Terminator 2 / Revolution X MAME calibration issues

[purbeast]

I'm trying to get these games to work with my light gun cabinet and having some trouble. 

I'm using a light gun that works as as joystick in MAME.  It works fine in games like Area 51, Maximum Force, and Carnevil.

I know that T2/RX are not light gun games and are actually on like a large analog stick.  I tried setting the adstick_device and positional_device to joystick in mame.ini as well, and nothing.

The weird thing is, I have the MAME cursor turned on.  And when I move my gun around the screen, the MAME cursor moves around and is tracking just fine.  However I still see the in-game cursor for RX sitting in the top left corner, and the bullets are just going right to it.

Anyone have any suggestions on what I can try to fix this?

[purbeast]

Okay I am pretty sure after messing with the calibration in game, that the problem is my monitor has burn in on the bottom right and when I go to shoot the bottom right during calibration, it doesn't register anything.  I have noticed in general the bottom right corner of my monitor has trouble registering in all games.

Is there any file I can manually modify or anything to hard set the calibration values?  I am guessing not because it is down inside the service menu.  Or is that something stored in NVRAM and is there a way to modify it outside of the game?  Even with like a hex editor or something?

[Howard_Casto]

Put that exact version of mame on your home pc, calibrate it manually with a mouse, save it and then copy the created nvram from your home pc to your cab. 

[purbeast]

Put that exact version of mame on your home pc, calibrate it manually with a mouse, save it and then copy the created nvram from your home pc to your cab.

I actually ended up calibrating it similar to that but on the same PC by just enabling the mouse.  I need to do it for p2 though.

Now I'm trying to add a screen flash via MAME overlays.  So far I have it working where I get an overlay when trigger is pulled but I'm trying to make it flash/blink while trigger is pulled down.  I'm not sure it's possible.

[purbeast]

Well I figured out the screen flash.  It flashes every 5th frame if you just hold the trigger down and has a white overlay of .4 opacity.  It works great with my Happ guns.

If anyone is interested just let me know and I can post the artwork file.  It's just one file with some XML and I had to write some LUA code as well.  If you want to use it you'll have to change some values to match your resolution but that's it.

[burn_654]

Definitely post it! I'm getting back into the crt light gun scene after some hiatus and this could be useful 

[phasermaniac]

What about this?
https://github.com/psakhis/gunlight
Unfortunately psakhis passed away

[purbeast]

Definitely post it! I'm getting back into the crt light gun scene after some hiatus and this could be useful 

Sure, I've attached them here.  But a few things...

1.

In the mame root directory, there is an artwork directory already there, and you need to create a folder for the rom name down in the artwork directory, and rename the attached files to default.lay down in there. 

So for example, create /artwork/term2 and place term2.txt in there and rename it to default.lay

2.

I have experimented a bit and there is a give/take with how many every frames you set the flash.  To me there was some noticeable lag when having it set to show every 5 frames, since the position updates every 5 frames.  But the flashing only happens every 5 frames.  In my terminator 2 one I set it to 3 and I found that more enjoyable to play as far as accuracy goes because there is less delay.  But the tradeoff is that the screen is flashing every 3 frames instead of every 5, which is nearly double.  So basically it's up to you to find your sweet spot. 

In each file there is a line of code down around line 45 or so that is

if count % 3 < 1 then

That 3 number there is the frame that the flash will happen on.  In term2.txt it is currently set to 3, but in the other 2 it's set to 5.  So you can play around with it and set it to what you want.  I hadn't played revx since I made the change to 3 but I think I am going to because that game I find myself holding the trigger more often than Terminator 2.

Let me know if you have any other questions.  Also if there are any other light gun games similar to this in MAME where they aren't true "lightgun" games like these 3, let me know and I can try to mess with those too.  It's pretty easy to make these now that I have the base logic and stuff for it, I just have to find the input values for each game which is simple to do looking at the driver files.