Adjusting and calibrating the Sinden gun to a 4:3 frame area on 16:9 screens?

[Alex F.]

Forgive my ignorance and probably this has been asked a thousand times before but for the life of me I can't find a simple good answer for that in any forum or on any website so cut me some slack here:

Almost all of the classic light gun games are 4:3 but played on a 16:9 screen. They either work with Sinden bezel packs or other means (e,g, Reshade)  to present them in a 4:3 format with some side art left and right to fill out the 16:9 screen.

When moving the gun to the left or right side and the crosshairs are on the left or right edge of the 4:3 area the gun already points to the very left or right edge of the 16:9 screen. (the upper and lower screen edges are of course no problem)

When bringing up a Sinden 4:3 border, everything is as it should be, the crosshairs and the pointing gun are perfectly aligned at the left or right side of the 4:3 border.

How can this be achieved when the white border is not produced by the Sinden software itself but as a bezel graphics?

In the Sinden config menu I tried everything, clicked on the "16:9 to 4:3" button, tried calibration in any direction but it doesn't have any effect, whether in MAME's Point Blank or in M3's Lost World.

So please, what am I missing or doing wrong? Thanks so much in advance.

Edited April 5, 2023 by Alex F.

[Alex F.]

I did the following:

First I took Demulshooter out of my bat.file to start a game. I found that one to be the culprit, apparently!! Now the bat file just starts the emulator and the game in it.

I opened up the emulator.ini and changed the resolution to 1280:960 (=4:3 screen for all classic shooter games)

I applied Reshade to the emulator with the usual two fx. collections already ticked in the selection menu.

With a simple graphics editor software I created a white rectangle with a 4:3 ratio, made the inside area transparent and saved it as a .png file (there are free websites that make any picture you upload transparent; I use https://www12.lunapic.com/editor/).

I started the game, pushed "Pos 1" to access the Reshade menu, and with the Layer.fx I applied the border around the game frame (with the adjust buttons in the Layer.fx menu you can do that almost to the pixel). Voilá!

The only downside to this approach is that you don't have fancy bezels for the left and right side of the 16:9 screen but I really couldn't care less as long as I have dead-on accuracy for my crosshairs. When I play a game I don't notice the bezels anyway. I also realized that the main reason for my jittering crosshairs in many games were actually the often much too bright bezels! In other games like "The Lost World" I made them much darker than the original, which in turn made my crosshairs much steadier, so as far as I'm concerned a black area left and right is best anyway (but that's just me).

If others can get the Sinden gun to accept 16:9 and 4:3 screen areas with one initial 16:9 calibration in the Sinden menu (as everybody is telling me) they are probably very happy (or lucky). My approach works, at least for me. If I can help anybody who is reading this with the same problem I'd be more than happy as well.

NB: Definitely try out the Reshade Technicolor2.fx or the Vibrance.fx, it makes every game much more colorful and, yes, vibrant!

(And in case you wonder: I play lightgun games on the backglass monitor of a custom-made full size Williams Widebody pinball cabinet, which also serves as a virtual pinball setup (then of course with all three monitors active) but I found the backglass monitor ideal for lightgun games as far as size, height and distance when shooting are concerned.

So of course the HOTD game images you see cover the whole monitor height (the photo is a bit dark, I know).)

Edited April 6, 2023 by Alex F.