left corner.  If you move the aim to the far top left corner of the physical monitor, the crosshairs go to 0,0 on the game screen.  It is not scaling properly with the aspect ratio, since mame is not playing on the entire screen. 

I tried going to a 4:3 resolution, calibrating there, then go back to 16:9 and launch mame, thinking maybe the calibration will scale, but it doesn't because it isn't a resolution issue, it is a positional one.  The monitor is about 24 inches wide, but the way mame sees the gun it tries to use that entire 24 inches in the 18 inches of screen it displays.  But it can't because the screen isn't what is telling the gun where it is pointing, the IR bar is.  So the sides will NEVER be accurate unless I play all mame games stretched over the entire width of the monitor.

Or perhaps I can measure out the "screen" while in mame, then measure where the windows calibration puts the arrows, mark where the arrows would be if it was 4:3, and instead of pointing at the arrows during calibration, point at the marks.  that should narrow the field down and allow the corners to be accurate in a game that is 4:3.  Would be cool is the software could compensate though.

But I have a bigger problem, and that is I think my second gun is bad.  I haven't swapped the guns yet to see, but the gun just stops working a LOT in a game, and even in windows.  To get it to work again sometimes I just smack it on the side, sometimes I get really close to the IR bar and wave it around, and sometimes I point it all around the room and then it might start working and might not.  When it works, it sometimes works perfect, but then it will just go away.  In game, if I have the crosshairs turned on, the P2 crosshair will just disappear and even the trigger won't work, as if I disconnected it completely, although it is not disconnecting as far as I can tell (or it would switch the gun# around, etc).  It is almost as if it has some bad connection inside.

I will swap the guns today to see if it follows the P2 position, cable, or ID, or if I get the same result in the P1 setup. 

This will stop working even while P1 is still working perfectly.

Oh, and I had to do what I first suggested, I had to do offscreen trigger back to the same as onscreen for a button to get offscreen reloading to work in games that didn't have a button assigned.  I guess I could still try the mouse clicks with the mame.ini configured right, but for now this works because it registers the offscreen trigger pull and reloads in games like Area51 and Lethal Enforcers.  but in Carnevil I have to use the front button on the gun to reload since shooting offscreen is still just a regular trigger pull.

Ambient light IS an issue since I have 4 windows and a double door all around the cab, but that is really only a problem during the day.  And the P1 gun seems to work fine right now as long as I compensate for the screen size thing.  The P2 gun is unreliable at best.

I will post more as I figure it out.

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