>spinners >dials >heavy Centipede trackballs >even

>>3932838
I just use a keyboard and adjust the sensitivity

"Decent substitutes" is pretty broad but there are no shortage of spinners, dials and trackballs more or less simply compatible with MAME and if that's not decent enough, you can always buy real arcade control components or entire panels (or cabs) and make them work with your emulators. True light guns are a bit trickier for emulation but also doable.

>>3932914
this stuff looks more expensive than I'd expect, from a cursory search

>>3932838
Lightguns mainly because even when you do find a place that has a game with them they're always never fucking calibrated properly or it's just Area 51 Site 4.

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>>3933837
Most arcade-style controllers have been made as some kind of generic controller for some console (or PC) at some point that you can pick up cheap then use adapters if you don't want to invest in the real arcade hardware. It's just that everyone's definition of "decent" is different.

Pic related is one that there's no consumer version of but I just use like a Sidewinder that can be slightly twisted. Close enough for my needs. Not trying to drop $100 to put real ones in my mame cab.

>>3933875
My home lightgun was 30 bucks, works as a raw input mouse in windows, and has a latency of roughly 0.1ms, and is absolutely pixel perfect in accuracy.

My only complaint is that it doesn't have recoil, but I can't be bothered destroying an old Namco gun to get that working.

A lightgun emulation setup is actually completely trivial, I just turn on my VGA monitor, set it as the primary, and then point and click. The guns are rare, but they're not expensive, and there's a pretty great list of games you can play these days.

>>3932838
All of those suck, trackballs specially would get filled with gum or soda and never function properly

>>3934237
What shithole did you live in where people were allowed food and drink around the machines?

>>3934232
I actually ordered an EMS TopGun III last night because it has recoil and it's the next best thing for most games. Been wondering if it were possible to use my Saturn lightgun through something like MAME if I were to hook my computer up to a CRT though I haven't been bothered to try it.

>>3934243
The top gun is shit. If you stand a mile away and use an on-screen cursor, you can get something vaguely close to a light gun, but it's still nothing like one.

The IR guns are just glorified Wiimotes. Also, the recoil on the Top Gun is super weak, drains batteries in 2 seconds, is incredibly loud for no reason, and often gets stuck or double recoils when you shoot for a weird feeling.

I've got one modded with a 5V 2A power cable, because the batteries are just shit. Also, they made the handle super-wide to hold the fucking batteries, so it feels like ass in the hand.

Even with all these problems, it's still better than the Aimtrak though, because it's the only way to play VC3 at home.

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>>3934252
Fuck me.

>>3934243
As for the saturn gun, you're never going to get that working unless you write your own drivers and shit.

The Gun-con 2 apparently now works in newer versions of Windows if you've got some kind of S-video out card or a VGA arcade monitor. When I tried it out on XP a while back, it worked alright, but the flash was in software and you had to run a bunch of hacks, both hardware and software. Also, through S-video, the best you can get is 480i, which in my mind is a joke.

Most of my favorite games run in 480p, so it's nicer to have a proper light gun that just works like the Act-labs. The only advantage the guncon 2 might have is that it's constantly tracked, so you could play machine gun titles like Operation Wolf. If you had a perfect set-up, built your own VGA sync stripper and soldered a delay circuit onto the guncon trigger, you'd wind up with probably the best home option.

But if you're going to all that effort, you're better off just picking up a HOTD2 cab and using the sega IR gun that isn't just a glorified wiimote.

>>3934242
Excuse me I don't live in Japan.

>>3934261
If it works with s-video it should work with those cards have that component output, which gives you more display options like 480p and other HD resolutions.

>Retro game store gets a HotD1 cabinet for people to play
>Play the shit out of it
>After two months one of the guns is out of order
>By month three the whole cabinet is out of order
And they seem to have no motivation to repair it. Letting cabinets fall into collectors is one thing but people have to take care of their cabinets. I cant imagine the amount of amazing arcade games that have gone to the dump because their owners dont want to sink any money, time or care into maintaining these things.

>>3932838
Why look for "decent substitutes" when the real things are readily available? Granted using them for emulation requires knowing how to connect red wire to red wire, etc.