Turning my Maximum Force cabinet into a light gun emulator cabinet...

Thanks for these updates! I haven't been around much to work on my projects, so I get to live vicariously through your successes!

Once I get mine up and running I think I might give your set up a shot to add to the mix.

Trying to bullet proof my cabinet so I won't have to crack it open for 20 years. Things can stay working that long without maintenance right? Just had to buy a new washing machine because the two parts that broke on it cost more than the washing machine itself! Really that's what they should do, lil' mini games on appliances! Imagine a screen on a dishwasher where you have a gun and you "shoot" aliens off your dishes as the machine squirts jets at the spots you shoot... it'd be like an augmented reality game, plus then you could make sure dishes come out really clean. No kids would complain about doing dishes again!

Hope you get some fun games in on your machine!
 
Thanks for these updates! I haven't been around much to work on my projects, so I get to live vicariously through your successes!

Once I get mine up and running I think I might give your set up a shot to add to the mix.

Trying to bullet proof my cabinet so I won't have to crack it open for 20 years. Things can stay working that long without maintenance right? Just had to buy a new washing machine because the two parts that broke on it cost more than the washing machine itself! Really that's what they should do, lil' mini games on appliances! Imagine a screen on a dishwasher where you have a gun and you "shoot" aliens off your dishes as the machine squirts jets at the spots you shoot... it'd be like an augmented reality game, plus then you could make sure dishes come out really clean. No kids would complain about doing dishes again!

Hope you get some fun games in on your machine!
Yeah I am still messing with it for sure lol. I still need to send my switcher to RiddleTV to repair it for me and I want to see if I can figure out how to have this in there with a Switcher and have 1 external cabinet. I've just been lazy about doing that and also working through some car insurance shit since someone hit my brand new car in a parking lot and took off.

One of my buddies is also going to be sending me a fast CPU/RAM that I want to swap, and possibly his motherboard as well because one of my RAM slots doesn't work in mine, but I am not sure if my shit will be "plug and play" with a new motherboard. Time Crisis 2 is now emulating and working however my current setup can't run it at a decent speed so I'm hoping his fast stuff will fix that. As well, Carnevil stutters with the sound for me so his stuff should fix that as well.

I won't be "closing it up" until both of those things happen though.

But I hooked up my Time Crisis pedal to P1 Button 8 on the JPAC, which is the V key on the keyboard. I configured that to work in OG Time Crisis and it feels 100% like the actual board that I own of Time Crisis, without the loud ass fan coming from that stack!

I also got Virtua Cop 3 running with the cxbx-reloaded emulator and the unreleased Xbox version of the game. I had to use demulshooter with it to be able to use 2 inputs (gun and keyboard keys for start button) because cxbx does not let you configure controllers across multiple devices by default. However the problem was the bullet time was set to the third mouse button, and my bun only has 2 buttons. And because demulshooter was hijacking an input, it never makes the input to be able to be overridden with the keyboard controls.

Since DS is open source I looked at the code and found where this behavior was happening. But it's all ASM and I just do web dev so wasn't sure what any of that stuff did. However my buddy knows ASM and found exactly what line of code to change. Then I built a custom version of DS and now I have it workin where it does NOT hijack the bullet time input and I set it to my pedal key, V, and now I can play Virtua Cop 3 on there with bullet time.

Almost there but it's been a fun project though that is for sure! And now this has me probably going to convert one of my Rush 2049 cabinets into a racer emulation station, and if that goes well and I like it, then I'm going to convert my other one to one too and have linked emulation racer cabs.
 
Well I am nearly finished with this project and have put it back together. I'll have a big update with a video shortly as well.

For the time being, here is the list of games that I have on there over what I believe is 7 different emulators.

1 America's Army Arcade
2 Alien3: The Gun
3 Area 51
4 Area 51 / Maximum Force Duo v2.0
5 Bang!
6 Big Buck Hunter Call of the Wild
7 Beast Busters
8 Born To Fight
9 Bubble Trouble - Golly! Ghost! 2
10 CarnEvil
11 Cheyenne
12 Chiller
13 Claybuster
14 Sega Clay Challenge
15 Clay Pigeon
16 Combat
17 Confidential Mission
18 Crackshot
19 Crime Patrol
20 Crossbow
21 Crypt Killer
22 Death Crimson OX
23 Deer Hunting USA V4.3
24 Desert Gun
25 Dragon Gun
26 Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars
27 Vs. Duck Hunt
28 Egg Venture
29 Evil Night
30 Fastdraw
31 Friction
32 Golgo 13 Kiseki no Dandou
33 Gallagher's Gallery
34 Mobile Suit Gundam Final Shooting
35 Ghoul Panic
36 Ghost Hunter
37 Golgo 13
38 Golly! Ghost!
39 Great Guns
40 Gunbuster
41 Hit 'n Miss
42 Vs. Hogan's Alley
43 House of the Dead
44 House of the Dead 2
45 Invasion - The Abductors
46 Judge Dredd
47 Who Shot Johnny Rock?
48 Jurassic Park
49 The Last Bounty Hunter
50 Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters
51 Lethal Enforcers 3
52 Lethal Enforcers
53 Lethal Justice
54 Laser Ghost
55 Line of Fire / Bakudan Yarou
56 Lord of Gun
57 Lupin the 3rd: The Shooting
58 Mad Dog McCree
59 Mad Dog McCree 2
60 Mallet Madness
61 Marbella Vice
62 Maximum Force
63 Mechanized Attack
64 The Maze of Kings
65 Ninja Assault
66 N.Y. Captor
67 One Shot One Kill
68 Operation Tiger
69 Operation Wolf
70 Operation Wolf 3
71 Operation Thunderbolt
72 Duck Hunt
73 Hogan's Alley
74 Wild Gunman
75 Police Trainer
76 Police Trainer 2
77 Point Blank
78 Point Blank 2
79 Ranger Mission
80 Rapid Fire
81 Rail Chase
82 Rail Chase 2
83 Revolution X
84 Road Runner
85 Steel Gunner
86 Steel Gunner 2
87 Shooting Gallery
88 Must Shoot TV
89 Silent Hill: The Arcade
90 Space Gun
91 Space Pirates
92 Sport Shooting USA
93 Sharpshooter
94 Star Trek Voyager
95 Target Hits
96 Time Crisis 2
97 Time Crisis 3
98 Time Crisis: Crisis Zone
99 Terminator 2 - Judgment Day
100 Tickee Tickats
101 Time Crisis
102 Total Vice
103 Triple Hunt
104 Trophy Hunting - Bear & Moose
105 Turkey Shoot
106 Target Terror Gold
107 Turkey Hunting USA
108 Tut's Tomb
109 Under Fire
110 Vampire Night
111 Virtua Cop
112 Virtua Cop 2
113 Virtua Cop 3
114 Vs. Freedom Force
115 Who Dunit
116 Wing Shooting Championship
117 Extreme Hunting 2
118 Extreme Hunting
119 Zero Point
120 Zero Point 2
121 Zombie Raid
 
Okay here goes the big one...

Here is a showcase video that I took to show off the interface and the different emulators and how it all works.


I used to have an 8 way JAMMA switcher in my cabinet and had a bunch of boards, however there were some games that I knew I could never play on it, and then I was tired of some of my boards not working out of nowhere. So I decided to turn it into an emulation station once I saw that I could use the actual happ guns for it.

A couple years back I sought out a USB2GUN board and ended up finding one. I proof of concepted that it worked with emulation in my other emulation cabinet, and I had this project in my mind for the past 18 months and just never got around to doing it, because I knew it was going to be a long project. I finally bit the bullet and did it.

Once I got MAME working, I quickly started wanting other emulators so I could play Virtua Cop, and then it just spiraled out of control lol

I have the following emulators all setup in there, as well as some native PC games:

- MAME (groovyMAME)
- Teknoparrot
- model2 emulator
- Flycast
- PCSX2
- Hypseus Singe
- Chihiro (Xbox)

I still have my switcher in there, however it just has 2 ports on it - 1 goes to the PC and 1 is an external port so I can connect any JAMMA game to it without going inside of the cabinet.

The hardware is a JPAC going to the PC, and then I have a USB2GUN board that the JPAC VGA goes to and that then goes to the PC video card. I have crt-emudriver installed so that I can run Windows in 320x240 since my monitor is a CGA monitor.

I also did A LOT of custom setup inside of Hyperspin/Rocketlauncher and just overall with the different emulators. I wrote some of my own LUA scripts to add the screen flash overlay in Terminator 2 (as I show in the video) and then for the Hypseus Singe emulator I had to write my own little custom code to use an API call they made but didn't implement themselves, so that I could use my guns to get real time tracking. I can go into more detail if anyone likes. But most non-MAME games are running from scripts/batch files that I wrote because a lot of them need demulshooter running in tandem as well, or I had to run an app to hide the cursor, etc. It's just a bunch of one offs that I had to figure out but I'm happy with the end result.

Here are a bunch of pics of the setup...

I have everything sitting on the wood tray that the Maximum Force PCB was just sitting on:
1mbvQmw.jpg

Here is the JAMMA switcher and the Aux board that works in tandem with it, and that is what the gun trigger/opto inputs are being switched on:



jO3Pwby.jpg

There's the JPAC hidden under all the wires:
45sdsT4.jpg

And this is the USB2GUN board here:
WGOZVNh.jpg

And then here is the PC and ATX PSU needed to power it:
kBNuVSx.jpg

The ATX PSU and the arcade PSU both need to get their power source from the outlet, so I have a Y splitter, and one of those ends has to go into the cabinet through the door. You can also see the wifi antenna up there, and those other wires coming out the back are the external JAMMA port that goes to the switcher:
blBNQOI.jpg

This is an audio amp that is needed for the sound and I have it mounted in the coin door so I can change the volume. It goes to the JPAC as well as the PC.
O956agN.jpg
And here is everything all cleaned up and put back together with my Time Crisis pedal as well:
JlS0skp.jpg

I have an HDMI cable hooked to the video card that I can get out from the coin door to hook to a real monitor when I need to do any setup on it, cause doing real stuff in windows at 320x240 is not realistic lol.
v3eGncd.jpg

And then here is that external port hooked up to my Maximum Force / Area 51 duo board sitting on top of the cabinet there.
pBC7ljk.jpg

Well I think that is it.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I'll try to answer them.
 
One of these days I'll find a USB2GUN.... one of these days....

Awesome job and the thread I'll be looking for in the future!
 
One of these days I'll find a USB2GUN.... one of these days....

Awesome job and the thread I'll be looking for in the future!
I actually tested out my Friction IO board yesterday to compare the screen flash, and that board tracks fine however the way it reads the button inputs in Windows is not really working in a way that would make it useful.

It always is "Button 3" when you shoot and sometimes you see a quick blink of button 1 and 2 when you fire. But whether pointing on or off screen button 3 always registers.

Whereas with USB2GUN, when you aim at the screen it is button 1 and when off screen it is button 2.

And this is all in the Windows calibration/config stuff for it. It sees each gun as an analog joystick in Windows.
 
What specs does the pc need to have to run this setup and games good? I have a maximum force I got cheep with a non working board and I have a usb2gun board. Really want to copy your setup cause it's freaking amazing!
 
What specs does the pc need to have to run this setup and games good? I have a maximum force I got cheep with a non working board and I have a usb2gun board. Really want to copy your setup cause it's freaking amazing!
You don't need anything powerful at all.

Initially I had an i5-3570k with 8gb of RAM in it (I had 16gb of RAM but one of the slots on the motherboard is bad) and everything ran fine except for Carnevil. It would stutter a little bit and then I read that that specific game needs a lot of power.

Then my buddy was giving away some stuff so he gave me his i7-6700 with 32gb of RAM so I put that in there and Carnevil runs just fine.

But aside from Carnevil, the older PC ran everything I threw at it.

I did try running Time Crisis 2 (arcade) on the newer hardware but that still isn't powerful enough to run it. I know TC2 isn't "working" yet in MAME but a while ago it started working with some graphical hiccups, but you need a really beefy PC to play it, like something modern.
 
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