light-gun review

Keep shooting, keep shooting!

Hooking up the gun to your PC is simple enough, there’s a single lead from the gun that has a monitor pass-through port on it which goes in between your graphics card and monitor cable, and coming out of the pass through port is a USB plug which goes into the nearest free port.

This lead is approx 7ft in length and has no bulky bits on it like the Act Labs gun so I would have thought it could be wired into your M.A.M.E cabinet with ease.

No drivers are needed for this gun, once plugged in XP recognises the gun as an additional mouse. The trigger button acts as mouse button 1 and reload being mouse button 2. When the gun is fired the screen is very briefly filled full of white lines, this is needed so the gun can identify where it’s shooting at. The mouse pointer is then relocated to this aimed position on screen and a mouse click is issued there.

Unlike the act-labs gun this gun doesn’t require any calibration; this is due to the fact that’s its design to work with a screen resolution of 640x480 only. This is not too much of a pain as M.A.M.E can be configured to force this resolution and all other PC games I’ve tried it with also support this resolution.

So how does the gun perform, well over the course of a couple of weeks I managed to try it with several M.A.M.E games plus a few PC shooters (Virtual Cop 2, and House of the Dead 1&2). At first I had mixed results and I wasn’t too impressed with it, but I found that dropping my monitor down to 60Hz the accuracy was improved. You wouldn’t want to run Windows at 60Hz on a daily basis but for games like this the low refresh isn’t noticeable. Also I got best results using the gun 3-5ft away from the screen.

Improved accuracy you say? So how accurate is this gun? Well to be honest its not fantastic, its not as good as you would find with console and arcade light-guns, but, yes there is a but, it is useable and after getting to grips with it I found it good fun.

I originally brought the gun to use with M.A.M.E but I’ve found myself using it more with the PC games, just can’t get enough of House of the Dead 2, just one of those games that you can load up and play for 10-30 mins without thinking, and its very satisfying shooting the heads off the undead.

A few people have asked whether two of these guns can be used at the same time, I can’t confirm this as I only have the one, but as its works like an extra mouse I can’t see why not. To do this though you would need to use Win98 and Analogue M.A.M.E (XP identifies all mice connected as one).

Is this gun worth buying? Well if I was in the States I think I would have just order the Act Labs gun, as this probably has better support and is slightly more focused towards M.A.M.E. but for £25 I can’t complain and so far I’ve had a lot of fun with this gun. A good addition to any arcade cabinet setup.

If you have any other questions just drop me a mail and I’ll try my best to answer, but for now I think I’ll get back to killing those zombies and bad guys.

Pros: Great price; very easy to install (no calibration); supports plenty of M.A.M.E titles and the few PC games available.
Cons: Accuracy not as good as it could be, fixed resolution support, design may not suit everyone’s taste.
Verdict: For £25 it’s a cheap addition to your arcade cabinet that offers an extra bit of fun despite its short-comings.