Virtua Cop 2 Guns Not Shooting Right

JonNena

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I have a Virtua Cop 2 and cannot get the guns to shoot right. One gun does not shoot at all...probably an optic sensor???...the other one had a loose lead on the optic so I resoldered that. Now that gun works and when going through the calibration stuff from the menu, it works fine and when the screen turns white, you can see the splotch moving around as the gun moves around. When I start a game, I cannot get the gun to raise up from the bottom of the screen. I can see the cross hairs at the bottom of the screen and all shots seem to register at the bottom of the screen. If I shoot fast enough, I can "walk" the shots up a little, but of course I run out of bullets before it gets high enough to hit anything. I did find out that if I cock the gun up at about a 45 deg angle upwards, I can actually hit a target...although I am not sure how it is doing that. Even when I am at the initial screen where you shoot to pick the level, I cannot get the cross hairs to come up from the bottom of the screen. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
 
First thing I would do (if available), try a known working gun. Sounds like one or both of your optic gun boards is bad. Also, check your power supply, I have seen flaky guns due to bad PS voltage. It was really strange, monitor lit up nice, game PCB did NOT shut down, sound worked, I re-wired the whole cab, swapped monitors, swapped guns, gun boards, lenses, monitor chassis, checked everything (so I thought). I even had +5V at the board! But, for whatever reason, when the game was played with that particular power supply, the guns would not shoot. Never seen that since, but I'll not forget it anytime soon.
The other thing it could be is the tube itself. Is it degaussed? (are the colors correct, and the sky is not red or green?) That COULD cause an issue with the guns shooting weird. Barring that, possibly a PCB problem. I would go after that last, as that's going to be the most costly fix. Check the simple things first, and go from there.
 
Try doing a manual calibration. It's a pain and takes a wile changing the number values adjusting the right ,left ,up and down but when you get it right it works great. It's kind of a balancing act.
I never could get the automatic calibration to work.
 
ah, if these are original Sega guns, boy can I tell you a few stories about those.

I wound up replacing the guns on our Virtua Cop with Happ .45s and retrofitting the buckets the guns go in with the Happ holsters... scored a couple backup guns for our House of the Dead in the process.

common point that breaks is the damn optic. there's always a leg that breaks on those. I might try globbing some silicone sealant on there on HOD to see if that improves the durability, but I've had to fix that 3 or 4 times now.

another point, as noted, is the monitor. make sure you have good brightness on it. I'm going to assume you have the cab that uses the large concave mirror and the little 19" monitor down below... another helpful tip with gun games is also making sure the tube and the glass (and in this case, the mirror too) are all very clean. alternatively, you can try shrinking down the Horizontal and Vertical sizes of the picture so that they're not on the outer edges of the tube. some shooters have difficulty tracking on the outer parts. also verify the Focus pot on the flyback is adjusted correctly.... over time these need readjusting.

make sure the lens on the gun isn't gunked up either. you can also try swabbing rubbing alcohol on the optic. another thing to note is making sure the optic is straight. I know the black plastic cylinder has notches for the optic to hold it in place, but they're pretty worthless, and it's easy to not have the optic centered right. this happened on Virtua Cop actually, same problem I think you might be having.

do all necessary cleaning and adjustments, and then just use the Default Calibration first, see where that gets you. it's usually all I ever have to do on our games.

check your voltage, Sega uses weird wiring colors. if I'm not mistaken, the yellow is +5 and the white is ground.... stark contrast to the usual colors of red and black!

good luck sir. if you have any other questions or want to know specific things about the machine, ask me. VC and VC2 are the same exact hardware I think.
 
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