Light Guns and Mame


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Posted by Reg on 29, 2001 at 10:00 PM:

Hi,

Tomorrow I will have access to an oscilloscope...
to test a NES light gun and see if it can be use with
most gun games in Mame.

Until now here are my findings about Light Guns in Mame...

First here is a list of games that support Guns:


Night Stocker (nstocker) Bally/Sente)

Cheyenne V.1.0 (cheyenne) Exidy
Chiller V.3.0 (chiller) Exidy
Clay Pigeon V.2.0 (Claypign) Exidy
Combat V.3.0 (combat) Exidy
Crack Shoot V.2.0 (cracksht) Exidy
CrossBow V.2.0 (crossbow) Exidy
Hit'n miss V.3.0 (hitnmiss) Exidy
Hit'n Miss V.2.0 (hitnmis2) Exidy
Showdown V.3.0 (showdown) Exidy
Who Dunit V.8.0 (whodunit) Exidy

Terminator2 JudgmentDay (term2) Midway

PChoice-10:Duck Hunt (pc_duckh) Nintendo
PChoice-10:Hogan's Alley(pc_hglaly) Nintendo
PChoice-10: Wild Gunmen (pc_wgnmn) Nintendo

Turkey Shoot (tshoot) Williams


I have see most picture of these cabinets and most of themhave their gun fixed on the cabinet. That mean that to move the crosspointer on a target, the gun is acting like a big joystick...

For the trigger Mame already support the Joystick button 1 of Player 1,so clicking this button is the same as using the trigger of the gun.

The optics are emulated but not ready to be used as is, in Mame without modifying the drivers (like Exidy440.c) by example...

But If someone buy at Ebay a T2 gun by example Mame will support it if we hack it with a old joystick for the crosshair positionning and use the button 1 of the joystick for the gun trigger...
Mame will work great without the optics...

Just try a regular joystick to play T2 ot Clay Pigeon and you will see...

If we really want the optics to be implemented, we must amplify the output of a Nes Light gun to trigger a relay like the one implemented in a CMOS 4069 and then trigger button 4 of player 1 of joystick port...


Why Button 4, because buttons 1,2,3 are used by the games list previously...

A light gun is sensing light all the time... when the trigger is activated it send a signal to the PC to reset their counter and to display a black frame with a small wite sursor that moves, when the gun see the cursor it send a signal to the pc to stop the counter and this way the computer know where the gun was pointed...

So button 4 can be use to tell the computer to determine if there was a miss or a hit...


by modifying the Exidy driver most guns games in mame will work ..

and apply the same process for Midway, nintendo and Williams...


So in a week or two, I will know if the Nes gun is a good choice or not..

bye
Reg



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