I was sure someone must have asked this before so I did a bit of a search but came up empty handed. So, I thought I would ask it.
How does a lightgun for a home video game system work? I can’t figure it out through my own deduction however it must be pretty simple as I know they have been around for years. Pointing a gun at the TV and pulling the trigger and hitting the target still keeps me glued to the set whenever I play it.
Anyone?
Sounds good but I may have seen a flaw in that… or maybe someone can tell me how it works in this case.
When playing House of the Dead 2 on the Dreamcast, you can calibrate the gun and actually see a pair of crosshairs slew around on the screen move the gun around. Would that still be the same theory?
Cecil’s column is just slightly behind the times. He’s right, those old Nintendo light guns do work exactly the way he describes.
However, newer light guns (the ones for the Playstation and Dreamcast, often made by Konami and known by the name “Guncon”) have become much more sophisticated. They actually tap into the TV’s input signal. You’ll notice the home version of all these newer “Guncon” light guns have two connections - on to the game console controller port, and one that taps into the yellow, round-ended plug that goes into the back of the TV. In short, the gun is watching the TV along with you!
Now, I theorize that inside the gun, there’s a microchip that builds up an identical picture of what’s on the screen based on the signal it’s hearing. And when you point the gun at the TV, the light sensor in the front of the gun looks at a small part of the TV screen. The microchip compares these two pictures and figures out where on the screen the small patch is, and badda-boom!
Of course, it’s probably not really that easy in practice. For instance, if the room is really dark or really bright, or there’s bad glare on the screen, the gun may have a hard time seeing the little patch. or figuring out where it fits on the screen. I often notice that the things you shoot at in gun games are often either bright against a dark background or dark against a bright background. This probably helps the gun not get confused. I’m sure there are some tricks they use inside the gun as well to make it fast enough to trick the human eye. Maybe it can only see in black&white, so the gun has to process less information. Maybe the gun has an edge-highlighting chip built in that reduces everything on the screen to outlines, which would be a lot easier to compare than shades of grey. Probably both these and more are all incorporated in there. At least, that’s my theory about how it all works. Konami isn’t giving any answers about how their guncons work.
Regardless, they’re really amazing pieces of technology. The accuracy is astonishing. I played a lot of Duck Hunt as a kid, and I’ve recently been playing a lot of Time Crisis at home with my guncon. It’s truly incredible to be able to localize a shot to a single pixel on the screen the way they do. I love being able to sit back, aim carefully, and bullseye enemies that are WWWAAAYYY off in the distance with a single well-placed shot. That NEVER would have worked with the old Nintendo flash-guns!
(Hm, a little polishing and this post might make a good staff report…)
-Ben