Light Guns Aren’t Just For CRTs Anymore

October 23, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

For how much of a cultural phenomenon light gun games like Duck Hunt were, they didn’t survive the transition from CRT televisions to LCDs particularly well because of all of the technological quirks the light guns exploited in older technology that simply disappeared with modern TVs. But it’s not impossible to get a similar gameplay from modern technology as evidenced by the success of the Wii and its revolutionary Wiimote, and there are plenty of modern games that use similar devices. There are a few paths to getting older light guns working again, though.

The first system to note, called SAMCO, uses a system of LEDs and a camera to synchronize the game’s flashes to the new technology and translate the input back into the game. Gun4ir uses a similar technique, and boasts extremely high accuracy and low latency largely due to being programmed in assembly. Both systems can use either an infrared tracking sensor or a Wiimote sensor as the LEDs and while the SAMCO system can run on a Raspberry Pi Pico, Gun4ir exclusively uses ATmega32U4 boards with the optimized assembly programming.

Both SAMCO and Gun4ir offer PCBs for anyone looking to try them out without designing their own circuit boards, and once the electronics are assembled they can either be put in an original NES-era light gun, put in a custom printed enclosure, or even stuffed into a Nerf gun. For others looking for a more turnkey solution, there are also offerings from companies like Sinden which make complete system. You can always build your own system to restore the functionality of original light guns from scratch if that’s more your style.

Thanks to [LookAtDaShinyShiny] for tipping us off to the latest happenings in the light gun community!

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A Casio Game Console With A Sticker Printer? Why Didn’t We Get It!

October 18, 2023 by Jenny List 10 Comments

To work in the computer games business in the mid-1990s was to have a grandstand seat at a pivotal moment. 32-bit gaming was the order of the day and 3D acceleration was making its first appearance in high-end PC graphics cards, so perhaps the fastest changes ever seen in gaming happened across a few short years. It’s a shock then after spending that decade on the cutting edge, to find a ’90s console we’d never heard of from a major manufacturer. The Casio Loopy was a Japan-only machine which targeted a female gaming demographic, and featured a built-in sticker printer as its unique selling point.

On the face of it the Loopy was up there with the competition, featuring a similar 32-bit SuperH processor to the Sega Saturn paired with a megabyte of RAM, but staying with cartridges as the rest of the industry moved towards CDs led to its games being space-limited and expensive. At the same time the original PlayStation was winning developers from the cartridge model with a lower-cost barrier to entry, so the Loopy failed to capture a market and was off sale by 1996. We can see that its graphics may have been a little dated for the 32-bit era and that sticker printer would have driven parents crazy with requests for expensive cartridges, but we can’t help wishing it had made it out of Japan like their portable computers did.

Thanks [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

Header: Incog88, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Can An 8-Bit Light Gun Work On A Modern TV?

October 17, 2023 by Jenny List 55 Comments

It’s an accepted part of retro gaming lore, that 8-bit consoles perform best when used with an original CRT TV. One of the reason for this is usually cited as being because the frame buffer and scaler circuit necessary for driving an LCD panel induces a delay not present on the original, and in particular this makes playing games which relied on a light gun impossible to play. It’s a subject [Nicole Branagan] takes a look at, and asks whether there are any ways to use a classic light gun with a modern TV.

Along the way we’re treated to an in-depth look at the tech behind light gun games, how the gun contained a photodiode which on the NES was triggered by the brief showing of a frame with a white square where the target would sit, and on the Sega consoles by a white screen with an on-board timer counting the screen position at which the gun was aimed.

The conclusion is that the delay means you won’t be playing Duck Hunt or Hogan’s Alley on your 4K TV, but interestingly, all is not lost. There are modified versions of the games that take account of the delay, or an interesting lightgun emulator using a WiiMote. We’d be happy at playing either way, just as long as we can take pot-shots at the annoying Duck Hunt dog.

Light gun image: Evan-Amos, Public domain.

Virtual Mini Pinball Cabinet Scores Big

October 8, 2023 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

Do you love pinball, but can’t justify owning a full-size cabinet? Yeah, us either, and that’s why we’re so interested in [mircemk]’s great-looking DIY mini virtual pinball cabinet. Since [mircemk] is a IT service specialist, they are lucky enough to have access to lots used and broken equipment, and that’s what this build is made of.

Essentially two computers working together, the playfield is a old 17-inch monitor that needed its LED lighting replaced before gracing the MDF cabinet The backglass is an ancient 10-inch tablet that was perfect for this application.

Even the motherboard, RAM, and SSD came from one of [mircemk]’s previous PCs. The SSD needed some attention first as well — it didn’t work sometimes, and didn’t show up in the BIOS at all, so [mircemk] threw it in the oven for 10 minutes at 250°, and now all is well.

One thing we really like about this build is that instead of designing a control board for the buttons, [mircemk] used a cheap USB joystick and wired them up to the pads.

So how does the tablet figure into all of this? It’s connected to a PC via USB and does its job thanks to a piece of software called Wired XDisplay. There is even a tilt switch in this bad boy. Because what’s a pinball cabinet without a tilt switch? A cheater’s cabinet, that’s what. Check out the build/demo video after the break.

Don’t even have the space for a mini cabinet? We hear you. Here’s one that fits in the palm of your hand.

Continue reading “Virtual Mini Pinball Cabinet Scores Big” →

Playing The Guitar Of DOOM

October 7, 2023 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Over the years, we’ve seen DOOM run on pretty much everything from an 8088 to a single keycap. We’ve also written up one or two controllers, but we don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this — playing DOOM with an electric guitar.

The guitar in question is a Schecter Hellraiser Deluxe, which seems like a great choice to us. In order to get the notes to control the game, [DOS Storm] converted a handful of notes to MIDI using a VST plugin called Dodo MIDI 2 and the Reaper DAW. Then it was a matter of converting MIDI to keystrokes. This took two programs — loopMIDI to do take the MIDI data and route it elsewhere, and MIDIKey2Key to actually convert the MIDI to the keystrokes that control DOOM.

The result is that the notes that move Doomguy around are mostly in an A-major bar chord formation, with some controls up in the solo range of the fret board. Be sure to check out the demo video below and watch [DOS Storm] clear level one in a fairly impressive amount of time, considering their controller is a guitar.

That key cap isn’t even the most ridiculous thing we’ve seen DOOM running on. It’s probably a toss-up between that and the LEGO brick.

Continue reading “Playing The Guitar Of DOOM” →

Famicom-Inspired NES TV Looks Rad In Red

October 6, 2023 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Take it from us, insomnia is no joke. But the wee hours can have a great effect on creativity, and if you’ve got a project in mind, doing that is way better than just sitting around, zoning out to infomercials and wishing for sleep. Over recent nights, [insomniacfactory] has been working on a Sharp C1 Famicon-inspired NES TV, and the result is simply fabulous.

The Sharp C1 Famicom was CRT television with a Famicom (precursor to the NES) built in. It allegedly had better picture quality than either a Famicom or NES with a separate television, and this was because it had direct internal display connection. The picture quality was so good that video game magazines at the time used it for screenshots.

Starting with a couple of TVs and a plan, [insomniacfactory] got to work, using the guts from a newer donor TV and a 1985 NES main board with the region-free mod and the RF module removed.

[insomniacfactory] also added also added a wiring harness and a side loader connector from a broken Game Genie to the NES main board. After some careful Dremeling out of the 1981 AKAI TV, they had room for the clone console’s cartridge slot and controller plugs.

This project took a lot of careful and fiddly work, especially since the boards are all bracketed in place and easy to remove. But it totally looks like it was worth it, and now [insomniacfactory] can retro game all night for a while before starting the next insomnia-driven project.

Are you in the mood for more iconic NES? Take a guided tour.

Tetris On An Oscilloscope, The Software Way

October 6, 2023 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

When we talk about video games on an oscilloscope, you’d be pardoned for assuming the project involved an analog CRT scope in X-Y mode, with vector graphics for something like Asteroids or BattleZone. Alas, this oscilloscope Tetris (Russian language, English translation) isn’t that at all — but that doesn’t make it any less cool.

If you’re interested in recreating [iliasam]’s build, it’ll probably help to be a retro-oscilloscope collector. The target instrument here is a Tektronix TDS5400, a scope from that awkward time when everything was going digital, but CRTs were still cheaper and better than LCDs. It’s based on a Motorola 68EC040 processor, sports a boatload of discrete ICs on its main PCB, and runs VxWorks for its OS. Tek also provided a 3.5″ floppy drive on this model, to save traces and the like, as well as a debug port, which required [iliasam] to build a custom UART adapter.

All these tools ended up being the keys to the kingdom, but getting the scope to run arbitrary code was still a long and arduous process, with a lot of trial and error. It’s a good story, but the gist is that after dumping the firmware onto the floppy and disassembling it in Ghidra, [iliasam] was able to identify the functions used to draw graphics primitives on the CRT, as well as the functions to read inputs from the control panel. The result is the simple version of Tetris seen in the video below. If you’ve got a similar oscilloscope, the code is up on GitHub.

Care for a more hardware-based game-o-scope? How about a nice game of Pong? Or perhaps a polar breakout-style game is what you’re looking for. Continue reading “Tetris On An Oscilloscope, The Software Way” →