Lightgun calibration issues with USB2GUN board in MAME

[purbeast]

I have 2 happ guns connected to USB2GUN and have a JPAC hooked up to my Maximum Force cabinet with MAME.  I have all of it setup and everthing.

I am having issues with the gun calibration.  Like the calibration goes well and in the little preview window it looks like the gun is aiming correctly.

However when I am playing Lethal Enforcers, it seems like the further away from the center of the screen I get, the more offset my shots are.  When I'm trying to aim at guys off center, like say about 1/2 way between the center and left edge of the screen, the bullet holes are showing to the left of where I am aiming. 

I have noticed that this doesn't seem to be the case with the vertical positioning though.  If I shoot towards the top of the screen at the center horizontally, it appears to be working fine and seems pretty accurate.

I am guessing this has to do with the screen being 4:3 yet the analog controller it THINKS the gun is, would be 4:4 or 3:3? 

The odd part is I had this all setup in my other MAME cabinet as a proof of concept, and the accuracy was perfect.  When I first was getting this new project setup I had another monitor in it and the tracking was even worse, so I swapped them, and now in my Maximum Force cabinet I have the exact monitor that I was using with my proof of concept that was working perfectly.

Is there some trick that I am forgetting to do with the calibration of the gun that I don't remember from doing it in my other cabinet?  To be fair it was over a year ago.  I'm also wondering if there are maybe some settings I need to set in MAME possibly?

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

[Jollywest]

Make sure the games aren’t changing your resolution from what your windows resolution is. You have to stick to the same resolution of which you calibrated the guns in. I use 640x480.

[purbeast]

Make sure the games are changing your resolution from what your windows resolution is. You have to stick to the same resolution of which you calibrated the guns in. I use 640x480.

Hey man thanks for chiming in, I found a lot of the help you gave me the first time I set this up over a year ago via google.

So I just checked my resolutions and it looks like you are correct.

I am calibrating in 320x240, however when MAME loads up I see it is loading in the resolution of 360x240, and that would explain exactly why the Y axis seems fine and as I get away from the center of the screen, it thinks I am aiming further towards the edge.

So where do I go exactly to make sure that MAME loads up in 320x240?  Is this something I have to set manually somewhere and run vmmaker again or something?

Thanks for the help.

[Jollywest]

Been a while since I tinkered with it but isn’t it just a matter of having ‘switchres’ set to 0 in mame.ini

[purbeast]

So I just tried doing that and then loaded up MAME.  When booting up the games it still shows video mode is 360x240, however right below that it also says "switchres is disabled".

Then I turned that setting back to 1 in mame.ini and It showed the super res that Switch res is using, but the video mode is still 360x240.

Here's a screen shot of it with switchres flag set to 1 and it is using the super res.



I'm going to do some googling though as well to see if I can figure it out now that I believe you pointed out the problem though for sure.

[purbeast]

I also just noticed when I click on "Machine Information" from the tab men in game, it shows the correct resolutions on that screen. 



But I think the issue is that it's loading up in the 360x240 resolution and that I can't figure out yet.

[purbeast]

Well I can now confirm that this is a MAME issue and not an actual gun calibration issue.

I just got the model2 emulator up and running and Virtua Cop plays flawlessly.

[purbeast]

So I'm still having no luck with this.  I have been messing with settings this evening and nothing.  It does seem like in MAME, it is "tracking" as if the monitor is a square, however it's 4:3 so it's not a square obviously.  Check out this video here, You can see it starts to move faster than I am as I move to the edges.  I hope you can tell from the video.



But the here is Virtua Cop on the model2 emulator and it's tracking just fine, even right by the edge of the screen, so that is why I think it is some sort of MAME issue.

[PL1]

Not certain if this will help, but what is the joystick_saturation set to in mame.ini?
- Instead of the default 0.85(?), try increasing it to 1.00.

The video looks like you already adjusted the joystick_deadzone from the default of 0.3(?).

Code: [Select]

#
# CORE INPUT OPTIONS
#
 . . .
joystick_deadzone         0.05
joystick_saturation       0.85


Scott

[purbeast]

Not certain if this will help, but what is the joystick_saturation set to in mame.ini?
- Instead of the default 0.85(?), try increasing it to 1.00.

The video looks like you already adjusted the joystick_deadzone from the default of 0.3(?).

Code: [Select]

#
# CORE INPUT OPTIONS
#
 . . .
joystick_deadzone         0.05
joystick_saturation       0.85


Scott

I have the deadzone set at 0.00 and then the joystick_saturation was set to 0.95 after seeing JollyWest's post, and then when I was messing around last night, one of the changes I tried was changing it to 1.0 and that didn't make any noticeable difference.

[purbeast]

I am going to mess with the sensitivity settings tonight.  I am pretty sure I have them all set to 255 per the JollyWest pics/instructions but maybe it's too sensitive for my monitor for some reason.  Because it's almost like it is moving TOO fast along the X axis.

[purbeast]

Well one thing that I noticed and it is kind of odd I think, is that the Joystick sensitivity stuff on the analog controls section for the X and Y axis, isn't doing anything.  Whether it is at the default value or set to 255 for everything, I get the same behavior as shown in that video.

[purbeast]

Okay so now I am even more confused with what is going on...

I was messing around with MAME.ini and I got a clean groovyMAME one and compared them and made a couple changes, and still nothing.

I did try setting the deadzone value up higher, and set it to 0.5, and I definitely noticed a difference with tracking in the center of the screen, so I know it's reading that value from MAME.ini.

Then under the CORE INPUT AUTOMATIC ENABLE OPTIONS section I had both the lightgun_device and positional_device set to "joystick" which the USB2GUN is recognized as.

So I removed it from positional_device and no changes.

Then for shits and giggles I decided to remove it from lightgun_device as well, so that I had no devices set to "joystick", and loaded up MAME.

And to my surprised, I am STILL getting the same exact behavior.  It's still recognizing the happ gun for tracking even though I do not have joystick set anywhere in MAME.ini which is completely baffling to me.  I also checked it inside MAME itself and nothing was set to joystick either. 

I did notice that mouse_device was set to "mouse" still so I wonder if for some reason, MAME (or maybe the PC) is seeing the Happ guns also as a mouse input device?

I am going to see if I can play around with this more later on too, but if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

[purbeast]

Yeah I am kind of at a loss at this point.  I'm not sure what is going on.  I have tried different settings in the MAME.ini file and nothing.  I'm even starting to wonder how accurate it was in my other MAME cabinet when I was proof of concepting this.  I did have the crosshairs on when I was just seeing if it worked so perhaps it wasn't as accurate as I thought it was but I thought it was accurate because I could aim easier with the crosshairs on. 

It almost makes me think that because the screen is 4:3 and the joystick controller emulates a "4:4" in that it is just a circle, that it could be the reason this is happening. 

Like my monitor is 25".

Let's say it is 15" tall and 20" wide.

So to the top it is 7.5" off center.  But to the sides it is 10" off center.

It is almost as if when I'm aiming 7.5" off center horizontally that the tracking is showing it is at the edge at 10" off.  It just seems like it is kind of scaling the movement in that sense.

But then it baffles me how accurate Virtua Cop is especially when I'm hitting stuff right at the edge of the screen.  But perhaps that is because I'm running DemulShooter with Virtua Cop and maybe that is doing some trickery behind the scenes with translation of where the gun is tracking when the trigger is pressed.

For now though, I am completely stumped.

Anyone else who has USB2GUN with Happ Guns, is it like dead accurate with MAME? 

[Jollywest]

I had this setup accurate to within a few pixels in MAME, so it definitely is possible.
However, I’ve taken the Emulator PC out of the cab now as my Americas Army Arcade is up for sale as a dedicated cab, so I can’t check through the settings.
I don’t remember having to mess with too many of the settings other than what was in the original thread that you’ve tried. I still link it might be a resolution issue.
Have you tried setting your desktop to 360x240, calibrating the guns at this res and then checking the accuracy in the mame game which is running at this resolution?

[purbeast]

Yeah based on the reply in the groovyMAME forum and just from messing around with it more, I don't think it is a resolution thing.  I think it is more of a 4:3 screen thing whereas the analog control is really just in a 1:1 aspect ratio, so I think there is some sort of translation MAME is doing with that to translate the 1:1 of the controller to the 4:3 aspect ratio of the screen.

Again, this is all theory and I can't prove any of this, but just the way the offsets grows more and more as I get closer to the edge of the screen, that is what I am thinking is going on.

And it's definitely JUST a MAME issue at this point because VCop works flawlessly.  HOTD seems to work too but it is at a slight offset everywhere I aim.  I think it's an in game calibration issue though.  I haven't messed with the in game calibration because I can't read the menus in 320x240 so I have to figure out where to go to calibrate first. 

I should try and get Friction running and see how that tracks.  From what I remember, it tracked flawlessly as well when I did it on my old PC as a proof of concept.

[purbeast]

I have now gotten Friction working and can confirm that tracking is flawless in that game as well, to the edges, so that makes the m2 emulator and now Friction working flawlessly, so I think it's safe to say for sure that the problem is with MAME specifically.  I haven't been messing with it the past few days as this Friction issue was bothering me but now that I got it figured out I am going to try to see if I can figure anything out with it. 

[purbeast]

I also got Silent Hill working tonight and tracking works perfectly fine in that as well, so yeah, definitely a MAME issue.

I was playing around with it a bit earlier and just not having any luck with anything.

I did notice something I thought was a little strange.  I started MAME with verbose mode on and spit it out to a log file, and I noticed 2 things.

1. I noticed next to the 320x240 resolution it finds in SwitchRes it shows an asterisk next to it like * and I don't really know why.  I'm not sure if that is because I manually added it to the ini file manually when I ran vmmaker because I want my desktop running at the resolution, or some other reason.

2. This was the one I thought was more strange.  When it shows Switchres setting MAME settings, it was setting the flag -nounevenstretch and -nokeepaspect.  However, my MAME.ini definitely had keepaspect and unevenstretch set to 1, almost like it was completely ignoring my MAME.ini settings.  Perhaps there are other settings it is ignoring?  But where would it be getting those values from then?  I then tried running it from the commandline passing in the -keepaspect and -unevenstretch flags, and this time in the log file I saw that it indeed did show those 2 flags.  So from the commandline it used them, but when set in MAME.ini, switchres seemed to not pick it up for some reason.

So yeah, that was the 2 strange things I noticed.

I also came across this post googling and this explanation basically says that MAME is at fault for the way it's handling it:

https://github.com/libretro/flycast/issues/1175#issuecomment-1823196491

That sounds a lot like what is going on with my instance as well, but I'm not using gun4ir or anything.

I tried turning off the mouse completely and only have joystick set to 1 in mame.ini, then every control style is set to keyboard except i have lightgun and positional_device set to joystick.  I still just saw absolutely no changes at all unfortunately.

[PL1]

When it shows Switchres setting MAME settings, it was setting the flag -nounevenstretch and -nokeepaspect.  However, my MAME.ini definitely had keepaspect and unevenstretch set to 1, almost like it was completely ignoring my MAME.ini settings.  Perhaps there are other settings it is ignoring?  But where would it be getting those values from then?  I then tried running it from the commandline passing in the -keepaspect and -unevenstretch flags, and this time in the log file I saw that it indeed did show those 2 flags.  So from the commandline it used them, but when set in MAME.ini, switchres seemed to not pick it up for some reason.

Either one of the later-loading .ini files is overriding mame.ini (#3-9) or you might have a second mame.ini that MAME is using. (#2)

When you run a game from command line, the command line settings override all of the .ini files, including the possible second mame.ini. (# 1)

MAME manual Chapter 7, page 149.
https://docs.mamedev.org/_files/MAME.pdf

Order of Config Loading
1. The command line is parsed first, and any settings passed that way will take precedence over anything in an INI file.
2. mame.ini (or other platform INI; e.g. mess.ini) is parsed twice. The first pass may change various path settings, so the second pass is done to see if there is a valid configuration file at that new location (and if so, change settings using that file).
3. debug.ini if the debugger is enabled. This is an advanced config file, most people won't need to use it or be concerned by it.
4. Screen orientation INI file (either horizont.ini or vertical.ini). For example Pac-Man has a vertical screen, so it loads vertical.ini, while Street Fighter Alpha uses a horizontal screen, so it loads horizont.ini. Systems with no monitors, multiple monitors with different orientations, or monitors connected to slot devices will usually load horizont.ini.
5. Monitor type INI file (vector.ini for vector monitors, raster.ini for CRT raster monitors, or lcd.ini for LCD/EL/plasma matrix monitors). Pac-Man and Street Fighter Alpha use raster CRTs, so raster.ini is loaded here, while Tempest uses a vector monitor, so vector.ini is loaded here. For systems that have multiple monitor types, such as House Mannequin with its CRT raster monitor and dual
LCD matrix monitors, the INI file relevant to the first monitor is used (raster.ini in this case). Systems without monitors or with other kinds of monitors will not load an INI file for this step.
6. Driver source file INI file. MAME will attempt to load source/<sourcefile>.ini where <sourcefile> is the base name of the source code file where the system driver is defined. A system's source file can be found using mame -listsource <pattern> at the command line. For instance, Banpresto's Sailor Moon, Atlus's Dodonpachi, and Nihon System's Dangun Feveron all run on similar hardware and are defined in the cave.cpp source file, so they will all load source/cave.ini at this step.
7. BIOS set INI file (if applicable). For example The Last Soldier uses the Neo-Geo MVS BIOS, so it will load neogeo.ini. Systems that don't use a BIOS set won't load an INI file for this step.
8. Parent system INI file. For example The Last Soldier is a clone of The Last Blade / Bakumatsu Roman - Gekka no Kenshi, so it will load lastblad.ini. Parent systems will not load an INI file for this step.
9. System INI file. Using the previous example, The Last Soldier will load lastsold.ini

Scott

[purbeast]

I just had a chance to go through and look for other ini files, and there are none in the MAME directory, so I have no clue why it is setting those flags even though in my MAME.ini I have it set to 1.

I do notice that it ONLY shows those settings being set to -nokeepaspect and -nounevenstretch when switchres actually changes resolutions.

Could that maybe have something to do with it? 

Like if I run MAME from command line with -v on my HD monitor and switchres never changes anything, it doesn't show that.

But when I run it the same way on my 320x240 CGA monitor and see switchres changing to a super res, that is when I see it show up (with a handful of other options).

[purbeast]

Man okay so now I'm even MORE confused...

I am trying to get Singe to work with these guns, and talking with the devs, I need to get my gun to act as a mouse in order for it to work with that emulator.

So I tried to find some applications and I found this Joy2Mouse application that turns your controllers into mimic absolute mouse position.

Well after I got the app working, I noticed that the cursor is moving EXACTLY like the cursor in MAME is.  Check out this video of just the cursor moving around in the desktop.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_G1nZ9HXUT4

The setting I am using is "Absolute - from center to center" as shown in this link below:

https://haxor.no/en/article/joy2mouse#ch_2

So now I am wondering wtf... is MAME using this same mechanism, and if so, how were other people getting it so accurate but I am not?

It's just so strange that I can have perfect tracking with Friction, Silent Hill, and Virtua Cop, but then MAME and now using this tool that just turns the analog stick into absolute mouse, it's behaving the same way. 

So confused...

EDIT:

Here is the MAME calibration issue on video - you can see it behaves identically to the Joy2Mouse video.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vvzp5Pj38fU

[purbeast]

Well I still have no clue what is going on with this.  I compared the MAME log files between my 2 MAME pcs where it is tracking fine and where it is not, and there is nothing that sticks out as different.

The one thing that I can think of that was different between how I set these 2 PCs up is that my first MAME pc was setup and hooked to my 4:3 monitor when I connected the USB2GUN to it.

When I setup this new MAME pc, I had the USB2GUN board hooked up from the very start when I installed Windows, and using my 16:9 monitor to get the crtemudrivers all setup.

My theory now is that when it initially installed the drivers, it installed them for the 16:9 monitor, which could explain why the X axis is off as I move further out from center of the screen.  I tried uninstalling the drivers and then rebooted and let windows reinstall them, but even in the device history it still had the old stuff in there so it knew it existed.

So I think my next step is to basically redo this new MAME computer, and I'm going to get it all setup with crtemudrivers and MAME and everything without ever connecting the usb2gun board to it. 

And then once I have it all setup, make sure the first time I plug in my USB2GUN board that the desktop is in 320x240 mode (4:3) when it installs the drivers for it.

I am crossing my fingers that this works.  I'm currently backing everything up before I reset it all up tonight.

[purbeast]

Well I got this working now finally, and I honestly think it was a total PEBCAK by myself this whole time...

I cannot confirm whether or not my new installation is why it fixed it, but I don't believe that is the case.  The guns were calibrated worse this time initially.

So I went into calibration and set it all up and it was fine, however in MAME it was not seeing my changes and still really messed up so I was like wtf.

Then I went back into calibration, calibrated it, and it showed tracking fine and all, but in MAME nothing.

Then I went back again, and initially I notice the little box that shows the tracking is all messed up, but after I calibrate, it's good to go. 

THEN I thought - wait, is there an apply button?

I am running 320x240 and it's super hard to actually maneuver in Windows like this and I can't see most of the full windows.  Well, there was an apply button that was cut off in the bottom right, that I never ever clicked prior.  So I found a way to click it and yep, it worked fine in MAME.

I am pretty confident this was the issue the entire time.  I hope one day this helps someone else out so you don't spend hours and hours trying to figure this out lol.