How to configure mouse as light gun? And light gun as mouse?

RetroArch
#1

I’ve been searching all around on these forums, and the web in general. I haven’t really found a solid answer to any of my questions/concerns.

I’m running RetroArch 1.3.6 on Windows 10 (64-bit). I play via EmulationStation, Steam, and a Steam Link with VirualHere USB sharing.

My retro emulation setup is working pretty solidly right now, so I’m looking to further expand its capabilities by working in light gun support. I know you can’t use the OEM light guns with anything but a CRT TV/monitor, and I’ve also seen the Aimtrak & ArcadeGuns light guns with sensor bars. Unfortunately those are a bit out of my price range right now. I hope to some day upgrade to something like that… For now, I also have been seeing and reading that some people have gotten their Wii remotes to work as guns, though perhaps not as accurate as the actual light guns.

My understanding is that any light gun, including the Wii remote, basically emulates a mouse input, which in turn emulates the original light gun input. So my first test was to see if I could play a shooting game (I have Duck Hunt and Operation Wolf for NES) using just a mouse. I’m starting with NES (running the Nestopia core), and so far have no luck with the mouse. I see no place in the input options to enable the mouse within an emulator. So my first question is: 1) How do I enable & use the mouse as a light gun in Nestopia? I also hope to eventually get light guns working with at least bsnes, Genesis Plus GX, Mednafen PSX, and MAME. I have read a couple places that a configured gun just works with Nestopia and bsnes, but I’ve also seen plenty of posts from people unable to get it working, and I’m worried that if I can’t even get just the mouse working with them, that I may be in that latter group.

I’m curious 2) are the mouse input and a light gun input indeed the same, or are they separate input types/devices within RetroArch or the cores?

Next, I’m thinking of buying the Mayflash DolphinBar to use with my Wii remotes. I’ve read a few things around the internet of people having success with it, but it’s usually with RetroPie and they tend to be slim on the details, or refer to settings that are not available in RetroArch. 3) Has anyone had any luck with the DolphinBar and Wii remotes setup as mice and/or light guns?

4) If light guns use mouse input to emulate the gun effect, how do you setup more than one player in any of the emulators, most importantly MAME & Sega Saturn? I don’t know if any NES or SNES light gun games had multiplayer or not. But don’t multiple connected mice just control the same cursor?

This other forum thread Light Gun/Mouse and Genesis Plus and Mame worries me about the Genesis & MAME side of things. It also brings up another question, 5) Do ROMs need to be played in full widescreen mode for tracking to work correctly? Or can they be played with the system’s native resolution with black areas on the left and right?

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#2

For Nestopia, make sure you have the NstDatabase.xml (you can get it from https://github.com/rdanbrook/nestopia) in your system/BIOS directory and then it should automatically detect which games need the zapper.

For bsnes, you need to go into settings > input and set p2’s input device as ‘super scope’.

2.) yes, they’re the same.

3.) yes, I’ve done it and it works well but only in Linux in my experience. When I tried it in Windows, the cursor was crazy.

4.) you don’t. we don’t have 2-player light gun support anywhere currently.

5.) black bars are fine.

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#3

This is a timely post.

I was searching yesterday and had all these same questions!

So to test the process I can use a mouse?

@hunterk you have any experience with this on the Sheild TV? I’m sure you said you have one.

I’m a way off lightgun setup but I dream of playing time crisis again

#4

I do have one but I haven’t tested with it. Mouse support on Android was spotty in the past but there was coincidentally a nice PR submitted yesterday that greatly expanded/improved it (esp for Shield devices), so it’s a good time to revisit it.

#5

Good news all round. I will have to try out my wireless mouse for proof of concept before investing in a gun

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#6

Is there a way to get mouse support on PlayStation core for light gun? Rearmed or mednafen

#7

Thank you for the info!.. I’ll definitely be grabbing that file and testing Nestopia again.

So, once I have that setup, for Nestopia and bsnes, if I start a light gun game (in Nestopia) or set player 2 to “super scope” (for bsnes), should it then use my standard mouse input as the light gun?.. I’m trying to test, and be sure it’s going to work to some extent, before spending the relatively low cost of a Mayflash DolphinBar.

I saw you rmention about the crazy Windows cursor on another thread. So I’m really hoping there’s been some updates somewhere that fixed that… I guess we’ll see. I’ll try to report back with my experience.

Awe… seriously bad, heart-crushing news about no two player ability, at least with Saturn, PSX, and especially MAME!!! Arg!!! Big time bummer. But I can understand the issue if it has to use the mouse input.

Another question, about real light guns vs. the Wii remote as a gun… From what I’ve read & seen around online, using the Wii remote results in an on-screen reticle overlayed on the screen, so you can see better where you’re aiming. I’m guessing it’s going to do the same just for mouse input. But it looks & sounds like the professional guns, Aimtrak & ArcadeGuns do NOT give a reticle over the screen. I assume part of the reason is the more fluid gesture motions of the Wii remote vs. the more exact, point-n-shoot accuracy of the actual light guns. But are they actually handled differently? Do the emulators recognize the difference? How different is their behavior? Or is there just a reticle on/off setting buried somewhere in the settings?.. Like I said, if I can get it to work with the low-end stuff, I might save up for some higher-end stuff.

Also, I had this thought concerning the possibility of 2-players… I know if multiple mice are connected to one computer (at least Windows), they aren’t really treated as different devices and certainly aren’t recognized as separate “controllers”, but i’m curious how exactly the high-end light guns work. Could two be used and each shot register as a click with cursor location? Or would they compete for control over an unseen cursor on the screen? The emulator would only register as one player, but it would have two guns controlling it… This may seem completely goofy to others to even suggest, but I don’t really know how the guns register shots/hits, so I’m just grasping at straws here, hoping.

And lastly, I guess, does anybody know of any mid-range light guns? Looks like, aside from cobbling together something like a Wii remote zapper, the only options are $85-$100+.

#8

Yeah, that’s my plan, too.

#9

I quickly tried in mednafen and rearmed core but couldn’t figure it out.

Next I will try the advice above from hunterk. Need to get those files

#10

When I implemented the mouse support I focused on getting it to work in ScummVM, so there might still be some issues with it not working on other cores. But this is good feedback, so I hope you will let me know how it went, and i will look into it :slight_smile:

#11

@Thatman84 Dunno, never tried it with any PSX light gun games, though I would assume you would do something similar to bsnes (i.e., changing the input device in settings > input).

@ultimusrex Yes, once it’s set up properly in the core, it uses your regular mouse and most cores show a reticle on the screen, IIRC. I know bsnes does. If the aimtrak doesn’t show a reticle, maybe they don’t do constant mouse tracking and instead just send the coordinates when you pull the trigger. /shrug I guess that could make sense if they’re doing 2 guns on a single mouse, too. Don’t quote me on that, of course, just idle speculation.

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#12

I found this list.

I’m will try some of the MAME games soon.

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#13

Just happy to know my idea isn’t completely ludicrous… Maybe I’ll be able to test it some day, or figure out exactly how the high-end light guns work.

#14

I’ve submitted a pull request that adds lightgun support to the Android input driver when using a mouse. I tested it with Duck Hunt on Nestopia and with Yoshi’s Safari on BSNES and it seems to work okay.

When using the touchpad to control the lightgun it gets a little sketchy due to the way I’ve currently set up left and right mouse button clicks. I’m hoping for some feedback in the other thread I made on the Android forums about this. Maybe someone has some better ideas on how to handle mouse button clicks when using the touch pad.

#15

I will try and test them on my tablet over the weekend. I take it I need the latest nightly and updated cores?

#16

You will need the latest nightly, but you don’t need to update the cores, they should already be compatible.

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#17

Okay, so here’s my experience, thus far…

I was extremely hopeful when I tested Nestopia and bsnes with only my mouse, as the mouse tracking was smooth and accurate. Since the Wii controller just acts as a mouse, it should yield the same results, right?… Not so much.

Nestopia – Great, easy support. I added that XML file (linked previously in this thread) to my RetroArch’s “system” directory, and it worked like a charm. No extra setup needed. Zapper games just automatically use mouse input… HOWEVER: I received my Mayflash DolphinBar, and my confidence was again bolstered by how perfectly smooth and accurately it worked as a mouse on my desktop. But inside the emulator, it is completely unplayable. It looks like the reticle is jittering spastically between 2 or 3 positions in a tight grouping, the Wii remote has to be aimed almost off of the screen for the reticle to even show up, and it only takes the tiniest movement of the Wii remote to send the reticle zipping across the screen. I tested with Duck Hunt and out of 2 levels, I think I successfully placed 2 shots. Like I said, unplayable, and so very disappointing. I’m planning to still do some testing and troubleshooting, to see if I can do anything to make it work better. I’m also now afraid to even consider spending MUCH more on a high-end Aimtrak gun, for fear that it will just behave similarly.

bsnes – See the Nestopia experience above for the general idea of how well the Wii remote works, with this core as well. I haven’t yet significantly tested on the big screen with bsnes, but when testing on my computer screen, it did feel like bsnes might have been SLIGHTLY more playable and less jittery than Nestopia, but I’m not really sure yet. The thing that did really annoy me is that not all light gun games on SNES work with the “Super Scope” device type. In fact I tried two, Lethal Enforcers and one I can’t remember right now. Neither worked at all with the mouse or Wii remote, but did work with the retro pad, which kinda defeats the purpose. I did try Yoshi’s Safari, which was made specifically for the Super Scope, and it worked (though, as you can read above, “worked” is a relative term here). Some very brief research has led me to understand that at least a couple games (at least Lethal Enforcers), possibly most of the gun games, if not all the third-party gun games, were designed to work with the Konami Justifier and will not work with the Super Scope… So I’m back to square one for SNES light gun games, since I really don’t care about Yoshi’s Safari or most other Super Scope games… One curious behavior of the core is that the Super Scope seems to be the right-most accessible option in the device type list, and if I try to click “right” again to see what other options are available, it immediately crashes.

Does anyone have any experience getting a light gun to work with non-Super-Scope SNES games in RetroArch?

I have not yet tested the Wii remote with any other cores. So I have no idea if the unplayable jitteriness is RetroArch-wide or core-dependent. I am hoping to also test Sega Saturn and MAME.

The silver lining to this is that, even though RetroArch seems incapable of properly emulating a light gun on Windows, I did see how well the Wii Remote worked in Windows alone as a mouse. So now I’m going to be searching Steam for some on-rails shooters to try out with my otherwise borked light gun and see if I can get SOMETHING useful out of my purchases of the DolphinBar and a gun accessory for the Wii remote. I might even see if I can get my hands on the old PC versions of the Virtua Cop games, and any other arcade shooters that were released on PC, and see how well the Wii remote and maybe eventually the Aimtrak will work with them.

For other users of the DolphinBar… It came with a little pedestal stand, but no mention about it in the instructions. Is that just for setting it beneath your TV? Or should it be used if mounting to the top of the TV also?… I’m wondering if it can be mounted to the top without the stand, or if it works better & more accurately when it’s standing a little bit away from the screen.

#18

I done a testing report in the added mouse support for android thread on similar games with a BT wireless mouse.

Please comeback and let us know what you find with the wii mote. Specially MAME because I’m heading down your exact same path.

I really want to test Time Crisis for the PlayStation in MAME

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#19

Yeah. I’m hoping to play some Time Crisis, too… I’ll definitely report back with my experience once I get the chance to test out the other cores with the Wii remote solution.

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#20

This is the topic I was looking for, as I am on my way to start setting up the light up games with my wii remote and the dolphin bar. I got the dolphin bar since last November and haven’t used it that much.

It is too bad to read that the cursor jitters… I wanted to set it up for the mame games to start with, but I will do my research and tests as well and come back here with comments.

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