Light Gun Shooters

gary24

Some of my best memories playing retro games were when the light gun would come out & I would feel like I had an arcade in my from room.
I don't know how likely or if even possible it is but playing shooters like Time Crisis or House of the dead through a retropie arcade setup would be an amazing addition.

Cole_48

I agree, but you need a CRT anyway. It would be cool is you had the TV for it

Rion

@Cole_48 said in Light Gun Shooters:

I agree, but you need a CRT anyway. It would be cool is you had the TV for it

That's not true. There are Arcade Light guns for LCD/Plasma/Oled.

For example Aimtrack from Ultimarc or Arcadeguns website.

There's a bunch more out there.

herb_fargus

Well it depends on what you define a lightgun as. to me a true lightgun are the ones that only worked on CRTs, but all the same its unlikely any lightguns will work without extra coding to the emulators themselves.

Zigurana

If you take a very broad definition of light-gun into consideration, maybe something that uses a fly/air mouse or wii remote might work as a light-gun while mimicking a mouse. The question then becomes, which of the emus/games currently support mouse input?

gary24

@Rion said in Light Gun Shooters:

@Cole_48 said in Light Gun Shooters:

I agree, but you need a CRT anyway. It would be cool is you had the TV for it

That's not true. There are Arcade Light guns for LCD/Plasma/Oled.

For example Aimtrack from Ultimarc or Arcadeguns website.

There's a bunch more out there.

Yeah I saw those the other day when looking into it. A bit expensive tbh and can imagine there a pain to calibrate but still a good option.
Wonder if retropie will eventually have support for this?

herb_fargus

@gary24 you'd have to look at retroarch for that kind of integration. They already have some mouse support for some things, perhaps they'll integrate more in the future

mediamogul

I have a set of AimTrak guns attached to my arcade cabinet for arcade titles and they work very well. They rely on an infrared sensor for positioning and use absolute mouse coordinates. I also have a hacked Wii where the Wiimotes are in Nyko Perfect Shot gun attactments that work the same way for playing NES, SNES, Master System, Genesis and SegaCD. They operate on pretty much the same principal, using the Wii sensor for positioning.

Anyone looking for a cheap alternative to AimTrak can purchase the Mayflash DolphinBar for about $13, which syncs up to a Wiimote and tranlsates the positioning to absolute mouse coordinates through a standard USB port. As far as the computer is concerned, it's just another mouse. However, there is one setback in using an AimTrak or DolphinBar setup with RetroPie. Even if an emulator is coded for mouse input, it has to specifically handle absolute coordinates.

For example, I've notice that UAE4ARM in RetroPie supports this and I've been able to move the gun/mouse around freely. ScummVM on the other hand only allows movement within the upper left area. I might be wrong, but as I understand it, this has mostly to do with the way a program is compiled for mouse support. The fact that the implementation of ScummVM in Recalbox allows for full free movement suggests it would be possible.

In short, I believable that affordable, sensor-based "lightgun" support is possible in RetroPie for emulators such as lr-nestopia & lr-mame2010 and perhaps lr-genesis-plus-gx. It would just take some forethought and reworking of how mouse coordinates are handled within a given emulator or perhaps the system as a whole.

mdg33

It seems its possible I sent an email to inquire to arcadeguns.com got this answer

Arcade Guns Team eric@arcadeguns.com
Nov 17 (2 days ago)

to me
I've tried retro pie with our guns. I was able to get 1 Gun working in joystick mode. I wasn't able to get a second gun to recognize in mame.

Eric

When I try to configure the gun it recognizes it as ULTIMARC but dose not recognize the trigger as a button and since it has only two other buttons it fails to configure the GUN

this is using the latest version of retropie to this date

Anyone have Ideas?

mediamogul

@mdg33

Improvements will have to be made to the RetroArch cores before RetroPie can become a truly viable solution to light gun gaming. The groundwork has been laid for mouse compatibility with lr-nestopia, lr-genesis-plus-gx, lr-snes9x-next and lr-mame2003, but really only mame2k3 is a fully working solution, due to the recent addition of absolute pointer coordinates. Besides lr-nestopia, the rest don't even recognize a mouse of any kind on the Pi like they do on x86 hardware.

Fortunately, as with anything else of this sort, there will come a day when a developer will find this sort of thing important to them and the whole thing will get ironed out. For example, look at the newest improvements to RetroAchievements in RetroArch. It languished as a half-implemented feature for some time and once the interest was found, it it got finished. You can bet that one day in the future, some developer is gonna want to break out their gun and play the NES 'Duck Hunt' or SegaCD's 'Snatcher' on their Pi and the final nuts and bolts will be added.