Posted by Reg on 6, 2001 at 7:25 AM:
Hi,
your inputs are appreciated...
I have found the Patent of the Act Labs Light Gun and the Nintendo Zapper...They quite well explain how each gun works...
Both of these guns need a blank frame and a white target...
The Act Labs works only on a monitor and they use the synchronization signal of the monitor to increase the precision of the gun...
Please do not forgot Mame emulate hardware...
I mean by this we can know at which resolution a game is running, the beginning of a frame the end of a frame, we can even synchronize the frames, ...
Look in Mame32 the advanced options "Synch to monitor refresh", "Wait for Vertical synch", "Draw every frames"
I have checked the game Clay Pigeon Version 2.0 "claypign"
you can see a black frame with the white target when you use the Ctrl button to shoot the clay...
so I think the implementation can be done with a fair precision.
We can solder the gun trigger swith on the Ctrl key of a keyboard controller and send the Gun output (Zapper is the blue wire ) in the Game port.
We just need to figure out in Mame how to make this gun work ...
I think we are half way...
Reg