[RESOLVED] Aimtrak Lightguns working in MAME, not in GameEx..

[Games001]

Hello all.  I recently entered the madness of lightgun in stalls and tried to get an AimTrak Lightgun pair setup for use in GameEx driven MAME.

After pulling my hair out over button controls I finally got MAME to see the guns, as well as their button/trigger pushes/pulls.  The guns will track reasonable well in most games and the buttons now fire correctly.. but when running MAME through GameEx the guns will not track and the triggers will not fire (set in Ultimarc AimTrak Utility config program as Mouse Right).

MAME cfg and GameEx ini attached.  Thoughts welcome.

GameEx.ini mame.ini

[Draco1962]

Can you attach your log.txt file after attempting to use the gun(s)? Thanks!

 

[Games001]

I was able to get the crosshair to move in some of the lightgun games, Area 51 in this test, when run through GameEx.. yet no trigger/buttons seem to work, only the buttons on the arcade CP work as fire/special.  Log attached.

log.txt

[Draco1962]

Are you using an interface or plugging the guns directly to the PC via USB?

[Games001]

Both guns are directly connected to a usb hub which connects directly to the PC.

[Draco1962]

I do not own any lightguns (yet) but waiting for a Sinden lightgun in the coming weeks after a manufacturer's delay so I am unable to test settings for use with MAME and via GameEx. You note that you have programmed MAME to recognize the lightguns & that they work without any issues.

I am going to elevate this to @Tom Speirsattention for any feedback he may have for making these work via GameEx. I am not giving up and certainly invite others with experience to contribute any suggestions.

[Games001]

A small detail addition, so people can understand what hardware is involved.

 

1. Ultimarc Aimtrak Lightguns:

https://www.arcaderenovations.com/aimtrak-light-gun-black.html

Ultimarc Aimtrak Utility has the lightguns as Device-1/2 with triggers/buttons set to Trigger=Right Mouse, Buttons 1/2=GP 1/2.  Oddly the guns will not fire on screen using left mouse, only working correctly in MAME on-screen as right mouse.

2. Extreme IR Bar:

https://www.arcaderenovations.com/extreme-ir-bar-for-arcade-light-guns.html

3. 4 Joysticks, buttons, push/pull spinner, and trackball controlled by 2 GP-Wiz 40 MAX and 1 Opti-Wiz 3 encoder boards.  All of which work as intended both in GameEx and MAME.

[Games001]

After some messing around with old YouTube videos which, in many cases, contradicted one another on settings and formats, I changed the MAME ini file to the following settings and... suddenly GameEx and MAME are playing nice again and gun games (Area 51, Alien 3: The Gun were my only tests thus far) are now playing, tracking, and firing trigger/button pushes as expected.  It seems that making the MAME cfg file Read-Only gets around the odd Device ID changes that happen with system restarts and the Input Configurations for each player must be confirmed the first time playing any of these games, given making the cfg files writeable (if made read-only for whatever purpose) when doing so.

MAME ini changes:
 

# CORE INPUT OPTIONS
#
coin_lockout              1
ctrlr                     
mouse                     1
joystick                  1
lightgun                  1
multikeyboard             1
multimouse                1
steadykey                 0
ui_active                 0
offscreen_reload          1
joystick_map              auto
...

#
# CORE INPUT AUTOMATIC ENABLE OPTIONS
#
paddle_device             keyboard
adstick_device            joystick
pedal_device              keyboard
dial_device               mouse
trackball_device          mouse
lightgun_device           mouse
positional_device         keyboard
mouse_device              mouse

 

Thanks for the help folks.  I think, as of this moment, that we can call this 'solved' unless some oddball like Terminator 2 gives us issues.

[Draco1962]

Will close the thread. Thanks for reporting back with a solution!