Posted by Tony C on 26, 2001 at 2:22 PM:
Okay here's what I have gathered about light guns and MAME, please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.
1. The ActLabs gun is supported by MAME32. It only works on PC monitors, and most people claim it plain sucks, and isn't accurate.
2. There have been a number of posts about possibly hooking up some console light guns (NES guns, Playstation guns, etc) but nobody's demonstrated any progress.
3. People with TV's or arcade monitors are simply out of luck right now unless someone develops some kind of parallel port interface to one of the console guns.
So I got to thinking about options and this crazy idea came to me. I've got an off-white rectangular box sitting below my television called a Dreamcast. It's got a very well-reviewed light gun which comes with House of the Dead 2. (Seeing the below post about HOD2 got me thinking on this tangent.)
So what good does that do us in MAME? Well, Dreamcasts can run Linux. And they have a serial port. So let's say a Dreamcast was running Linux and had the serial port connected to a PC. It seems to me a small program could be written to take the input from the light gun (I'm guessing the joysticks/peripherals show up as devices on the Dreamcast's Linux distribution?) Then it could write its output to the serial port, which would go to your PC. If MAME could recognize that input, it could get input from the light gun.
Now it's certainly a hack, and I don't yet know enough about how feasible it is. And yes, coming up with some interface to decode the light gun's proprietary encoding scheme into serial port input would be a "cleaner" approach. However I'm a software guy and I was thinking some other people might have a Dreamcast lying around collecting dust. Besides, some people have put consoles in their MAME cabinets just for the heck of it. Why not put it to use while MAME is running?
So anyone have any thoughts on this? Think it would be possible?