EMS Topgun III most buttons not working in MAME 0.175

[ckeech]

How do you use the buttons other than the trigger and C button on the EMS Top Gun III in MAME?

 

Background:

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and a lot of people are having various problems with this gun. There’s a lot of people saying don’t get them etc etc.

 

Now, I bought mine a few years ago and the reason was because I much prefered the idea of wireless that having a cord. The recoil and laser pointer are pretty cool too. The next most popular talked about gun was the Aimtrak. Now that I’m having problems I think a cable wouldn’t be the end of the world, and probably nice to not have to charge the batteries. I’ve committed to the EMS Topgun as I’ve already routed out spaces for the IR LED’s to sit around the bezel of my arcade. So I really am going to give these guns a good go before I make the expensive, difficult switch to the Aimtrak’s.

 

I’m getting close to finishing my arcade cabinet so I’m knuckling down on the software. So I’ve installed the Topgun drivers (in the strange way you have to) and the gun is working, and working quite well as a mouse in Windows 7 and in the MAME interface. Turned lightgun on in MAME.ini and fired up Point Blank. It’s mostly working really well.

 

Straight away the first issue is I noticed I can use only two of the guns buttons. The trigger and “C” which is a button on the gun handle. There’s 4 others and a d-dad joystick type control on the back, not working. As far as I can see there are a few options/variations to investigate. First the easy ones, settings in MAME. We have:
 

lightgun                  0

offscreen_reload          0

lightgun_device           keyboard

mouse_device              mouse

 

The working config for me is:
lightgun 1 - enables the use of the gun

Offscreen_reload 1 - enables the C button to be used as reload on games where you need to shoot off the screen to reload.
lightgun_device keyboard/mouse - this doesn’t seem to make a difference.

I’ve also read about Directinput and Raw input. I hear that the way MAME detects the buttons. So I tried both versions and it didn’t seem to make a difference.

 

The main thing that boggles me, is that a mouse can be used as a lightgun fine. The EMS Top Gun in Windows is emulating a mouse, even each button is mapped to a mouse button. However mame doesn’t pick up the presses. It’s almost like MAME is being too smart, and I want it to just think the gun is a real mouse.

 

The other option available is EMS Top Gun has a utility that you can map keys to. For example, pressing Start on the gun can be mapped to pressing the 1 key on the keyboard. That’s exactly what I tried to do, so that it would be mapped to Start in games. No dice. Even though when in the MAME menu pressing start on the gun types 1’s, it isn’t detected in games. I haven’t tried getting my second gun working yet as I’ve left it at my dads but that’s another hurdle.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated.