How Did the Duck Hunt Gun Work?
mentalfloss.com
mentalfloss.com
Control pad - Used with Game A for second player to control duck's flight pattern.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/98225/duck-hunt-on...
I guess that's because my first exposure to light gun tech was with Commodore hardware, that had already taken the leap to cathode ray timing. Nice to know.
The decline of lightgun tech with the introduction of flat-screen TV:s is something that sometimes makes me sad. The replacement "passive/dead-reckoning" techniques just don't feel as satisfying, or elegant.
On the other hand, keeping a tube TV around just to play Time Crisis is hard to motivate, too. :)
Light gun technology is alive and well with Nintendo.
(EDIT: I previously had some incorrect information about the Super Scope, which I have removed)
You might have heard of their current light gun. They call it the "Wii Remote". It also has accelerometers in it, yes, but those are not used for the pointing mode; there's no dead reckoning going on. It uses LEDs instead of light from the TV, and a camera in the remote to determine the remote's angle, rotation, and distance from the TV. The LEDs are in the sensor bar (which contains no sensors).
The old light guns did not require a pointer on the screen because they were perfectly accurate.
I love my wii, but it's not a good replacement for true lightguns.
The cursor technique is where you see lag. There really isn't much lag in terms of processing angle of the remote. But in order for the cursor to be usable, it needs to have continuity of motion. Smoothing its position as it moves around on screen introduces a delay, and that's why it feels laggy.
But in principle, there's no reason that a game couldn't have a calibrated mode that would act just like an old light gun. Players would just hate it.
It really seemed to go out the window much earlier except for arcade machines before cathode-ray went out of style. I never really saw it widely used except NES on future platforms. If anything, the recent reboot with Wii (any screen, trigger off IR LEDs on top of it for direction) is a revival.
Some of the newer sets with fancier CPUs are doing all kinds of video processing work on the signal before clocking out the LCD pixels. The delay can sometimes be a couple of frames. While that's not enough to be noticeable or annoying when watching standard TV, it seems to be enough that the NES stops looking for the white video before it can be shown on-screen.
Guess the makers of Duck Hunt could hardly have anticipated the need. :)
I was a teenager in the 80s when it dawned on me that, during a live broadcast, the electron beam in the CRT was literally being driven, in realtime and over radio, by the camera at the broadcast site. Of course, any respectable broadcaster also had tons of video processing equipment to sync those non-synchronized camera signals ... and to delay the actual transmission for whatever reason (censoring, etc.)
Other light guns (including the SNES Super Scope) and light pens do sense the pointing location by timing when the TV electron beam crosses the gun's sensor, but not this one.
Maybe you don't, but I did. The screen flashed and you'd see the squares on-screen for that split second. I certainly wasn't fast enough to see the sequence of the squares, but I'd see them appear.
I'd be interested in more technical depth on this exact hardware. Specifically, was each square on-screen for a whole frame or did they draw one square per interleaved field?
Raytracing is the same. The ray is cast in the "wrong" direction in order to figure out from where it came.
Actually, the design of the Zapper was heavily influenced by the High Standard .22 LR target pistol: http://i.imgur.com/1i9hyvx.jpg
A light gun that worked with all TVs was also included with the Telstar Ranger console (a pong game console developed by Coleco and distributed by Sears) in 1977. The gun was used with the skeet games supported by the console and worked pretty well at a distance from about 4 ft (although tracking a large bouncing white block on a black screen was probably not that technically challenging).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar_%28game_console%29
Incidentally, my brother and I had our Telstar Ranger gun (black plastic, very gun looking) confiscated by airport security when we, perhaps unwisely, tried to carry the console, paddles and gun in our carry-on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1NyIsZXeqU&feature=playe...
If you click play and then pause and then hold down space it'll slow-mo the video and you'll see the white block on the black background that the article is talking about.
When the pen was clicked against the screen, it notified the card when it saw the scanline, in a manner quite similar to the duck hunt gun described here. The position of the pen click could then be read from a register on the card.
That is what this wikipedia article indicates anyway, though the section is rather poor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_weapon#Toy_weapon_laws
I used to build a circuit board version using light sensitive diod and a flash light source.
I didnt make the laughing dog. :P
I don't know for sure that it used the H refresh, but it would often get targets that were horizontally aligned mixed up (i.e. you hit a different target than you were aiming at), which seems like pretty strong evidence for it.
Sadly, this is not how the gun worked. It was the kind that works by measuring IR sensors.