Act labs dual Gun system problems

[GMZombie]

Ok i have the Act labs GS dual gun system...its non usb hooks to the gameport but after i got all the drivers installed and calibrated the guns i tried them in mame and couldnt get them to work at all...using advmame...is there an option i should be using that i dont know about or what? thanx

[Chris]

No.  Those guns don't work in MAME.

--Chris

[Lilwolf]

They only kinda work with mame.  Bunch of crap really. 

I have a set that I keep considering putting on ebay... because some people pay a lot for them..  But I feel guilty knowing how crappy they are.

[vibez]

What is the difference between the GS dual guns & the PC USB guns? I have one of the latter & intend to buy a second gun for use in mame

[Chris]

The USB guns emulate a mouse, and can be used in any game that uses absolute coordinates instead of mouse mickeys (tracking difference from last position) to read the mouse.  The GS guns needed to essentially have a hack for each game they supported; I think they were read as joysticks.

--Chris

[vibez]

Gald I didnt buy them then

[Chris]

Gald I didnt buy them then

If you get them really cheap, the base looks like it would make a nice holster for a pair of USB guns...

[vibez]

I was just thinking that. If anyone is pre-ordering the new act-labs guns, I can confirm they will have a quick disconnect between the box & gun.

[Lilwolf]

The real problem with the dual gun system is they give out relative mouse motions in their beta mouse driver...  The new ones don't.

IE, shoot, then shoot the the left a bit.. .it updates it to move left 5 pixels.

The new ones are move to x,y

Also, the original ones lost all calibration if you touched your system mouse.  Now this might have been slightly fixed with analog+ mame and not using the system mouse.... But I never tried it. 

but all in all... nobody has ever got them working good enough.  It would really take hacking in their joystick based api into mame.  This WOULD be a good thing if anyone did it.  But I'm not holding my breath.

[GMZombie]

damn then my uncle got conned as he payed about alot for the set....ima have to tell him that they dont work in mame then...---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- that sux

[GMZombie]

ok i just started to think about this situation and i looked on ebay and found somoene else who is selling this set of guns...he says they work in mame32 perfectly...now i have setup mame32 just as he says and i can get the guns to work....but the crosshair is about an inch off and so is the guns...if i shoot at the item it will shoot about an inch to the right of it....anybody know how to calibrate guns in mame. Secondly i was also thinking this. What if we got a gameport to usb adapter...is there a way to either make these guns work like a mouse with that...by making a new driver or am i way off on this... i think they have a software developer kit for this and since these guns are compatible with mame....in most versions i have tried so far anyway the guns have worked when i modified the emulator to the correct settings...anyways hopefully im kinda workin some brains and mabye we can come up with a n answer...
http://www.usb-port.com/rm203.html here is the link to the gameport to usb adapter...

[Lilwolf]

Thats not the problem (gameport or usb). 

Its the way the drivers are setup.  If you moved them gameport -> usb you would be dealing with a USB gameport instead of a USB mouse.

They did work if you played games that had their api being used.  But nobody ever added them to mame (act-labs should have paid one of the developers $200 bucks and a few sets of guns to do it... they probably would have jumped)

The beta mouse drivers are almost there.  I never tried it with analog+ mame to access the mouse driver by itself (instead of the system mouse).  This is probably your best bet that might get ok results.  But thats one gun only. 

[sc1103]

Couldn't you just force both the windows resolution and MAME to be the exact same? Then the aiming would be on...i have a set of these and got them working somewhat in mame32 but then upgraded to XP so i can't test out this theory but it may work

[GMZombie]

i dont quite understand API for the guns if you can explain that that would be cool...but if im grasping this correctly you are saying that even if we changed it to a usb it would still think its a joystick..with that being said is there anyway to either change or spoof the guns or windows and mame for that matter into thinking that this is just a standard usb mouse? or would this take some rewiring and rethinking of the the system...im just trying to get the best possible answer on this as im sure my uncle will be pissed that he paid alot for guns that we both thought would work for mame and then to realize that they are a pyle of ---auto-censored---...ya know...anyways thats what i think and im sure im way off base but have to voice my opinion so that it is at least heard ya know..ok i kinda understand lilwolfs statement about relative vs actual position..heres my question does this relative come out of the driver that is used for the guns or directly from the mobo of the guns...Now i know the other guns are cheap....but as i said before i dont want these guns to be a total loss.

[Howard_Casto]

Couldn't you just force both the windows resolution and MAME to be the exact same? Then the aiming would be on...i have a set of these and got them working somewhat in mame32 but then upgraded to XP so i can't test out this theory but it may work

Nope..... your not understanding relative vs actual positioning.   Read what lilwolf said.  Long story short they'll never work as mame reads direct positioning and the guns spit out relative.  It's a direct-x thing, can't be helped without basically writing a special function in mame to add relative mouse support or support fo the analog joystick drivers for the guns. 

The new guns are cheap and they work, just get them. 

[AlanS17]

Couldn't you just force both the windows resolution and MAME to be the exact same? Then the aiming would be on...i have a set of these and got them working somewhat in mame32 but then upgraded to XP so i can't test out this theory but it may work

Nope..... your not understanding relative vs actual positioning.

[Howard_Casto]

Well, then no offense, but you guys were dumb for not getting a set when they first came out.  The whole reason act-labs isn't going to make anymore is because enough people didn't buy their guns.  In other words, teh high cost is your own faults.  Not mine, I bought my set on the original tv guns pre-order. 

I don't think 80 bucks is what you'll have to pay though *cough* ebay *cough cough* buy sell trade *cough* cough*

[Lilwolf]

Actually... on ebay they where up to over 200 bucks PER gun a while ago... And if I handn't stared to hack my gun to a real gun it would have been sold....

Those guns have ONE possible way to be good.  And that is to rewrite the input for MAME to use the api (developemnt software) which comes with the original gun.  This makes the guns look more like a joystick then a mouse...

then you will have dual support also.  Would be VERY nice... and if it was easy to do... it would have been done...

also... if you make a mame version that uses the API.  you can't distribute the executable and still call it mame... trademark issues.