Raspberry Pi Setup Guide

Setting up your Raspberry Pi to run BareBones 9

BareBones 9 is the community-made image that is pre-configured to let you get you up, running and ready to play your favourite Lightgun games on the Rasperry Pi 4.

Version 9 has been designed with the idea that most people would like to have a mixed bag of lightgun and non-lightgun games on their system so particular attention needs to be given to the way that your games are named and the locations where they are placed on your SD card.

Version 9 also has the following additional features:

• Retroarch 1.10’s fullscreen border;
• A fix to a bug in Retroarch 1.10 whereby the Y-axis is not treated correctly;
• Bezels for the majority of lightgun games;
• Generic bezels for non-lightgun games, including some dynamic bezels.
• Pre-set and applied configurations and settings for all known-working games;
• StormedBubbles versions of mame emulators featuring quality-of-life hacks and fixes for many games;Version 1.8 Sinden Lightgun drivers;
• Exclusive Golly Ghost scoreboard for 16:9 screens;
• A brand new Sinden Lightgun menu and calibration screen.
• And much more!

Requirements

Sinden Lightguns

You will need:

• a Raspberry Pi 4, any of the variants will do, the amount of RAM will make no difference.
• adequate cooling (a fan and heatsinks should do)
• A suitable power supply for your Pi that is capable of delivering 5V @ 3A, preferably the official Raspberry Pi power supply an SD card
• A micro-SD card, minimum 16GB capacity, but the more space you have, the more games you can install.
• An HDMI to micro-HDMI cable for connecting to your TV.
• A USB game controller
• A Sinden Lightgun

Video guide for visual people

Raspberry Pi4 Sinden Lightgun image -  BareBones v9 install, setup and calibration with demos

Installation

Download the latest BareBones image from lightgun.tech. it’s a .img.gz file.

Extract the .img file from the .gz using software such as 7zip or WinRar.

Use software such as BalenaEtcher or Raspberry Pi Imager to then flash the image to your micro-SD card. The two programs mentioned are capable of writing the image without extracting from the .gz, but it can be more reliable to extract the image first. If your image fails to work then reflash the image after extraction.

Running for the first time

Make sure you connect the micro-HDMI cable to the port closest to the USB-C power socket on the board

Once you have your freshly flashed card, carefully slot it into the Micro-SD slot in your pi.

Connect the TV to your pi using ensuring that you plug the cable into the micro-HDMI port that is nearest to the USB-C port on the pi. Be mindful that some cases might rearrange the order of the ports, if your pi boots up to a blank screen, try the other port.

The USB boot order on a Raspberry Pi

Connect your Sinden Lightgun(s) to the pi. The player order is determined by the USB port so connect them in this order – 1. top-right (blue), 2. bottom-right (blue), 3. top left (black), 4. bottom-left (black).

Connect the USB controller into any other USB port Plug the power supply into the USB-C port.

Once the power supply is connected, the raspberry pi will boot up. On first boot, the images filesystem will self-expand to fill the whole SD card so it may take a little longer than usual to boot the first time.

When the pi has finished booting you will be asked to configure your game controller. Hold any button on your controller to start configuring the buttons then follow the prompts on-screen. Do not attempt to configure your Sinden Lightgun as a controller!

Once that’s done you’ll be presented with the Emulation Station front end and you will see the Sinden Lightgun collection available.

At this point we recommend that you then connect your Raspberry Pi to your local Wi-Fi as this will likely be the primary way you will transfer games onto your system. You can do this by going to the RetroPie group and the Wi-Fi settings option in the list.

Calibrating your gun(s).

The calibration screen in Barebones 9

In the Sinden Lightgun menu you will see a “Test and Calibration” sub-menu. Enter it then select the test for the port number (as specified above) for the gun you want to calibrate. If a gun is connected, it will load the calibration screen.

Look down the iron sights to see if the mouse cursor lines up with the sights. If not, follow the advice on screen to calibrate the gun. The gun’s X and Y offset calibration will be saved to the gun when you exit the utility.

If the cursor dances around the screen apparently randomly, then this probably means that your gun’s camera is having difficulty seeing the on-screen border. Follow the advice in the Troubleshooting section of the wiki to remedy this.

Installing BIOS and Games

We wish we could provide you with the complete package all ready to go, but unfortunately we cannot legally provide you with the bios files and game roms you need. So you’ll need to find these on your own.

Some systems require BIOS files to run games properly. Refer to the RetroPie documentation at https://retropie.org.uk/docs/ to find out what bios files are expected by each emulator and exactly where to place them. Most console bios files go directly in the "/home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS" folder with few exceptions.

In order for the preset BareBones configuration files to be effective you need to follow two rules – the games need to be named correctly according to the no-intro naming convention, and they need to be placed in the correct locations.

First, we’ll deal with the location. In the "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms" folder you will find the subfolders for each system supported (and many others). Some of those system folders have a subfolder called “Lightgun_Games” or similar. The Sega systems have slight differences to the name which is important for the configurations to distinguish between them as they use the same emulator. Lightgun games for those systems should be placed in the Lightgun_Games subfolders. All systems that require it will have this folder already in place for you. Daphne is an exception to this which uses Actionmax and Hypseus emulators which do not play nicely with subfolders, so daphne games should be set up as per the existing guidance in the wiki.

Secondly, the filenames must match what the config files are expecting. We’ve decided to go with the no-intro naming scheme here as a widely recognised standard. Check the compatibility list for the filenames expected. The only Retroarch-based exception here is the C64 system. As far as we know there is one online source that provides a working set of C64 lightgun games and we decided to match the filenames from that set for simplicity’s sake. Daphne also doesn’t require this rule to be adhered to as it is not a Retroarch-based system.

Barebones has been pre-configured to use the most appropriate and best-performing emulator for mame-based arcade games, and as different arcade emulators require roms from different romsets it is important to make sure you use the correct roms. Using a rom from a mismatched set may result in poor performance or a non-working game. Check the compatibility list for the correct romset versions needed for each game and any additional files that arcade games might require.

Any non-lightgun games you’d like to add can go in the main folder for the system. After you add games, restart emulationstation so it will refresh the games lists and you will find any systems that you’ve added games to will now be visible and selectable in EmulationStation.

When you launch a Lightgun Game, if it has a game-specific config file, that games configuration will be loaded up, along with its bezel and border. If the game doesn’t have a specific config file then it will load the generic config, bezel and border for Lightgun Games of that system. And if you load a non-lightgun game it will, that game will load with a borderless generic bezel for that system.

Playing Games

Before you start playing any lightgun games you must first “start” the guns. Go into the Sinden Lightgun category of EmulationStation. You can choose to Start all connected guns at once using any of the “Start All…” options for either no-recoil, single-shot-recoil or automatic-recoil.

If you have multiple guns connected and each player wants a different recoil option, perhaps one of you prefers not to have recoil while the other does, then you can go into the “Start Guns Individually” subfolder and start the appropriate configuration for each gun individually.

If you make a mistake and start the wrong process, you will need to stop the gun process you started before starting the correct one. So run the Stop script to stop all processes, then Start your guns again.

Once your guns are started, now you can launch the game you want to play. If everything went to plan, when the game launches you should be able to get straight into playing a game.

If you find your guns don’t respond at all try and exit the game, run the Stop guns script then run a Start All script. Restart the game – If your guns work then perhaps you started the wrong script before. Otherwise, if your guns still don’t work, explore the troubleshooting section for further advice.

If your guns do work but they don’t respond very well, you may need to refine your gun cameras settings, and/or the brightness/contrast settings of your TV. Refer to the troubleshooting section of the wiki for further advice.

Upgrading from BB8 to BB9

RECOMMENDED BB9 UPGRADE INSTRUCTIONS: It's as simple as copying all your roms, media & bios files to a fresh BB9 image:

1. First, back up your existing image using Win32DiskImager or equivalent backup software just in case something goes wrong during the upgrade.
2. Before deleting your old image, copy all bios files, roms, media (if you've scraped videos, etc) and gameslist.xml file from your existing image for each of the various systems to a temporary location. Basically, you need all the files in your ../roms/[GAMESYSTEM] for each system. Ideally if you scraped videos and marquees on your old image, you selected to have the files saved in /roms/[GAMESYSTEM] within a media subfolder. If not, you'll have to locate the video/marquee files and transfer them to your new image using WinSCP, FileZilla or equivalent. If you look in the "gameslist.xml" file within a given system you should be able to tell where the scraped videos are stored and transfer them over to the new image. Worst case scenario, if you can't locate the media files, you'll have to rescrape your new BB9 image.
3. Reflash your SD Card with the BB9 image.
4. Boot the new BB9 image, set up wifi/LAN networking and transfer all of your bios files, roms and media to the new image
5. Restart and you should be up and running.

Note: BB9 is preconfigured for some of the arcade games to work on different emulators from BB8 (e.g. lr-stormed-bubbles, lr-mame-2010,etc.);

Check the compatibility list to see what files and romsets are recommended for the new emulators.

As always, if you have any troubles please hit us up on the Sinden discord for help!