Posted by Druin on 10, 2000 at 5:50 PM:
In Reply to: Optical Gun Games, arcade hardware and MAME? posted by EmuMannen on 10, 2000 at 4:58 PM:
: The last one is if anyone could recommend the best (playability) classical (not Virtua Cop, House Of the Dead, Time Crisis etc.) arcade game (preferable JAMMA) supporting optical guns?
Well the old game Cheyenne was from 1984 or something, I used to play that in 7-eleven in the mid 80's. It had a rifle gun and it was a very basic game but I liked it. It's come to MAME in recent months I noticed. It was great to play it even with just the mouse for targeting.
For possibilities on interfacing an optical gun, I don't know. It comes down to what MAME decided to use as a substitute, such as the mouse axes. I wouldn't know how to get the mouse cursor to follow a gun around, but if you notice in games like that, I know Cheyenne is like it, and all those old Nintendo games, I am not sure how subtle it is in the modern gun games, but when you pull the trigger, the screen flashes. At this point, the gun's photo detector takes a reading when the trigger is pulled, and any targets on the screen will have a different brightness than the rest of the screen, so based on what intensity of light the gun sees during that screen flash, it will know if it's pointed at a target or not and that's how it registers. To know exactly which target is hit out of multiple ones, there may be some fancy flash pattern distinct for each target, so it can read the flashing data.
This came from some writeup I saw somewhere around the internet on the basics of light guns...So I know that you can wire up the trigger button to a gun's trigger, I know you can even get a light gun to read the flashing patterns off the screen when you pull the trigger, but as for getting MAME to respond, MAME apparently will look at where the mouse cursor is when the trigger is pulled, and that is what it will use to decide if you're hitting the target, so I think we're out of luck unless the development team makes some provisions for us to develop hardware (or if someone can actually hack the source or something)...
Since we DO have access to the source, anything is possible generally...it would be quite tedious, I imagine, but possible....I just don't see it happening though!