Mednafen: Crosshairs fears the lightgun!

[wderbi]

This is another weird issue that I ran across setting up Light gun games on my Hyperspin cabinet.  I have parsed through my Sega Saturn roms to select the lightgun games to add to my wheel. I downloaded and installed the latest Mednafen (09.45.1) on my system (i7, 12 Gb RAM system, GTX 1050ti graphics card), which the new version of Mednafen  can now support Aimtraks and other lightguns for Sega saturn. I run the emulator outside of Hyperspin, it works flawlessly for most games.   If I select a light gun game---like House of The Dead2, it runs just fine if in windowed mode that is less than full screen...I can use lightgun quite well in game play.  If I change the screen dimensions to full screen (or full screen windowed) and use a mouse to position the pointer/crosshair anywhere on the screen, It works flawlessly with no additional issue, and I can play the game and use the mouse to shoot and point to the target with no issues in full screen mode or in full screen-windowed mode.   However, If I just point either of my two Aimtraks at the screen, the cusor/crosshair immediately flies off the extreme outer edge of the screen in either full screen mode.  In fact, if I was to continue pointing at the screen, it actually chases the cursor/crosshair all around the edges of the screen.  It was very difficult to even get the crosshair to move across the viewable areas of the screen at ALL!  It was almost as if the crosshair/cursor was actually repelled by the lightgun!  I could chase it around the outside edge of the viewable screen, but it tended to want to go to the corners---as if the middle portions of the screen edge had some type of cursor repellent.  If I pointed the lightgun away from the screen, I could then move the cursor/crosshair back in the viewable area of the screen with no problems using the mouse.  This problem seems weirdly similar to the issues I was having with eXPSE2.05 that I described a few weeks ago...in that case, the cursor/cross hair would just flicker and jump randomly across the screen as long as the lightgun was pointed at the screen...

htxp://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forums/topic/33139-cursor-disappears-or-rapidly-appears-and-disappears-in-random-spots-for-ps1-shooter-game/

Remove the light gun, all was well using the mouse.  This same behavior is also seen when launched in Hyperspin too...

 

Has anyone else experienced this or a similar problem with a cursor/crosshair appearing as if it was being repelled by the Aimtrak lightgun?

[wderbi]

So far, I haven't gotten any feedback and I am still fighting this issue.  I decided to make a quick YouTube video of what's going on in hopes that it would help explain what I am seeing. https://youtu.be/TSDGZRpgtc0

[wderbi]

Well, it looks like my problem must not be all that common...However, I wanted to post a followup in case it can help someone in the future.

OK...Here is what I have done over the past couple of weeks:  I had a suspicion that running in full screen was a problem, but If I was somehow able to run it in an enlarged windowed mode, that it would work with the lightgun without the cursor being chased to the edge of the screen.  I first tried manually making changes to the config by changing the resolution values, but the window size never changed no matter what resolution values I tried.  The only thing that would happen was that the actual playable screen changed size (got smaller), and the "dark" area around the playable screen got thicker if I activated full screen mode via ALT+Enter.  The Crosshair still would not stay in the playable area when the lightgun was pointed at the screen...which was weird because the playable screen was even smaller than the default size of the Windowed mode playable screen.  I also tried changing the scaling, but evindently, I must have changed them in the wrong area of the config (more on this later!)

I then tried changing the windowed size in DxWnd.  Long story short, no matter what I did, I could not get the DxWnd program to "hook" Mednafen, and I could never kill the process because the program would report no active processes even though I was successful launching Mednafen-HOTD within DxWnd.  Too bad I could not find a good tutorial to deal with games that are ROMs to be launched via emulators.  I believe that DxWnd would work, so if anyone has a tutorial in launching Roms that themselves are not the executable, I would really appreciate seeing it!

Finally, I tried the latest MedAdvCFG (v0.3.3).  This was a very helpful program to make changes and test them immediately.  After making sure that Full Screen and FS-Stretch was disabled, I set the resolution to 1920X1080 and the scaling factor to 6.36.  Now, I have full screen X-axis, but a little bit long on the Y axis for my monitor.  The GOOD NEWS is that the lightgun works perfectly well in regards to the crosshairs staying in the playing screen. It does not disappear to the edges as it was doing in full screen (non windowed) mode.  In fact, If I was to enable full screen via ALT+Enter, the crosshair immediately disappears to the edge of the screen.  If I revert back to the scaled up, fullscreen windowed mode, the crosshair returns to normal function with the light gun.  It has bought me to the conclusion that there is some bug in the full-screen mode so that does not play well with my system, but full-screen windowed mode works fine.  For now, I will just use the scaled windowed version until I get further insight from the pros on what seems to be the bug.

I have since gone into the config file and manually changed the Y-scaling to 4.5.  The 6.36/4.5 values for X/Y scaling in windowed mode is perfect for my monitor.  Now, I need to figure out what is going on with the problem where 1 player shooting uses up both players ammunition in 2 player mode!

EDIT:  I have posted a second video to You Tube demonstrating my results in full-screen windowed mode:
https://youtu.be/wIIlqr_s0Bg

[KlopjerO]

Thanks for you write up. I can't help you with this but I do appreciate that you are writing up your steps and findings so that other members of the community might benefit from it in the future. you're awesome and good luck!

[dougan78]

I thought the lightgun support was a work in progress right now, per the documentation

• gun - Light Gun
  Virtua Gun/Stunner. Won't function properly if connected behind an emulated multitap.
  Emulation of the Saturn lightgun in Mednafen is not particularly accurate(in terms of low-level details), unless you happen to be in the habit of using your Saturn with a TV the size of a house and bright enough to start fires.

 

I figured the devs would just add scaling into the mix.  I would guess this is a matter of time for this input emulation.  I did not test both guns, I just saw it wasnt working full screen yet to be fair.  Let me give it another whirl windowed again.   Cheers.

[dougan78]

I do not think it differentiates the different guns.  If you select lightgun on port 1 (red crosshair apears) and Lightgun on port 2 (green crosshair appears in place of red one) and configure both guns you are really only left with 1 cross hair.  So I would say you have taken the current emulator functionality to the max.  I know you must be stoked you have posted on Arcade Controls, Here, and mednafen forums.  Until the devs fix lightgun emulation on this, as far as I can tell anyway, you have taken it as far as it can go.  This is why I stopped messing with it and after reading the current documentation .  

 

good luck.

[wderbi]

I tried to get as much coverage with the issue at hand by hitting up the most informative forums to tap into the greatest resources of minds on the problems that I cannot resolve on my own.  It just that it seems that the types of issues that I have encountered thus far in my endeavors into the Hyperspin/arcade scene appears to be either unique to me, or somewhat fringe since I almost never get a whole lot of feedback to directly address my exact issue.  I do sometimes do get some great hints that allow me to think about things in a new way to help me fix the problems myself, or in this case come up with a pseudo-fix or work around.  As an effort to provide some help to a person who may encounter a similar issue, I think it is incumbent on me to provide a follow-up if I came up with the solution or got an answer that was helpful to me addressing my problem.  Posting both the question/ problem and the answer/ solution at multiple places increases the visibility and makes it easier to help others down the line.  

But to answer your question, I was just as stoked (or even more stoked) to post the solution to my issue on the major spots as I was desperate to solve what I was thinking was a difficult to explain problem!  

[dougan78]

I tried to get as much coverage with the issue at hand by hitting up the most informative forums to tap into the greatest resources of minds on the problems that I cannot resolve on my own.  It just that it seems that the types of issues that I have encountered thus far in my endeavors into the Hyperspin/arcade scene appears to be either unique to me, or somewhat fringe since I almost never get a whole lot of feedback to directly address my exact issue.  I do sometimes do get some great hints that allow me to think about things in a new way to help me fix the problems myself, or in this case come up with a pseudo-fix or work around.  As an effort to provide some help to a person who may encounter a similar issue, I think it is incumbent on me to provide a follow-up if I came up with the solution or got an answer that was helpful to me addressing my problem.  Posting both the question/ problem and the answer/ solution at multiple places increases the visibility and makes it easier to help others down the line.  
But to answer your question, I was just as stoked (or even more stoked) to post the solution to my issue on the major spots as I was desperate to solve what I was thinking was a difficult to explain problem! [emoji4] 

Bravo sir! I do aplaud you!