Flat-panel displays killed one of my favorite genres of video games. As far as I know, all attempts at producing an modern, accurate light gun have failed. The Nintento Wii tries to act like a light gun controller, but the accuracy is awful.
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. :)
>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.
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.
Sadly, the Duck Hunt gun doesn't work on some newer LCD/Plasma TV sets.
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.
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.)
It's not the delay, it's the fundamental technology. The duck hunt gun works by using signal processing on the timing of the scan-line. On an LCD TV there is no scan-line so it just doesn't work at all.
No, the Duck Hunt gun doesn't time the beam to the scanline. It and the software only care about light level deltas from one frame to the next, looking for the dark-light-dark sequence. It fails on non-CRT TVs not because there's no line scanning, but because they buffer and delay the display enough that it falls out of frame synchronization with the software.
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?
Was my television particularly slow? I noticed the blackened screen and white rectangles around the ducks as a kid, but the article says "you don't notice" the blackout and the white rectangles. Surely many of you noticed this as kids.
Yes, I seem to recall that there was a 'flash' effect when shooting but it never occurred to me it might be to do with the gun working - just thought it was intended for effect.
I remember noticing that too, but figured that the box around the duck was an artifact of the flash. It's not like there weren't games where sprites got corrupted on screen.
This is why I always thought my friends were stupid for sitting up really close to the T.V., whereas I could always beat them by going as far back as the wires would allow. I was widening the field of view, requiring me to be less accurate than at normal range.
You could be pointing at any flashing light source and get pretty good results. For example, an Apple II monitor showing TEXT: HOME: FLASH: FOR A = 1 TO 24 * 40: PRINT " ";: NEXT
Later games that supported the gun would either have multiple targets and check to see if you hit all of them in a single refresh cycle, or test between refresh cycles to see if you "hit" a non-existent target.
The cool thing is that the shot is in the wrong direction. It is the television that shoots a ray into the gun. Of course, there are no other way to do this, but it is fun to think about.
Raytracing is the same. The ray is cast in the "wrong" direction in order to figure out from where it came.
Technically ray tracing refers to both eye-based versus light-based ray tracing. Eye based is most often used because it tends to be faster excluding some minor effects like caustics that are easier to generate from the light source. Though complex scenes may benefit from bidirectional path tracing, which is a combination of both.
Light guns hit home video game consoles with Shooting Gallery on the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. Because the included shotgun-style light gun was only usable on a Magnavox television, the game flopped. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Zapper then fell into the hands of American kids in October 1985...
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).
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.
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.
Back in the early 80's I became the owner of an IBM light pen, IIRC salvaged from a 3270 terminal. By replacing the connector, I managed to get it to work with the CGA card in my IBM PC, which had a light pen connector and a couple of supporting registers.
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.
Anyone remember the orange one? I heard they changed it to orange after getting sued due to the grey one looking too "real" - any truth to that legend?
I am not sure if it was the case at the time, but I believe there are currently federal regulations that mandate that airsoft guns have to have a bright orange tip.
It wasn't just Nintendo guns. I remember that all toy guns switched to ridiculous colors some time around 1988. If I recall correctly, it was a new safety law; the police didn't want to accidentally shoot some kid playing with a toy gun.
I'm pretty sure at least one game used the horizontal refresh timing to distinguish targets rather than sequential targets; I think it was called "Gotcha!"
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.
Reminds me of when I was watching William Gibson (Vancouver, early 90s(?)) recite a piece talking about "the glow of light pens [on some device]"... being of a generation that grew up w/ a Commodore 64, my understanding was that light pens read light (and raster position), they don't emit light. I let Mr. Gibson go on in peace, though...
For those that want the modern equivalent to relive your old time crisis, HOD, op-wolf days, (e.g. for mame cabinets), apparently the ones that use a dedicated infrared sensor (like the wii) are the most accurate (e.g. www.arcadeguns.com).
Control pad - Used with Game A for second player to control duck's flight pattern.
Source: http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/manuals/duckhunt.txt