Best Light Gun for LCD

[DRD]

My favourite video games were the 80s and 90s 2 player light gun games like point blank, time crisis, lethal enforcers, t2 ....... I thought that point blank and time crisis were excellent on PS1, but i think that that needed a CRT TV

I saw this video and it made me wonder whether the technology has finally caught up with lcd TVs

Can folk on here recommend a light gun package for LCD TV, that has pixel perfect classics from the 80s and 90s pls ?

Use a laptop As the engine ?
Or buy one of these all in one boxes ?

Is this Retroshooter package the way ?

i dont even own a games console and have pretty basic laptops for work use with no fancy graphics cards

Thanks

 

[Colywobbles]

Best Gun by far is the Gun4IR however quite expensive unless you you make your own which I’ve made a few now. Perfect in every way apart from price.
Needs some knowledge of PCs and a little effort required to set up but flawless from any direction, distance or angle. PERFECT

Aimtrack Gun made by Ultimarc - about £75 don’t bother with recoil as it fades quick anyway. This was originally my goto gun.

Sinden light gun - I had 2 of the bees overated POS. Border looks crap and guns a PITA to set up next to the Aimtrack.

 

[Colywobbles]

Oh I have my backup Aimtrack I’d consider selling if you go that way.

 

[Jmac]

@SeikoKid may be able to answer some of the questions in the first post

 

[AlfonsoB]

Sinden works but you have to live with a white border.
Personally didn’t like it for a number of reasons.
Had one for a few months.

Gun4ir works really well. I have built 2 now and love them.
Building your own one has been made a lot easier recently
As JB ( creator owner) is now selling pcbs for guncon1 and guncon2.
also pcbs for the leds. £6 for 4 which is pretty reasonable.
Just check you can get the camera before starting a build.

Retroshooter seems to be getting favourable reviews and might be the most
Straight forward plug and play option.
The hardware may limit the games it will run.

 

[Fantazia2]

Retroshooter ilooks like you can link to PC as an option so you could likely play whatever runs on PC.

I've got an Aimtrak in a box somewhere, remember it worked well but the distance you had to stand back from the screen seemed further than most other technologies.

 

[SeikoKid]

2nd Cols post. Sinden brings out the fear in people which is sad as they are a nice made gun and concept. I have Gun4IR under licence from RPEG Electronics - JB’s sales guy in usa

I run a Sharkade set up in my own cabinet with my own PC. His HD’s - 32tb and his OS He simply logs into my system and sets it all up. But now he is only selling his own builds. You can buy gun kits from him that plug into your tv that are loaded with games

Check his site

I think sinden is ok for simple retropie style games but for the arcade games and laser disc ones people just go gun4ir . Mine work in dark or light , sun or clouds and also have perspex over the leds and doesn’t affect them. I stand 1m away from screen but i do have a 32” monitor

i think the guys above know more tech side answers

 

[edward.emms]

You can use a wii remote with the sensor bar

 

[ChrisH]

Best Gun by far is the Gun4IR however quite expensive unless you you make your own which I’ve made a few now. Perfect in every way apart from price.
Needs some knowledge of PCs and a little effort required to set up but flawless from any direction, distance or angle. PERFECT

Aimtrack Gun made by Ultimarc - about £75 don’t bother with recoil as it fades quick anyway. This was originally my goto gun.

Sinden light gun - I had 2 of the bees overated POS. Border looks crap and guns a PITA to set up next to the Aimtrack.

I'll have to dig into the Gun4IR, but completely agree with the Sinden - complete pig to setup and the boarders look rubbish, as soon as I had a go I decided my Aimtrack was safe.

No gun is 'easy' to configure but generally that because the games you want are spread over a a number of emulators so there is always a degree of work involved as each emulator requires configuring
TBH I may have not given the Sinden a proper chance, but the boarders put me off and I never really wanted to after seeing them.
I have my aimtrack's LED bar built into the bezel of my cab so it's virtually invisible and it just works.

It's now possible to play TimeCrisis2 in mame, but you do need a monster of a machine to do it.

Interesting to hear it's not worth bothering with the recoil though, I've never had it and often though about doing the add-on.

 

[Colywobbles]

I'll have to dig into the Gun4IR, but completely agree with the Sinden - complete pig to setup and the boarders look rubbish, as soon as I had a go I decided my Aimtrack was safe.

No gun is 'easy' to configure but generally that because the games you want are spread over a a number of emulators so there is always a degree of work involved as each emulator requires configuring
TBH I may have not given the Sinden a proper chance, but the boarders put me off and I never really wanted to after seeing them.
I have my aimtrack's LED bar built into the bezel of my cab so it's virtually invisible and it just works.

It's now possible to play TimeCrisis2 in mame, but you do need a monster of a machine to do it.

Interesting to hear it's not worth bothering with the recoil though, I've never had it and often though about doing the add-on.

Recoil works great on Gun4IR it’s just the others that suffer.

 

[Den - aka Wolfgang]

Quite a timely post this, as the other day I manged to get a Sinden gun (recoil ver.) for a reasonable price.
My fave lightgun games are Point-blank, Time Crisis and the HOTD/Virtua cop games.
I managed to set up the Sinden with Mame pretty quickly and I was really impressed when playing Point blank and Time crisis; really accurate and tracked really fast (48" 4k LG TV with game mode enabled - Beefy pc plugged to tv)
The white border isn't ideal, but I think the thickness can be tweaked? (Will look in to that)
So far, I've preferred the sinden to the aimtrak I tried a while back.

If you want to run games such as Rambo, HOTD 4/5, Timecrisis 5 etc (and great games such as Alien Armageddon/Anialation) you'll need a beefy pc and to learn how to set up the Tekknoparrot front end.
If you aren't worried about playing the above (I gather from your post that's the case), then apparently a raspberry pi with sinden (or A pre built Bacetara(spelling) light gun set build) works great.

Would love to try a Gun4IR, but don't have the skills to make one and I think pricess are expensive:-(

One last think to mention, is you can buy a dolphin sensor bar (basically a tweaked of the wii light bar for windows) and use a wii mote, but I haven't personally messed with it enough to say if it's a great experience.

 

[Pharo]

Hi all I just got a new cab in exchange deal and it came with 2 Aimtrak guns with recoil the fella I got it from said he didn't try to set up the guns as it was a pain,it is running hyperspin frontend,I've also got a sinden gun which I've not had much luck setting up either so was wondering if anyone could recommend a you tube video or a link to set them up, I've watched a few videos but the all seem to contradict each other on what should be the best way to set these up so I'm no further forward.
Cheers Brian

 

[ChrisH]

Hi all I just got a new cab in exchange deal and it came with 2 Aimtrak guns with recoil the fella I got it from said he didn't try to set up the guns as it was a pain,it is running hyperspin frontend,I've also got a sinden gun which I've not had much luck setting up either so was wondering if anyone could recommend a you tube video or a link to set them up, I've watched a few videos but the all seem to contradict each other on what should be the best way to set these up so I'm no further forward.
Cheers Brian

The front end won't really make any difference (unless you want to navigate it with the gun which I wouldn't!) each of the emulators will require config independantly.
Mame is the easiest and probably the best place to start - https://www.ultimarc.com/AimTrak Setup Guide.pdf

Worth remembering that the AimTrack is in reality a mouse in the eyes of the operating system and emulators.

 

[Pharo]

Hi Chris thanks for the reply that's the pdf I followed and I can get the sight to move and button 2 to work ie in aliens the gun I can fire the grenades but it will only fire if I aim at the bottom left or right of the screen which makes me think it could be something to do with the offscreen reload I've changed this in the mame ini file to off and on but makes no difference.
Cheers Brian

 

[MadNat]

I made a little PCB for Light Guns. It has a standard pinout for Gun4IR as it's not open source and can't be changed.

Let me know if you'd like to try it.

 

[DanSeldon]

I've zero aptitude when it comes to electronics so I couldn't set one of these up but I do have a cheeky Ebay search for an Operation Wolf cab every week or so