Wiimote lightgun

[blueznl]

I've seen some very promising stories on the net, but I wondered if anyone got it actually working: a Wii remote to be used as a lightgun in Mame...

Anyone?

(No? Then hurry and tell me how to do it  )

[Dartful Dodger]

How accurate is the remote(gun)?

I'm debating on what to ask Santa for.  the wii or the ps3.

Time Crisis 4 has the Guncon 3, which works like the TopGun, which would be ideal, but the gun looks goofy with the controller attached to it.

[brandon]

How accurate is the remote(gun)?

I'm debating on what to ask Santa for.  the wii or the ps3.

Time Crisis 4 has the Guncon 3, which works like the TopGun, which would be ideal, but the gun looks goofy with the controller attached to it.

yeah it kinda does.. but anything that could work properly could be hacked into a different case probably...  so many wonderful product out there..  why can't we have a proper lightgun!! 

[patrickl]

I think the wiimote works pretty accurately. A lot better than the LCD topgun at least.

De new Wii zapper doesn't look too bad does it? Not sure why you'd want to put the nunchuk in there too though.

Here is a hack for a Wii - NES Light Gun and I think it looks horrible. Maybe with a better/longer cable from the gun to the wimmote it will be better, but I'd rather have no cables at all though. I have a broken Topgun which I never bothered to return. Maybe I can shoehorn a wiimote in there.

I haven't tried the wiimote on a PC (let alone with MAME) though. Guess I should. Is this site http://onakasuita.org/wii/index-e.html the best place to start for that?

:edit: Hmm I guess that doesn't work. It uses the accelerometers for control.

[shardian]

Using an NES lightgun for a hack is a bad idea. The trigger action on a NES gun is not ideal for rapid button presses.

[brandon]

man.. he should've at least used a proper cable.. cat5 or something... electrical tape looks ghetto as hell! lol

[SithMaster]

cant you just change the trigger on the new zapper and still use the case?  that or just find a toy shotgun at a dollar store.

[ChadTower]

Using an NES lightgun for a hack is a bad idea. The trigger action on a NES gun is not ideal for rapid button presses.

What, you don't want a rock hard index finger worthy of Ahnold in his prime?

[ahofle]

I think the wiimote works pretty accurately. A lot better than the LCD topgun at least.

Yeah it's pretty accurate, but it loses accuracy if you get too close to the LED bar (like the TopGuns), making it less than ideal for a standard arcade cabinet IMO.  It would be great for a show case style cabinet where you aren't right up against the monitor though.  Wasn't someone (Fozzy?) playing around with adding a wider lens to the LCD Top Gun?  An LED bar type gun would be the perfect solution if someone could just solve the distance issue.

[brandon]

it would probably work great for a mirror in monitor like Terminator 2, Lethal Enforcers or something like that..  You could put the sensor bar down in the bottom of the cab where the monitor is.  That way, even right next to the glass in front of the cabinet, you'd been a few feet away...  optically at least..

[patrickl]

Yeah it's pretty accurate, but it loses accuracy if you get too close to the LED bar (like the TopGuns), making it less than ideal for a standard arcade cabinet IMO.

I'd say the wiimote works closer to the screen (led bar) than the Topgun does though.

[northerngames]

I also was wondering if the lcd topguns could be modded to make them work closer by changing the sensor and swapping on the led's for a more powerfull MCD rating.

[brandon]

what if you just hacked the "sensor" bar and put the IR LEDS closer together?  I think that's why the gun gets lost because it has to see more that one LED to triangulate its position.  BTW, the "sensor" bar is passive.. it doesnt sense anything.  It should be called an emitter bar but.. marketing?

[blueznl]

Stil no-one said he got it to work 

[patrickl]

what if you just hacked the "sensor" bar and put the IR LEDS closer together?  I think that's why the gun gets lost because it has to see more that one LED to triangulate its position.

I saw someone claim he used candles instead of the sensor bar. Guess that would be easy to test then. Just put some candles on the TV and move them closer 

BTW, the "sensor" bar is passive.. it doesnt sense anything.  It should be called an emitter bar but.. marketing?

Well it's part of the IR sensor system

[Thenasty]

I'm debating on what to ask Santa for.  the wii or the ps3.

Maybe SANTA is very generous this year, ask BOTH you might just get it

[patrickl]

Stil no-one said he got it to work 

I got it to work with WinMote. Seems unusable for games though. The cursor moves way to slow. It's quite accurate so it can be used as a mouse replacement for normal windows use.

I think they do some smoothing to get it working. When I look at the RAW IR display it's plenty fast.

I couldn't get it to work with the sensor bar though. When I switch on the Wii to power the sensor bar, the Wiimote loses connection to the PC. So I used the led bar from a Topgun. Works just as well.

I also tried GlovePIE, but I just can't get it to do anything useful. Either nothing happens or the cursor just slowly drifts to the upper left corner.

[ahofle]

Just curious, how close can you guys with Wiis get to the sensor bar before you start losing accuracy?  My cursor starts shaking at around 3-4 feet.

[patrickl]

I couldn't get it to work with the sensor bar though. When I switch on the Wii to power the sensor bar, the Wiimote loses connection to the PC. So I used the led bar from a Topgun. Works just as well.

The Wii sensor bar just gets voltage from the Wii, it's easy to run it off another power source.

True, but without cutting the wire I don't see how I could do that. I don't recognize the connector and I don't really feel like cutting the wire.

The wii does communicate wirelessly with the wiimote, though... via bluetooth or something.

BlueTooth yes. otherwise it wouldn't work on a pc.

BTW I had a lot of problems getting it paired and then actually working. I finally got it working using the  Wiimote Tutorial -- Tutorial for the widcomm stack linked from the List of Working Bluetooth Devices

Another site claimed it works with  BlueSolei Drivers, but i didn't get that to work. Neither Microsoft XP2 nor the BlueSolei worked for me. Finally I found the widcomm based drivers for my Acer bluetooth dongle (lost the CD of course)

[patrickl]

I was just thinking. The Wiimote would make an excellent Star Wars controller

[fjl]

I was just thinking. The Wiimote would make an excellent Star Wars controller

Lol, People have been thinking that since it was first announced on how it works.

[patrickl]

I was just thinking. The Wiimote would make an excellent Star Wars controller

Lol, People have been thinking that since it was first announced on how it works.

Huh, what a coincidence then that people have been hacking/using the wiimote for all kinds of games except Star Wars.

Just to be clear, I'm talking about the 1983 Arcade game and not something like Lego Star Wars.

[patrickl]

Yeah it's pretty accurate, but it loses accuracy if you get too close to the LED bar (like the TopGuns), making it less than ideal for a standard arcade cabinet IMO.

I'd say the wiimote works closer to the screen (led bar) than the Topgun does though.

When you want to use the Wiimote closer to the screen you can put the IR leds closer together. This will probably work on the TopGun too.

I saw a video of a guy who created a Wii laptop and he put the leds closer together and his Wimmote works at about a foot away from the screen.

[steveh]

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=70838.0

[ahofle]

I saw a video of a guy who created a Wii laptop and he put the leds closer together and his Wimmote works at about a foot away from the screen.

Now that looks promising!!! 

[knave]

My wii came with a "wireless sensor bar".  It just uses some AA batteries to power the LED's. It would work pretty well for a PC too.

[patrickl]

Not sure if this was mentioned already, but I just stumbeled on an article about the Motus Darwin game controller

Moving In on the Wii
A unique motion-based controller from Motus is designed to create a more realistic experience for video game players.

This one is claimed to use gyroscopes and accelerometers for determining orientation and location (don't they measure the same thing though?). From the description it looks like it uses a magnetic field sensor too. This would make it feel more "realistic" (guess they mean more accurate and faster)

[Jess--]

Gyro's would measure the angle that the controller is at, accelerometers will measure the speed of movement.

given accurate enough data from both should give pretty good results

[patrickl]

Gyro's would measure the angle that the controller is at, accelerometers will measure the speed of movement.

Ah right. A Gyro would measure rotation of the controller and the accelerometers the angle of the force (combination of gravity and movement of the controller). Yeah that makes more sense

I build a tilt sensor using an accelerometer chip. When you measure the force of gravity on the chip you basically measure the angle of the chip (or the device that it is in). I wanted to use this in carting to record some sort of telemetry of the lap. I ran into trouble seeing the difference between accelerating and driving up a ramp (ie the same trick a hydraulic simulator uses to fool you that you are moving) The gyro would know that the cart titled up. Cool. Guess I should get me one of these and try it again.

[bigredsk10]

Im hoping someone can help me out here. I've got a wiimote synced up with my computer (a mac cause its my only computer that has bluetooth) using a program called Darwiinremote (http://blog.hiroaki.jp/2006/12/000433.html).

So I've got the wii remote working as a mouse now. I have the wii infared bar over my arcade monitor.

But when I open a light gun game to play in Mame OS X it wont recognize the input from the wii remote. The regular mouse works as a pointer, but I have no idea where to look for preferences to enable the wii remote. Any ideas?

[Neverending Project]

Im hoping someone can help me out here. I've got a wiimote synced up with my computer (a mac cause its my only computer that has bluetooth) using a program called Darwiinremote (http://blog.hiroaki.jp/2006/12/000433.html).

So I've got the wii remote working as a mouse now. I have the wii infared bar over my arcade monitor.

But when I open a light gun game to play in Mame OS X it wont recognize the input from the wii remote. The regular mouse works as a pointer, but I have no idea where to look for preferences to enable the wii remote. Any ideas?

Unfortunately, it won't work right now. Darwiin Remote is an application that translates the Wii remote movement into keypresses, but it resides at a high level in the operating system. Mame captures the keyboard input at a lower system level than this, which means it will not see the events generated by Darwiin Remote. It will need a driver like a kernel extension written for it before programs like Mame will see it.

FWIW, I have contacted the creator of MAME OS X to see if he can add support for the Wii remote, and he says that it is a very low priority to him. But he suggests that a feature request is filled out at the sourceforge page (which I haven't done) before anything may or may not happen.

[Afterburner]

You might want to look at the Gyration series of Air Mice.

We have one at work for presentations, and I've been pretty impressed with how well it works.

It might be an alternative to the Darwin remote....the functions are similar, but the Gyration is simply recognized as a regular USB mouse which should make integration with MAME much easier.  No extra drivers to load, etc.

Here's an article about it:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1128548,00.asp

Now if someone could take the guts out of one of the Air Mouse and put it into the TopGun....then we'd have something!  Hmm...I may have to give that a try.  At the very least put the guts from the mouse into a shell from squirtgun pistol or something for a prototype.

[lettuce]

Im looking to do the same thing with my arcade cab, ive just bought a wireless sensor bar, and hopefully shall be able to snyc this up to my blue tooth device, and get the wiiremote to work as a mouse point, thus getting it to work as a light gun in MAME

[tophatne1]

When you guys do get this going you should get yourself a pair of these guns for th ewii remote. They're awesome!

NYKO Perfect Shot.

They're hard to find and a little pricey on ebay. I'm not sure why. I believe they retail for like $12.95 when you get them in stores.

<url>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B000X2RKOO/ref=dp_image_0/104-4937107-4970309?ie=UTF8&n=468642&s=videogames</url>