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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

That actually was better than I thought ... I had to double-check on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_gun#Sequential_targets) but I didn't know about the sequential-targets approach.

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. :)

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>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.

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).

But the wiimote is not accurate at all. You have to watch the pointer on screen to see where your pointing. It's very difficult to get a perfect distance from the screen to make the pointing of the wiimote match up with the location on the screen and there's much more lag.

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.

There is certainly a weakness in the way that games implement the Wii remote pointer. Since there isn't a direct connection to the screen, the options are either to have a calibration step, or to either use a cursor/reticule and let the player's brain compensate for the discrepancy. Everyone opts for the latter because having to calibrate pisses users off and is probably why the Super Scope failed. FPSes opt for a variant which treats the remote like a mouse on a PC FPS, and this is arguably the most immersive option.

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.

perfectly accurate is a massive overstatement since it depended on what kind of light hit the diode.

I always thought that Namco's GunCon controllers were the most interesting; rather than passively figure out the cathode ray timing, they tapped the video signal to actively read it. They're still the most accurate "light gun" controllers I've used.

"Figuring out" seems more active than "reading" to me. But of course being active is better than being passive in our culture, so the newer and better tech will always be labeled "active" no matter what it actually does.

Have you tried a rails shooter on the Wii? Motion-control tech is as elegant a solution as you could ask for to that problem. While having a visible reticule on the screen may be less elegant, I find it far more satisfying; no more needing ten minutes to determine the lightgun "pulls" half a foot to the left. The goal becomes to defeat the game instead of defeating the input device.

Same here - I learned/used commodore HW with cathode ray timing. I thought that's how all of the others worked too, it's not like NES is wildly less powerful than a C20/C64, and was a little disappointed that this wasn't how it was done.

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.

This isn't exactly related, but it's very easy to justify keeping a tube TV around if you're an avid gamer, especially with older games. Even LCD and plasma TVs made for gaming and low response times still have some amount of lag, just due to their nature, and they also display older systems very poorly.

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