RetroArch's Genesis Plus GX core not allowing lightgun crosshair

[TheMadMan007]

I went to play the Sega Genesis Menacer Toejam and Earl game, and in RetroArch I am unable to play it at all. I went into the options and made sure "Show Lightgun crosshair" was set to on, but for whatever reason I can not get the game to get passed the menu select screen. No matter if I use my mouse of controller, nothing works.

[Lordmonkus]

4 minutes ago, TheMadMan007 said:

Sega Genesis Menacer Toejam and Earl game

What ? Toejam and Earl is not a lightgun game

[TheMadMan007]

No, the Menacer game, it has a ToeJam and Earl mini game where you use the lightgun to throw tomatoes at humans. It was one of six minigames packed in the cart for the Sega Menacer lightgun.

[Lordmonkus]

Ahh, my bad, I wasn never too into light gun games let alone Menacer games.

It's been a while since I looked at light gun games with a mouse but it did work the last time I did look into it. Does it work with other lightgun games like Bodycount ?

[Lordmonkus]

Just tested with Bodycount and it works fine.

[TheMadMan007]

Huh, I've never even heard of Body Count, I guess it was only released in Europe, so I never played it here in the states. I loaded it up and it works perfectly, using the D-pad moves the cross hair just fine. I grabbed a new rom of the Menacer game, but it still isn't working. I do have the No-Intro set, so I doubt it was the rom to begin with, but just trying to troubleshoot.

[Lordmonkus]

What's the name of the rom ?

I suppose it is always possible that it is one of the few games that could have some emulation issues. As good as Genesis GX is it is not 100% accurate so there are bound to be some games with issues.

[TheMadMan007]

Looks like it's due to the fact that the 2nd player controller needed to be set to MD Menacer. I was only doing it with the 1st Player controller, and the MD Menacer never shows up, I never thought to setup the 2nd player as the gun. Ok, I think I got it now. 

[Lordmonkus]

Good to hear.

[TheMadMan007]

Ugh... Ok, now I'm running into major issues. I can get the crosshair to show up now, but I can't "fire". Left or right clicking the mouse doesn't fire, and neither controllers will get the game to "fire" or select a thing. So I thought to troubleshoot and make sure other lightgun games work. I went to Duck Hunt for NES, surely this should be easy and work right away.... NOPE. same thing, the mouse moves the Zapper crosshair around but I can not click to fire. Is there something really wrong with my system? I downloaded a new Retroarch build, just incase and its still the same issues. I'm starting to pull my hair out at this, playing Duck Hunt via emulation shouldn't be this hard.

[proghodet]

On 9/6/2018 at 10:10 AM, TheMadMan007 said:

Ugh... Ok, now I'm running into major issues. I can get the crosshair to show up now, but I can't "fire". Left or right clicking the mouse doesn't fire, and neither controllers will get the game to "fire" or select a thing. So I thought to troubleshoot and make sure other lightgun games work. I went to Duck Hunt for NES, surely this should be easy and work right away.... NOPE. same thing, the mouse moves the Zapper crosshair around but I can not click to fire. Is there something really wrong with my system? I downloaded a new Retroarch build, just incase and its still the same issues. I'm starting to pull my hair out at this, playing Duck Hunt via emulation shouldn't be this hard.

Did you ever figure this one out? I'm in exactly the same position as you. Cursor moves with the crosshair, but can't fire..

Edit: Nevermind, got it working using another emulator, called Meka

Edited January 19, 2019 by proghodet

[TheMadMan007]

21 hours ago, proghodet said:

Did you ever figure this one out? I'm in exactly the same position as you. Cursor moves with the crosshair, but can't fire..

Edit: Nevermind, got it working using another emulator, called Meka

Sadly, no, I gave up on it months ago, RetroArch has more important things to do than fix something that should be a no brainer, like backporting the emulator to Windows 3.1 and PS2 instead.... I kid...kinda...

But yeah, I think the only way to really get those games to work is basically just use another emulator. It sucks, but I don't see the RetroArch team ever going back and fixing it, and I'm not going to hold my breath.

[Lordmonkus]

I'm just having another go at this and I can get the mouse to move the cursor but not shoot like @TheMadMan007 said. I know I have had this working in the past though, I played Bodycount with it but I haven't touched it since then so that's a long time, like maybe 2 years or so.

Doing a quick search on thier forums it seems this did get broken sometime last year.

I know it's easy to dump on the RA guys for this but at the same time it's not like the whole team all works on the same stuff. Different guys work on different things in their field of expertise. It's possible something got broke within the core at some point and either no one noticed or told them.

I tried the Pico core and that has no light gun support at all, the same with stand alone Mame for the Genesis emulation in it.

[neil9000]

1 minute ago, Lordmonkus said:

I'm just having another go at this and I can get the mouse to move the cursor but not shoot like @TheMadMan007 said. I know I have had this working in the past though, I played Bodycount with it but I haven't touched it since then so that's a long time, like maybe 2 years or so.

Doing a quick search on thier forums it seems this did get broken sometime last year.

I know it's easy to dump on the RA guys for this but at the same time it's not like the whole team all works on the same stuff. Different guys work on different things in their field of expertise. It's possible something got broke within the core at some point and either no one noticed or told them.

I tried the Pico core and that has no light gun support at all, the same with stand alone Mame for the Genesis emulation in it.

If i recall i was helping someone else with this issue but for NES a while back, and i found the same as you it got broken at some point. I believe the answer there was to use version 1.6.9 of retroarch as it was working there, so use that version for just the lightgun games.

[Drakkorcia]

I used MEKA for years. Best SMS emulator I ever used. It got lost in the shuffle of 64 bit and Windows 7+ though and it started having issues so I had to look at other options. I just found a new build of it on Github and it runs perfect on Windows 10. Only problem is it won't launch directly to game fullscreen from Launchbox. I have MEKA set to launch fullscreen when a game is launched and even have the cfg edited not to launch the gui but to no avail. I have been testing various fullscreen commandline parameters but they error as invalid. If anyone knows how to get MEKA running with Launchbox (if its possible) I would be very grateful. Hopefully it isn't like Phoenix where it only runs as its own standalone.

[proghodet]

On 5/27/2019 at 2:17 AM, Drakkorcia said:

I used MEKA for years. Best SMS emulator I ever used. It got lost in the shuffle of 64 bit and Windows 7+ though and it started having issues so I had to look at other options. I just found a new build of it on Github and it runs perfect on Windows 10. Only problem is it won't launch directly to game fullscreen from Launchbox. I have MEKA set to launch fullscreen when a game is launched and even have the cfg edited not to launch the gui but to no avail. I have been testing various fullscreen commandline parameters but they error as invalid. If anyone knows how to get MEKA running with Launchbox (if its possible) I would be very grateful. Hopefully it isn't like Phoenix where it only runs as its own standalone.

Open the emulator. Go to Main -> Options -> check the box where it says "Switch to fullscreen mode after loading a game"

[Drakkorcia]

I already selected this. And it works as long as I use MEKA as a standalone emulator. But if I try to launch from Launchbox, it doesn't work. But it really isn't a big deal because all I have to do once MEKA opens is hit the Esc key and the game goes to fullscreen. I'll probably just use Retroarch for most games and select MEKA to run lightgun games. Then just tap escape to switch fullscreen once MEKA loads.

[proghodet]

I also use it you see, and it works fine here. Can't remember how I did it.. Did you check out meka.cfg? It's a text file in the meka directory.
On line 40, it says fb_fullscreen_after_load equals either 1 or 0. Be sure to set it to 1, if it isn't already