Lightgun questions

[Pasqualz]

Hi all,
As I'm drawing closer to constructing my cabinet, I'm becoming more and more intrigued by the idea of having light guns for my cabinet! It seems like the most popular light guns are from Act Labs, but I have a few questions 'bout them:
1 - Has anyone used the Act Labs gun with a TV instead of a computer monitor or real arcade monitor? Was it accurate.
2 - Are the light guns tough to use in general? Do you have to recalibrate constantly during use, or just once when you begin playing?
3 - Can you use 2 Act Labs guns at the same time in Mame32 running on WinXP?
4 - Is there a better, but not too much more expensive alternative to these guns?

[jerryjanis]

Hi all,
As I'm drawing closer to constructing my cabinet, I'm becoming more and more intrigued by the idea of having light guns for my cabinet! It seems like the most popular light guns are from Act Labs, but I have a few questions 'bout them:
1 - Has anyone used the Act Labs gun with a TV instead of a computer monitor or real arcade monitor? Was it accurate.

Act Labs makes 2 PC USB Light guns.  One is for use with a PC and a TV, and the other works with a vga or arcade monitor.

2 - Are the light guns tough to use in general? Do you have to recalibrate constantly during use, or just once when you begin playing?

The PC Lightgun for VGA has to be recalibrated each time you play a game.  There may be some little tricks around it, such as running your games at 640x480 with hardware stretching, however hardware stretching is a bad thing to do particularly when using an arcade monitor.

I don't have the TV lightgun, but I think that it only needs to be calibrated once every time you turn the machine on.

3 - Can you use 2 Act Labs guns at the same time in Mame32 running on WinXP?

In order to use 2 PC Light Guns in Windows XP, you need to run Mame Analog+ XP.  There is no Mame32 version of Mame Analog+ so you will have to use the command line interface, or set up a front end.

4 - Is there a better, but not too much more expensive alternative to these guns?

KevSteele's got a nice review of the different light gun options side-by-side:

http://www.retroblast.com/reviews/lightgun1.html

[drunkatuw]

I have two ACT Lab guns hooked up to my mame cabinet with a 27" TV.  I've had no problems at all (other than a broken gun that I got a very quick RMA for).  I have not needed to use analog+ mame, I just use the normal mame and both guns work fine.  If you use the PC guns, then you need analog+ mame.  I calibrate my guns everytime I boot the mame machine, but it only takes a few seconds to do.  

I've heard of people having accuracy problems on TVs smaller than 27", but I can't comment on those, because I have a 27" TV and the accuracy is always withing a few pixels (granted you have to calibrate correctly first).

[Pasqualz]

drunkatuw, some questions:
1 - What OS are you using?
2 - How do both light guns connect to the TV? I thought there was a small dongle you had to connect between the S-video out of your graphics card and the S-video in of the TV? IS this correct?
3 - Is teh calibration performed with a program that you load before running MAME, or is it performed in whatever game you are using?
Thanks!

[drunkatuw]

Pasqualz, some answers :
1.  I'm using winXP pro.
2.  You are correct about the dongles, do connect a second one, you just plug it in to the dongle of the first one and then plug the s-video cable into the second one (not sure if I described that very well).
3.  The calibration is done thru the gun.  You just flip a switch on the gun and then the screen  turns white and you move the gun in a cross pattern from left to right and top to bottom of the tv...no extra software is needed.  I usually calibrate when the first gun game is played and then it's set until I turn the cabinet off.

[Pasqualz]

Drunkatuw,
Thanks for all the info. You're really helping me understand this, and yes, i did understand your daisy-chained dongle description! One last question. You said you use MAME, so i'm assuming your mean regular old command line MAME. Are you using a front end? If so, which one? I'm currently using MAME32, but I'd be happy to switch if there's something better out there! Thanks!

[drunkatuw]

"Daisy-chain" that's the word I had on the tip of my tongue just couldn't get it out !.  To answer your question, yes, I use regular command line mame (for windows) with MAMEWAH as a front end.  There are tons of front ends out there, but I tried MAMEWAH first and had no problems, so I've stuck with it and have no plans to change.

I used mame32 when I played mame on my desktop PC, but once I had a cabinet, it was silly to use a mouse to select games...if you're paying for the joystick, might as well use it