Sinden Light Gun Made Easy!

RetroRalph·video·27m 9s·analyzed·Jul 28, 2023

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Free Batocera Sinden plug-and-play image review: works but hardware-dependent.

Summary

RetroRalph demonstrates a free Batocera-based plug-and-play light gun image for Sinden light guns, showing its out-of-the-box compatibility with classic arcade light gun games. While the image works effectively on suitable hardware (specifically a Dell OptiPlex 3020), he encountered reliability issues with mini-PCs and emphasizes that results vary by PC configuration. The video includes detailed instructions for burning the image to an SSD and installing it in older Dell systems.

Key Claims

The Batocera light gun image is free and provides out-of-the-box Sinden compatibility without manual software configuration
high confidence · RetroLizard created the image; Jon demonstrated it booting and recognizing the Sinden gun immediately upon startup with proper white border tracking
Sinden light guns often fail or stop working for users due to updates or improper software setup on Windows
high confidence · Jon read viewer comment stating 'The Sinden is such a pain. Even when I set it up, it magically stops working because of an update' and acknowledged this reflects common user experience
The Dell OptiPlex 3020 with NVIDIA GT1030 graphics card runs the Batocera image reliably, costing ~$192 total
high confidence · Jon tested extensively on this hardware; Dell 3020 ~$100, NVIDIA GT1030 ~$92, demonstrated consistent operation
Mini-PCs like the Beelink exhibited persistent USB disconnection and recoil/tracking conflicts when running the Batocera image
high confidence · Jon struggled for a week with the Beelink, reporting random gun disconnects, port switching issues, and incompatibility when enabling recoil
Lighting conditions significantly affect Sinden tracking accuracy due to glare on the camera lens cover affecting white border recognition
high confidence · Jon demonstrated tracking degradation with studio lights and explained the camera's reliance on detecting the white border for position calibration
The Batocera image includes pre-configured support for Gun4IR light guns in addition to Sinden
medium confidence · Jon mentions Gun4IR support supposedly included on the image; however, his personal Gun4IR guns are at RPEG Electronics for updates, so he couldn't test this feature
Carlos from Arcade1Up has taken over rights to Rec Room Masters designs and can modify/update them
medium confidence · Jon states 'Carlos over at Arcade1Up took over for Rec Room Masters. He now has the rights to use the designs and everything and even change them and updated them'

Notable Quotes

“The Sinden is such a pain. Even when I set it up, it magically stops working because of an update or something. A lot of time tinkering and not a lot of time playing.”
Viewer comment (read by Jon)@ 0:22 — Motivates the entire video; encapsulates common Sinden user frustration that the Batocera solution addresses
“Unlike on Windows, where you have to load up the Sinden software, it's all done for you.”
Jon@ 19:57 — Core value proposition of the Batocera image: eliminates manual Sinden setup overhead
“I don't know why but I kept getting tons of random gun disconnects... I just couldn't get it working right.”
Jon@ 10:01 — Honest assessment of mini-PC incompatibility; demonstrates practical limitations of the solution
“The Dell seems to be pretty reliable... if you put it on one of the ports in the back it seems to work better I'm assuming they're two different USB buses.”
Jon@ 25:04 — Practical troubleshooting tip: USB bus configuration affects Sinden stability
“I'm not providing tech support though, guys. If you are on your own, if you do this, it is a project, okay? So your mileage might vary.”
Jon@ 20:36 — Disclaimer of liability; emphasizes DIY nature and hardware variability
“Lighting is really can be really goofy with the Sinden light gun. You have to be careful with lighting because it has this little plastic cover on top of the camera.”
Jon@ 22:19 — Technical explanation of Sinden's optical tracking weakness and environmental sensitivity

Entities

RetroLizardpersonJonpersonSindenproductBatoceraproductDell OptiPlex 3020productNVIDIA GT1030productGun4IRproductRPEG ElectronicscompanyArcade1UpcompanyRec Room Mastersproduct

Signals

?
business_signal: Carlos from Arcade1Up has assumed control over Rec Room Masters line with authority to modify and update designs, indicating strategic product line consolidation or transition
medium · Jon mentions Carlos 'took over for Rec Room Masters' and 'has the rights to use the designs and everything and even change them and updated them'
?
community_signal: RetroLizard created and maintains free Batocera light gun image for community use, reflecting ongoing support for legacy light gun gaming in open-source ecosystem
high · Jon credits RetroLizard for image creation and acknowledges ongoing maintenance/support within community
?
product_strategy: Batocera image pre-configures recoil feedback settings for Sinden guns, providing integrated support previously requiring manual Windows software tuning
medium · Jon shows recoil configuration menu in Batocera settings; notes default recoil is off but can be enabled to 'gun' or 'machine gun' mode
?
product_concern: Mini-PC hardware (Beelink) shows persistent USB and stability issues with Batocera light gun image, suggesting hardware compatibility variability that could frustrate users
high · Jon spent a week troubleshooting Beelink, reported random gun disconnects, port-switching issues, recoil/tracking conflicts; Dell 3020 worked reliably by comparison
?
technology_signal: Sinden light gun's reliance on camera-based white border tracking creates environmental sensitivity to lighting and glare, limiting practical deployment scenarios

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.081

0:00

Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. In the last video, we looked at the Retro Shooter. It's a plug-and-play light gun solution, and I got a lot of great comments on that video. And there was one in particular that stood out to me, and I'm going to read it right now for you, because I kind of was like, man, maybe I need to do something about this. It said, I have a Sindin, but I kind of want this, the Retro Shooter. The Sindin is such a pain. Even when I set it up, it magically stops working because of an update or something. a lot of time tinkering and not a lot of time playing and troubleshooting things like that so that was the general gist of the comment and there were a couple other comments like that too almost saying hey i invested in these syndans but they're not really easy to get set up and i kind of do agree with that it does take some skill in understanding how a gun like this interacts with maim or another emulator so what i decided to do was look is there any plug and play images out there and I came across a Badosara image that actually does say it's plug and play. So what we're going to do in this video, we're going to kind of briefly go over the image itself, see is this something where you can truly power it up and it will plug and play with the light guns, and then see what kind of experience we can get out of it. And then I'm going to show you, sort of, how to build this on your own using the same parts I did. Now keep in mind, I'm not your customer support, so if you have problems with this and you deviate from my exact build then I can't really help you but it does work out of the box with the build that I'm gonna show you. It's a little overkill but you'll get there when we get there but anyways let's jump right into it. Alright so I just finished burning the image to an M.2 drive I put it in my little micro PC I got the send-in gun plugged in so we'll see will it actually boot up and recognize the send-in and work out of the box as promised. Okay so So the image is all booted up and you can see it actually automatically puts the white border on the image and I can freely move, you know, my cursor or my crosshairs around. No problem. So it does deliver on the fact that it's plug and play out of the box as far as recognizing the gun. Now, keep in mind, this image also says it's out of the box support for gun for IR. Now, my Gun4IR guns are actually back at RPEG Electronics getting redone. So I wanted to do some of the more modern, recent updates to them. So I'm going to actually do a subsequent video on Gun4IR. But for this video, this is about plug-and-play Sinden. So, so far, so good. It does have controller support. I would say like an Xbox compatible controller is usually okay. And you can scroll through the games list here. So let's try time crisis and see how that works. Now, I don't have any pedal connected or anything like that right now. So we're not going to have that capability. So we're going to duck with the gun. And that's automatically going to be mapped, hopefully, to a button on the send-in. All right, so let's give time crisis a shot. Again, like I said, everything should be out of the box working. There shouldn't really be anything we have to do. You can put in coins by pressing this button right here. and then all right there we go i'm gonna put the volume up a little bit so you can hear it so you can see with the syndan the tracking is really good you got your whiteboard already there it's all pre-configured for you now this is stuff if you were playing this in windows you'd have to go set that up manually the cool thing about this image is you don't have to mess with that so i mean a lot of people i think that are having problems with syndan are having problems because they haven't set up the software right or they haven't mapped the gun in each of the games they're playing. Now there's a lot of games on here and various different systems. Again, you navigate it with the controller, but you know, there's a bunch of things on here. There's Duck Hunt, there's Versus Hogan's Alley, Wild Gunman. There's a bunch of really great games. Zombie Raid, Alien 3, The Gun, Area 51. We'll try that one out real quick. The only issue I have with this, the volumes can really fluctuate on some of these ROMs too. I'm not sure why. This one's considerably louder than the other one. So I'll put in credits and let's give this one a go. I did notice most of the games maintain the original aspect ratio, which is good. If I compare it to the Retro Shooter, obviously it's much more accurate than the Retro Shooter. Now I can also shut off the crosshairs. If you have a keyboard connected, you can hit tab and go to crosshair options and then say visibility never. Now I'd like to do this just to see how well it works without the crosshairs. Because the crosshairs kind of sometimes make the game not feel natural if you compare it to the arcade version. So let's see how it works without the crosshairs, if we can maintain some accuracy. A little less accurate, but let's try a little bit more here and see if we can get it any better.

6:58

Okay, so far much better than the way the Retro Shooter played this game, so that's good. And keep in mind, I don't have the crosshairs on. It's working pretty good. All right. So see what I mean? Like, some of the games run great and some of them don't. You just got to kind of play with it and test it out. But I will say, does it work out of the box with Ascendant? It does. So if you're someone that's, this thing's been sitting there collecting dust, better to play some games than no games, right? So whenever I do videos like this, people ask what games are on it. So there's a bunch of games on here. Maximum Force, you know, Operation Thunderbolt, Operation Wolf, Operation Wolf 3, point blank one and two police trainer you know a lot of really great ones revolution x a lot of great shooting games i'll scroll through the list space gun's a great one steel gunner one and two terminator 2 judgment day who doesn't love that time crisis like i showed you already so there's a lot of great games but everyone always asks for like virtue cop where's virtue cop well they don't have the main like port or the main official version of virtue cop but if you scroll over to the Sega Saturn, they do have the Sega Saturn versions of Virtua Cop 1 and 2, as well as the original House of the Dead. Now, if you're looking for House of the Dead 2, they do have the Dreamcast version of House of the Dead 2 as well. So there's some really great games packed in here. But like I said, it's plug and play out of the box. Now, if you're really good at customizing Battocera, you can go in here and tweak a bunch of things. I'm relatively new to it, so I couldn't sit here and give you a tutorial on all of the settings you can do here. Like if you go into game settings, You can set things like aspect ratios. There's shaders and a whole bunch of different things. You can also download different shaders if you connect this to Wi-Fi. You can go to network settings and connect it to Wi-Fi. I have it connected, but I'm not really doing anything with that right now. So there's a bunch of things you can do here, and the games list is pretty good for an out-of-the-box sort of experience. And so far, so good. it has worked pretty well with this little custom, not custom, but this little PC that I'm running it on, this little mini PC. So let's go back to the image. I'll show you a couple more games, and then I'll give you a little taste as to how you would actually burn this image to a hard drive so that you can use it as well. Okay, next up is does it support the gun recoil of the Sindin? This is the actually recoil version of the Sindin. So what I'm going to do is I'm to show you go to the menu options and there's an option under controller and Bluetooth settings and it says extend in gun settings in here you can adjust the border and you can adjust the recoil settings the border I'm fine with but I want to set the recall

9:44

I'm sorry for the change in scenery I've never been so frustrated with something in my life. I was really... maybe not in my life, but I was really wanting to have this be a plug-and-play image on this Beelink PC and I don't know why but I kept getting tons of random gun disconnects. I'd plug it into a different USB port, it would kind of work and then it would stop working. I'd enable recoil, tracking would stop but the recoil would work. I just couldn't get it working right. But the crazy thing is is I had this running in this room, in this very room all week last week. And the reason why is because I was like, I want to battle test this so that when I do present it to you, it's a good experience. But I don't know why. I don't know what the issue is. But so far, and this is just my experience, you may have a completely different one. But I want to say like proceed with caution and don't expect a whole lot. If I run it on the Battocera 35 image for this particular build, it seems to work okay. But it works better on this Dell PC I have down here, it seems to consistently work on the 335 image. And if you're looking for this image, I had to write down the name of it because I knew I'd forget it. I'll put the name of it. If you're interested in this image, search for this. It'll be in the link of the description of this video. It'll say search for this. And if I remember to tell Mason when he edits this, I'll have him put the name of it right here, right now, so you know what to search for in Google. Maybe I was just trying to do too much with that mini PC. It seems like if I put it, Like right now the gun is tracking and the recoil is working consistently with this Dell PC. I cannot get it to consistently work with this BE-Link. So I don't know. It might be just this particular configuration with Pat O'Sara that just something it doesn't like about this. I don't know if it's the USB ports. I'm not sure. Something it doesn't like about this. And I thought how cool it would be to show you on a little small form factor PC. Like how cool would that be? But now I don't want to do that because I just feel like I'll still show you how to burn the image. but I feel like I don't want to, I wanted it to be an out of the box, here you go, boom, do this, copy me kind of thing, and then you'll be good to go. But I can't consistently get it to work. So right now I'm using like an older Dell, seems to be working fine with that. What I wanted to show you before was the settings on, on Battocera image. So you can go to controller and Bluetooth settings and you can go in and set the gun settings. So it lets you do two things, the border size and the recoil. Now gun is single press. So single press, if you want it to be machine gun, like maybe when you're in T2, this will actually set it. So when I hold it down, see, I'm going to lose my cursor, aren't I? No, there we go. Okay. So it's got that motion. So if you go into a game like T2, you'll see it will have a constant motion, which is, which is kind of cool if you're, you know, that game would be like that in real life, right? The real T2, the real arcade game does have repetitive shooting like that. Now keep in mind that has a much better solenoid than what's in this Cinden light gun. So here we'll go to, we'll go to T2 so I can show you this function actually working. The other thing I wanted to show you guys is just that this image is cool, but I feel like I had a bad experience with it. I don't want you to, I don't want you, my bad experience to taint yours, but I definitely had issues with this. Let's see. One thing I almost forgot to mention is calibration issues. Let's say you feel the gun is not tracking the way it should. What you can do is on the main screen here, you take your gun and you press the left D-pad for about five seconds. And when I do that, what you're going to see is the crosshair returns to center. You then aim appropriately at that target, pull the trigger, and now it actually restores or recalibrates your gun So if any time you feel like the tracking is a bit off you can do that from the main screen here and it should resolve any calibration issues you have You have your missile button right here. So yeah, the recoil works pretty good. The tracking's a little off because I think of where I'm standing and everything, but for the most part, this works pretty good. So anyways, I wanted to show you guys that so you can see the recoil does work in this image. And there's a bunch more games, you know, there's House of the Dead, there's a bunch of things. The whole purpose of this video wasn't to show you every game, but I was really hoping for a better experience out of the box. The guy that made this is Retro Lizard. He sells a dedicated version of this drive you can buy with a PC that's all pre-configured and everything. But this is obviously DIY. So I'm going to show you now how to burn this image. We'll wrap up and I'll give you some final thoughts. Okay, so how are we going to get this image bootable in our PC? It's an old Dell PC. Now that old Dell PC happened to have a 500 gig boot drive. But this is a bootable Linux image, this Battocera image. So we're going to replace our Windows boot image with this Battocera image. So you could put it on this drive. Yeah, I can hook up this drive to this device right here and burn the image to this. However, I just thought for performance reasons, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to put it on an SSD. Now, if your computer you're using has an M.2 device, I'll have a link to this. But this basically you put it in here like so. And then you could basically burn the image onto that. But we're not going to do that. We're going to actually use this SSD drive as our bootable image. So if you have any older Dell PC laying around, you could probably use this. So basically, you're going to put this like that. and then now you will see this pop up in Windows, and then I'll show you how to burn it. Okay, excuse my messy desktop here, but basically what we're going to do is we're going to select the file we want to burn. So the image we want to burn is actually called this Retro Lizard Battocera Light Gun image. Now this image, we're going to make sure that this image is the right one. So you're going to want to make sure that you look at the link in the description of this video. Sorry, it's not going to be a link, it's just going to be the name, and you're going to search for that and then you'll be able to find this image. So you download it, unzip it, or decompress it, and then you'll end up with this image file. Once you select this image file, you're going to select the drive you want to burn this to. And the drive that I'm going to burn this to is going to be that SSD drive I showed you earlier. Hit select, hit flash. Yes, I'm sure you're going to get a pop-up message that says this. Hit yes. And now it's going to start burning this image. It's going to take a little while to burn this. It usually takes like 15, 20 minutes. So let this burn. By the way, the size of the drive doesn't really matter. Even though it's 128 gig image, you could use a much larger drive. That's fine, but there's really no need to. Put your drive in, let it start burning. At the time that the image is completed, we'll do a verification too. You don't have to do it, but I think it's good practice. Let it do the verification. At this point, you can take the drive out when it's done and then put it into your Dell PC or whatever PC you decide to use to do this. At that point, it should just boot straight into the Battocera image. I'll show how to install it even though I think everyone here knows how to do that. I'll put it into the PC and then you'll see when I fire it up it will launch Battocera. Just so you're aware the PC I'm running is this Dell Optiplex 3020. They run about a hundred bucks and then the graphics card I'm using is an older low profile GT1030. So this retails for about $92. This one, for some reason, this used to be really cheap and they went up in price, but it has to be the low profile version to fit in this Dell 3020. But this is more than sufficient for what we'll be doing here.

17:51

Piece right here. Hold on Shit, it's broken. That's awesome Yeah, so Just ignore what I just did. But anyways this piece comes up shit come on man this this is par for the course for today i swear everything today has gone completely terrible but anyways this comes out then this whole tray comes out but long story short and then your hard drive would be right here or your ssd it might look slightly different because there's a couple different builds but anyways long story short what you're going to want to do is gain access to wherever the hard drive or existing ssd is you're going to pull that out because that's your boot drive and you're going to put on the new one that we just burnt so You're going to pull that out, put it in here, and then we'll boot it up together so you can see exactly what you get. But if it's all done correctly, it will boot up into Battocera. Now, for the purposes of this, I'm just going to kind of shove this shiz back in. I'm going to tuck this drive down here by the graphics card just because it's a solid state. It's not going to be moving or anything. So I'm going to tuck it right there. We're going to put the cover back on it, and we'll boot it up together so you can see the first time what you get. It's just basically going to be the same thing. it boots up the SSD drive and you're pretty much good to go. There's really not a whole lot to it. We'll boot it up and I'll show you what you get. Everything is plugged in. I got my light gun plugged in. I got my Xbox controller plugged in and a keyboard. So we should be good to go. I'm gonna power it on and you're gonna see what this thing boots up into the first time you boot it up. Now keep in mind, if you boot it up and the audio is coming through the PC and not your speakers on your TV, it's because your audio settings are not set to HDMI output. I will show you how to do that once this boots up. Okay, so the image is booting, so we're good there. And when it boots up, the gun should be tracking. Okay, you can see I was too close, but the gun is tracking no problem out of the box. I didn't do anything. So right out of the box, right after you burn the image, the gun should absolutely work without you doing anything. So unlike on Windows, where you have to load up the send-in software, it's all done for you. And I can say with a decent amount of confidence that this Dell 3020 seems to run it well. This is where DIY can have its faults, right? DIY, do it yourself. So Battocera may not like something about this build right But I gotta hand it to RetroLizard This build does provide you with an out experience But like I said there different PC configurations different hardware configurations. So not everything's going to be complementary to the image, but it seems like the Dell hardware works pretty good. So I'll have a link to this 3020. I'm not providing tech support though, guys. If you are on your own, if you do this, it is a project, okay? So your mileage might vary, but I can tell you I've been testing it with this one and it seems to work. I'm disappointed because I really thought it would be cool to give you like a PC recommendation and then just boom, you know, all on this little box. But unfortunately, it didn't work out. Now, that doesn't mean that other mini PCs wouldn't work well with the Batocera image. They may. Yeah, at this point, you could select any of the games you wanted. Now, keep in mind, we rebooted this, so I will show you really fast. Keep in mind, if the audio is not coming out of the TV speakers, you're going to want to go to system settings. And then there's a setting right here that says audio output you want that to say hdmi if it doesn't it's going to route out a different a different port and you're not probably going to hear it and especially if you're on like a you know on a tv and you want it to be routed out of your tv so just just keep that in mind the other thing is by default i don't believe the feedback settings are on so if you're using a send-in gun with recoil even though auto it won't it won't do anything you're going to want to set auto to gun or machine gun if you want repetitive machine gun if you want single shot gun and then hit back and then at that point um it basically disconnects the syndan and then reconnects the syndan now you'll see when i when i move this screen back you'll see that uh the recoil will work and you're going to see that this this is bouncing around everywhere but it's bouncing around because of where i am but you'll see that is 100 working now the reason why it's bouncing around is because i'm not i'm too close to the screen so if i if i back off actually the further I get that back from it the more accurate it would probably be I've got a couple of like studio lights in here lighting is really can be really goofy with the sinden light gun you have to be careful with lighting because it has this little plastic cover on top of the camera if you're getting glare on it it will have a hard time seeing the white border that's how this gun works it basically how it tracks is it the camera is looking at the white border and now it knows what its play field is. If for some reason lighting is glaring off the camera, then it's going to have a hard time tracking the white border and you'll get a lot of that jumping around. So if you're having that problem, just know that's probably a lighting thing. Something in your room is interfering with it. I think the image is a good attempt at a plug and play image. It is DIY, so you're going to have to do it yourself. You know what I mean? And if you want to go down this path, your mileage will 100% vary based on what PC you choose and things like that. And you might have some problems, but it's free. You're not paying for the image, right? The image is free. It's available to you. Retro Lizard put it together and it seems to work pretty good. Now, supposedly this image also supports Gun for IR. Unfortunately, I told you my guns for Gun for IR are at RPEG Electronics. He's updating all of them. So probably in my next two videos, one of them will be an update on gun for ir and the next one will be the new rec room masters cabinet because carlos over at arcade-1.com took over uh for rec room masters he now has the rights to use the designs and everything and even change them and updated them so it's really cool i have it already built in the garage it's it's pretty awesome so so we'll be covering that and then i haven't been sleeping on the arcade hobby it's just been hotter than the depths of hell here so i haven't been able to really do much in the garage i got rid of a bunch of stuff but i brought in a bunch of stuff like a lot of stuff so i'm not just like sitting here being like oh you know i'm not a collector it's kind of like a funny tongue-in-cheek thing of course i'm a collector and of course i'm gonna buy more stuff come on now you know me i'm not gonna sit here and not buy more stuff so we will get back to the arcade stuff the traditional arcade stuff but i'm having fun with this because it's stuff i can do inside in the air conditioning where it's nice and not uncomfortable so anyways i hope you're enjoying this content it's definitely old school retro ralph for sure and I'm having a lot of fun with it. So is this DIY thing decent for Sinden? Kind of because there are no plug and play Sinden images that I know of. I think I tried a Pi One once. It didn't work very well. This Battocera image works pretty well when it's on the right piece of hardware. I was beating my head into the ground trying to get this to work and it worked to an extent, but it was too flaky. It was too flaky. So the Dell seems to be pretty reliable. I will say one more tip. if you're having a problem with the gun recognizing itself disconnect it from a USB port maybe put it into a different USB port with this particular build I notice if I put it on one of the ports in the back it seems to work better I'm assuming they're two different USB buses and maybe that's why one more thing if you're going to Southern Fried Gaming Expo which is actually it's the 28th through the 30th so if you're going we're going to be premiering Token Taverns you're gonna be able to see a special screening of Token Taverns it's five dollars to get a ticket I'll have a link in the description to that as well. I would love it if you'd come out and support the movie. I'd also love it if you just could come to the show and hang out. Things are heating up. This will be showing the arcade bar documentary Token Taverns on the big screen. 40 years later, these machines are right back where they started in an arcade bar. That's right. This movie has it all. Pinball, classic arcades, craft beer, butterflies, and broken dreams. Play the game with the owner of this place and he fucking destroyed me. I might leave that in a Yelp review. It's a token taverns party to tell your friends what we do last night Mario you close down that bar didn't you? Come see the movie the way it's meant to be seen on the big screen boom shark and locket If you're in that area in the Atlanta, Georgia area consider coming and checking it out. That's it for this video I want to hear your comments about this that I make your life easier or did I kind of confuse you even more? I don't know but after this we'll be looking at gun for IR some record master stuff and I got a lot of arcade stuff a lot of stuff dude probably everything i sold i bought just as much back