If there’s one thing our community is good at, it’s re-imagining redundant old hardware, particularly in the field of classic gaming consoles and their peripherals. Dead consoles have become new ones, Powergloves have ventured into virtual reality, and light guns, well, they’ve become novelty light fittings.
The [JJGames] Nintendo light gun chandelier will probably make collectors wince who prefer their retro hardware pristine, but it’s certainly an eye-catching conversation piece. The twelve guns are carefully disassembled and the Nintendo electronics removed, before a bulb holder and teardrop lamp is installed. Wiring is completed with twist caps, the guns are joined at the grip with some metal strips and glue, and a chain for ceiling attachment completes the ensemble. A dozen pieces of ireplacable retro hardware sacrificed for a novelty, or a masterpiece of interior decoration? You decide, though we’d opt for the latter in the context of the retro games based business in which it sits.
Our favourite NES lightgun hack ever has to be [Seb Lee-Delisle]’s one that fires a real laser. Meanwhile [JJGames] have made it here before in a similarly wanton use of classic Nintendo plastic, with their urinal made from SNES cartridges.
You know, there will be a time when 3D printing becomes so good that retro hardware loses its point because you can just make an identical item that you can’t tell from the original. After that, owning something like an original Nintendo light gun becomes a point of futility – the only value of it is “knowing” that it was an original.
It’s kinda like art forgery. If rich people weren’t playing auction poker with it, it really wouldn’t matter if the painting on the wall was a replica. The only point anymore is that there’s a bigger fool who thinks they’ll get more money out of it by saying it is the original.
I don’t know about that, you can buy a copy of Shakespear’s first folio for a couple of bucks, but if you had an original, well you’ed be a fool to sell it for a couple bucks.
I think that’s the point Luke is trying to make, aside from the money/investment aspect, if the item is exactly identical to an original, then what does it matter?
But it’s not like the original, I mean if I clone you and upload your brain to the clone then is it cool to skin you to make a leather jacket? An original has a value all its own, and while there are mass produced guns it will still be better to 3D print copies for the lamp and keep the originals. Of course since it’s a cool lamp made from fairly common components I guess its cool this time.
Life isn’t a thing, it’s an event or a continuum. You can’t end it and start another event elsewhere, and pretend it’s the same event.
When all that is valuable in the original have been extracted: the text of the Shakespeare book, the looks, the scientific and scholarly data, and all that’s left to extract is this “originality”…
What is it and why does it matter?
>”you’ed be a fool to sell it for a couple bucks.”
Only if there exists a bigger fool who will take it off of me for more than couple bucks.
See how it works? At some point there’s going to be the biggest fool, who paid the most money just for the sake of it being “The Original”, and then what? They paid a kazillion dollars, and what do they get for it? A moldy old tome that’s already been studied to exhaustion, that you can’t even read because “It’s too rare to handle”.
Think of it like Bitcoin. The price goes up as long as there’s someone to pay that price, and in the end you have a small piece of computer code that literally does nothing.
I imagine it is getting harder to find working CRT displays on which light pen and light gun games/apps will usefully run.
I wonder how hard it would be to use a couple of galvos to scan a laser across the surface of an LCD in sync with the video sync signals coming off the input so that the bright spot would register at the right time for where the gun was pointed allowing the light gun to be used on an LCD TV.
It’d work better if the sensor in the light gun were sensitive to IR so the laser didn’t visibly wash out the display.
This is a pretty darn good idea. Regular glass naturally absorbs IR, and the phototransistor in the gun is probably sensitive to IR already.
Add a visible light filter to the gun, program the scanner to match the CRT refresh rate, and done. Play vintage duck hunt style games on an LCD or projector screen, with no software changes.
Someone needs to do this.
While it’s a neat idea, I don’t think it would be practical, with the Nes Zapper “When the trigger on the Zapper is pressed, the game causes the entire screen to become black for one frame. Then, on the next frame, all valid targets that are on screen are drawn all white as the rest of the screen remains black. The Zapper detects this change in light level and determines if any of the targets are in its hit zone. If a target is hit, the game determines which one was hit based on the duration of the flash, as each target flashes for a different duration.” It might be possible, but getting it to be accurate would definitely be a challenge. You’d basically be building a monochrome laser projection screen, which if you’re going to do that, why not just use it to play the game instead of an lcd? You’d need to control the laser brightness anyway, might as well go the extra step.
Yeah, in that case, this wouldn’t work. I was under the impression these were like light pens and worked off the CRT scanline timing. I thought the flash was just to illuminate the screen to get a reading.
At least the builder didn’t use the really collectible all grey zappers. What I’m surprised nobody has yet done is fitting a real .22 rimfire barrel etc into a zapper.
That can get a little sketchy, making toys into operable weapons that use explosives gets you on the ATF’s radar rather quickly.
Beats what I did with mine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6yauoJ6sOk