Supermodel Forum

Hi All,

I have a Sinden lightgun that I was able to get configured in supermodel on Pi4 using Lost World as a test bed. I was able to get coin and start mapped, and also the trigger and pump action. I am able to calibrate the guns in the game's test menu, but the lack of a white border seems to be causing the lightgun to not register properly in-game. The Sindens are a combination camera/mouse/keyboard USB device and use a white border around the gameplay screen as a reference point to know when the camera has been pointed outside the game screen. For Windows, Reshade can be used to add borders. For other Pi-based emulators, using the libretro cores it can be done via an on-screen overlay. I was wondering if there is a way to add borders to supermodel in some way (maybe via a 3rd party app) on the Pi? I'm looking to add something like this:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRKeo1WKauFPJ1-hd8KOERYw1POsmIWpY1JNQ&usqp=CAU

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated by the Sinden community!

Could just change the clear colour to white, I mean that would work.
But how much white border do you need?

Looks like they may have come up with a solution.

Hi,

Yes, we were able to get Sinden functionality with one gun in all of the gun/yoke games.

A few issues do remain, though:

- We haven't been able to figure out how to maintain the native resolution but just magnify the image to fit a physical screen either vertically or horizontally (whichever happens first). Increasing the resolution tanks the performance.
- Multiple mice is limited to Windows still. A user suggested ManyMouse, but that hasn't been attempted yet.
- Getting the Sinden border on seems to have caused issues with coordinate scaling. The Sinden software allows for adjustments to this, but we haven't found a spot in the emulator code yet that would fix this issue. By default, the gun sees the roughly 1.2917 aspect ratio, but the emulator seems to think it's dealing with a 1.78 aspect ratio. This makes the in-game cursor travel much faster than it should and also wander away from absolute alignment.

Possibly the best way to solve all of these issues for non-Windows users would be to wrap the Libretro container around Supermodel and create a port "lr-supermodel" for RetroArch. The ports of various MAME versions solve these similar issues by using the Libretro input/video system. For example, the Windows-only MAME "multimouse" mode is compatible with Libretro's input system and allows multiple mouse devices to be recognized even on non-Windows devices. Similarly, the RetroArch frontend allows for scaling of a game seemingly without affecting performance. Other quality-of-life features, like adding bezels/borders, adjusting inputs from a GUI, and having command-line options accessible via menus, would also be possible.

It appears that "lr-supermodel" was created and canceled on the same day a few years ago. Hopefully, someone gets the itch to investigate that again.

You do not want to go near RetroArch. It's just a headache for the original emulator devs with their code getting stolen and being repacked as subpar cores. The original MAME devs hate RetroArch's guts.

Well, well looky here.

It seems they have 2 players on the Pi with Sindens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qplfGymaDPI

Nice to see..