Raspberry Pi with Aimtrak

RetroArch Linux devices
#1

Hello! I am trying to get the AimTrak gun to work with Mame2003 in a raspberry pi that has RetroPie loaded onto it. I am trying ot use Mame2003 with the Vs. Duck Hunt game. I have the gun all calibrated to the monitor - I did that with my windows box. However in Mame2003 when I have the gun in Mouse mode, the raspberry pi is detecting it correctly as a mouse. I read that I just needed to change the configuration for Mame2003 to “pointer” instead of “mouse”. However when I did that the gun just entirely didn’t work. No buttons and no movement. When it is in mouse mode the buttons do work. But the gun doesn’t control the cursor on the screen. I did a command and can see that the gun is registering movement in the raspberry pi itself. I had seen that this has to do with absolute mouse coordinates versus relative mouse coordinates.

Has anyone gotten this working? The raspberry pi SD card was already preloaded with the emulation station and retropie. I am updating all of the installed packages now hoping that something there will make it work. I have a Raspberry Pi 3B. If I use a regular mouse it works - just the gun doesn’t work.

Any other ideas?

Thank you very much for your time! Phil

#2

As I had the same goal (aimtrak on retropie) , here are some insights:

  • aimtrak reports as a mouse with absolute coordinates. Standard mouse use relative coordinates. So aimtrak acts more like a touchpad or a touchscreen.
  • libretro supports (so far) only one mouse so you will never get 2 guns working
  • mame2003 tries to change from absolute coordinates to relative coordinates. As I have reasonable doubts on the reliability of such a solution, I decided to use another emulator.

So far the only mame emulator I have found working well with absolute coordinates is advancemame. As linux was also lacking of a configuration tool for aimtrak, I have started one: https://github.com/gunpadawan/gunconf

Best, GP