1. OCAU Merchandise is available! Check out our 20th Anniversary Mugs, Classic Logo Shirts and much more! Discussion in this thread.
    Dismiss Notice

Any light-gun fans out there?

Discussion in 'Retro & Arcade' started by bojo, Apr 14, 2011.

  1. bojo

    bojo Member

    Joined:
    Mar 1, 2007
    Messages:
    1,892
    Just curious about this, as they are possibly my favorite type of arcade game, and i'm really pining to go play some at the moment.

    I had some cool gun-con2's for the ps2 (which has since blown up on me grr). I've tried to use the wii to play house of the dead :overkill (which is freaking awful.. not the game just using the controller, even with the attachment). I've looked into the new IR based ones and they just don't seem like they will work nearly as well as the old gun-con system.

    Some favorites of mine are.

    Time crisis 2
    Vampire Night
    Ninja Assault

    Also really been wanting to play some house of the dead too. It doesn't seem like mame would be great at emulating these :(.

    Any other light-gun fans out there? Should i bite the bullet and buy a IR based light-gun? I was tempted to fish out an old CRT tv and hook it up to the video out of my pc to get some light-gun action going, but there's no guncon2 drivers that work in windows 7. :(
     
    rthy likes this.
  2. power

    power Member

    Joined:
    Apr 20, 2002
    Messages:
    70,156
    Location:
    brisbane
    best home light gun game I have ever played was Virtua Cop 2 on the Sega Saturn.

    also nothing like playing it on the real hardware.

    Best Wii gun game I've played is Ghost Squad
     
    Last edited: Apr 14, 2011
  3. OP
    OP
    bojo

    bojo Member

    Joined:
    Mar 1, 2007
    Messages:
    1,892
    Hmmm.

    I think i can maybe feed my urge to play by finding the house of the dead games. Installing virtualbox and fishing out an old CRT from the shed.

    Project for weekend :).

    Also virtua cop is pretty great. Can't remember playing it all that much myself, though i've played it once or twice at the arcade.
     
    Last edited: Apr 14, 2011
  4. elvis

    elvis OCAU's most famous and arrogant know-it-all

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2001
    Messages:
    48,067
    Location:
    Brisbane
    House of the Dead: Overkill uses the Wii's standard tracking API, which is shit. It's laggy as hell, and destroys the game entirely.

    There are other games that are much better. House of the Dead 1 & 2, and Ghost Squad both use much better tracking code, and are pretty damned fast and accurate. I've got both, and play them quite regularly. They're heaps of fun.

    Next on my Wii purchase list is the Gunblade/LA Machine Guns double pack:
    http://www.ozgameshop.com/wii-games/gunblade-ny-and-la-machineguns-arcade-game-wii

    You can also try modding your Wii Sensor Bar like I did:
    http://www.stickfreaks.com/wiibarmod.php

    It can help, depending how far away from your TV you sit (or how big your TV is).

    I'm very keen to make an AimTrack cabinet one of these days:
    http://www.ultimarc.com/aimtrak.html

    MAME has a tonne of lightgun games. Not all of them are great, but there's definitely enough to justify a dedicated lightgun cabinet.

    Other than that, I love my PS1 and dual Guncons. Point Blank still floats my boat. :)
     
  5. klufs2004

    klufs2004 Member

    Joined:
    Apr 24, 2007
    Messages:
    19
    Location:
    Brisbane
    I got light guns running on my mame cab, light gun games i got running well on it is virtua cop 1&2,house of the dead 1,2&3, big buck hunter1-4. Havent tried any others yet.

    If your thinking of getting some light guns for a pc i'd recommend these:
    http://www.dealsdirect.com.au/p/blaze-scorpion-iii-light-gun-ps2/
    very good gun and bloody cheap! (although take it easy on the trigger, aggressive friends have broken 2 :p)

    ps2 guncons are pretty much unplayable on a pc (I tried) as they have an issue with the x axis (google rolling x guncon)

    as for drivers I'd recommend a program called wingun, theres another one called guncon2pc but it wasnt as good imo. Both simply install light guns as usb mice

    pm me if you have trouble finding wingun.

    Hope that helps,
    Cheers
     
  6. OP
    OP
    bojo

    bojo Member

    Joined:
    Mar 1, 2007
    Messages:
    1,892
    Jeez elvis with a wealth of info :). I'll have to look into these other games. The main thing that got me about the light-gun games i've seen thus far is that they draw the cursor on the screen. Your just moving them around to adjust, not aiming light the old scan-based light-guns :).

    AimTrack is bloody interesting!. I was contemplating running around and finding a rear projection CRT tv and building a cabinet around that. Would be curious to give that aim track ago. Its the same tech as the wii, but maybe they've taken extra care to make it not suck hard :)

    Read that article about the wii mod. The biggest drawback i have of liking IR based ones is that... i can only effectively play my wii at night. During the day those IR beams reflect like crazy, i think once i counted around 8 damn circles that the camera was picking up, this leads to a pretty piss-poor wii experience (especially from any kind of distance). At night it's fine though.

    Oh and thus far alot of the MAME light-gun games i've looked up were in preliminary status etc. Time Crisis 2 being the major one :(. I don't think those drivers are being developed too much. I've read them though, makes me wish i understood the whole emulation thing abit better, so i could try and contribute to them.

    I think I have wingun, i tried to bastardize it to get running in windows 7 x64 bit. It seems to use a third party driver and then just read the data coming out.

    When i setup my VM i'll give it another shot, hopefully rolling x shouldn't be a problem, my guncons are "fake" guncons. But they are better than normal ones, they have gun-slides that move back when you shoot :).


    ......also super tempted to buy second hand arcade cabinets now!
     
  7. schnappy

    schnappy Member

    Joined:
    Apr 23, 2008
    Messages:
    1,029
    Location:
    Brisbane
    I've an LCD TopGun, it's not bad but all the random useless buttons and rubbish on it ruins it. (A laser pointer... really? :( ) Software is also a pain, haven't used it in yonks.

    I bought a wiimote to use on my PC, it's a lot less problematic. So the games actually look good I play then on my PC with an emulator (at 1440p some of them look quite good surprisingly), and the wiimote works well. But I'm yet to find a gun case housing thing that's actually worth buying.

    I've got 2 Virtual Cop 3 gun housings, with the intent on putting some sort of gizmo in there (wiimote maybe, this aimtrak is new to me). Only problem is I'll need to track down some screws to attach the half cases together, and wire up a microswitch with a spring to the trigger.

    I bought Time Crisis 2 not long ago, I really should give it a go :)
     
  8. Reaper

    Reaper Member

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2001
    Messages:
    12,159
    Location:
    Brisbane, Qld, Australia
    I've been eying that off since last year. I should get it already. I also bought another sensor bar from DX last year too, just never got around to the mod yet.

    I've also been looking at big game hunter for the top shot. Looks freaking sick dude. :)
     
  9. OP
    OP
    bojo

    bojo Member

    Joined:
    Mar 1, 2007
    Messages:
    1,892
    You must freaking elaborate on this. Talk of wii remotes then you pull out time-crisis 2!.

    AFAIK time crisis 2 came in two froms. Arcade = cost me a billion. Or ps2. which i would go buy a ps2 for. If the damn slims supported ilink so i could get two TVs and just be in heaven.

    EDIT:

    also had a pretty big win thus far. TV-out from graphics card, Virtual Box with USB passthrough. Guns are registering inside the vm and i can use wingun to select things on the desktop :).

    Just need to get some games / install mame and i should be able to play some light-gun goodness!.
     
    Last edited: Apr 15, 2011
  10. elvis

    elvis OCAU's most famous and arrogant know-it-all

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2001
    Messages:
    48,067
    Location:
    Brisbane
    Definitely true for "HotD: Overkill" and "Link's Crossbow Training" on Wii. But as before, "HotD 1&2" and "Ghost Squad" use much better WiiMote tracking. In fact, after modding my sensor bar, I could play both of those latter games without the cursor on screen. Not only was it heaps more fun, but you get a massive score boost for it too.

    I've been a bit hard up for cash lately, and have been holding out for Time Crisis on PS3 with the PS3 Move. I went to a mate's place a few weeks back to play it, and was hugely disappointed. Not only was it laggy as all hell, but even after calibrating the "guns" at startup, the calibration slipped badly after just a few seconds of play (and then went all over the place).

    I was hoping the PS3 Move would be the holy grail of next-gen gun games, but not so. It sucked hard. So it's still pretty much a very small batch of Wii games, PS1, PS2 or a handful of MAME games for lightgun fans.

    Oh, and on the subject of MAME, 3D in MAME is always a bit rough. The reason is that MAME does not, and will never use 3D hardware acceleration. That surprises some people, but the point of MAME is to emulate hardware, not games. Playing games through MAME is actually just a "pleasant side effect" (as one MAME dev put it). So when the MAME devs emulate the various CPUs and GPUs in arcade hardware, they'll never use your system's 3D hardware to "simulate" or "approximate" that output. What you are seeing is cycle by cycle emulation of actual hardware.

    With the jump from 2D to 3D, CPUs became orders of magnitude more complex. The end result is that most 3D MAME games (even old stuff) are still unplayable on anything bar the most high end of modern machines. Indeed, there are some MAME games that are well emulated now that simply won't be playable on a PC for another few years yet, simply because the hardware they emulate is so recent that another order of magnitude clockspeed jump is required to emulate them on a different architecture.

    So yeah, if 3D light gun games are your bag, MAME might not be the best place to look. There are a few other emulators out there that will happily "simulate" part of the game (on a "HLE" style emulation system) and output through a consumer video card to speed things up. They might be a better option for you.

    And don't forget, of course, that some developers like SEGA actually released some of their lightgun games for PC. Coupled with the Ultimarc Aimtrack, that's a good option for light gun fanatics.
     
  11. OP
    OP
    bojo

    bojo Member

    Joined:
    Mar 1, 2007
    Messages:
    1,892
    TBH i've had trouble getting the pc lightgun games to run . They are abit old and just getting them going is always hit and miss.

    I think i'm going to settle for just playing the wii, you've listed a few games that should be good, and i think there's a dead space game that might be okay (even just because i enjoyed dead space 2 so some more history in the form of a rail shooter might be nice).

    I did see a video of the move playing a new time crisis, it just looked so plain awful i decided never to bother :) haha.
     
  12. Holdenkicks

    Holdenkicks Member

    Joined:
    Mar 30, 2003
    Messages:
    1,070
    Location:
    Central Coast
    Im a light gun game fan here. I once bought a PS1 and time crisis just to play time crisis. I tried the wii system and thought it sucked. CRT scanning all the way. If I wanted to play it now I'd just buy an old PS2 and a gun and some games on ebay.
     
  13. Reaper

    Reaper Member

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2001
    Messages:
    12,159
    Location:
    Brisbane, Qld, Australia
    Well I got a copy on special at bigw on saturday, (about half price, $20-odd $, same as redsteel2 with a motion plus, got it for like $22 bucks too). finally gave it a blast this morning, it's pretty good. It even keeps the tracking to the original arcade 4:3 screen when using a widescreen tv. It displays wide screen, but limits the tracking, and if enemies attack outside the tracking area, it doesn't hurt, so it's balanced.

    On tracking, it seems fine and fast to me. I found that the standard tracking system is fine, I tried the manual set up, but it sort of didn't go that great, so I had to wipe the game from the system and start again as you couldn't "reset" the tracking. So far I've just played the gunblade (helicopter), one. Also I didn't bother putting the wiimote into a gun housing, just the remote by itself is all you need.
     
  14. Loey

    Loey Member

    Joined:
    May 26, 2010
    Messages:
    236
    has the sharpshooter light gun come out for ps3 yet? that looks pretty sweet
     
  15. QuakeDude

    QuakeDude ooooh weeee ooooh

    Joined:
    Aug 4, 2004
    Messages:
    8,811
    Location:
    Melbourne
    House of the dead on the original Xbox with a good lightgun is simply awesome :thumbup:

    I used break out the game every now and again, but can't play it now due to the xbox being connected to a plasma :(
     
  16. flain

    flain Member

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2005
    Messages:
    3,233
    Location:
    Sydney
    One word... Dreamcast


    Best ports of the house of the dead's and virtua cop's i ever played on a home system. Also its important to have a big ass CRT TV.


    You know they really outa bring out a modern light gun. Surly with todays technology they could make one using optical mouse technology with a lens or something to see the screen in HD. Producing a super accurate gun :p.
     
    Last edited: May 11, 2011
  17. Reaper

    Reaper Member

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2001
    Messages:
    12,159
    Location:
    Brisbane, Qld, Australia
    Yea, until the kids stare into it or shine it into each others eyes. :(
     
  18. Creekin

    Creekin (Taking a Break)

    Joined:
    Jun 21, 2003
    Messages:
    10,105

    Click to view full size!



    there is a modern light gun...
    it's called a Wii

    :p
     
  19. flain

    flain Member

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2005
    Messages:
    3,233
    Location:
    Sydney
    All the wii shooters i tried were really laggy and so sucked hard. I might as well play the shooters on a PC with a mouse :lol:. I haven't tried any that Elvis has mentioned though. So i guess maybe i should give it a second chance.
     
  20. Reaper

    Reaper Member

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2001
    Messages:
    12,159
    Location:
    Brisbane, Qld, Australia
    Ah, you really don't know how a wiimote, or any light gun works do you?

    It uses camera / ir sensor. It doesn't emit focused diode light like optical mouse technology does.

    Unless flain was getting at using a better photodiode or something. It wouldn't be easy though. Definitly not as easy as following one colour or light source around.

    I've got hotd 1+2 + overkill and the sega gunblade double pack. None of those games cause problems for me at all. :)
     

Share This Page

Advertisement: