Nintendo Lightgun... How It works

[ecookman]

http://www.delsquacho.com/blog/2009/04/13/a-great-mystery-solved/


i found this to be very interesting....

[Dan]

Most of us back in the day who had one of theses knew the "cheat" of holding it up to a bright light to kill anything on the screen.

The light would look the same as the box srounding the target and trick the gun into thinking it was a hit.

Also the R.O.B. robot accesosry worked in a simualr way; looking at the screen for it changing to a sold color. Each color would repsent a diffrent comand for the robot to performe.

[BigBear]

Dan @ Mon Jun 01, 2009 4:19 pm wrote:

Most of us back in the day who had one of theses knew the "cheat" of holding it up to a bright light to kill anything on the screen.

The light would look the same as the box surrounding the target and trick the gun into thinking it was a hit.

Also the R.O.B. robot accessory worked in a simualr way; looking at the screen for it changing to a sold colour. Each colour would represent a different command for the robot to perform.

So the counter for number of bullets shot was based on the mechanical trigger? So you could get 0 fired and hit them all

[ecookman]

hun...well...not so much a mystery now is it (poor me....i never figured it out)

[Dan]

BigBear @ 1st June 2009, 4:57 pm wrote:

So the counter for number of bullets shot was based on the mechanical trigger? So you could get 0 fired and hit them all

No you could only shoot one bullet at a time and noramly only hit one target at a time if i rember right. Each time you pulled the trigger it would check if the sensor was detetcing a white box (or just light realy) or not and in either case it would count as a shot (what the sensor detected determined if it was a hit or not).

[Clayton]

When you pulled the trigger of the Zapper, the game would draw a white box on targets onscreen for a fraction of a second. The sensor in the Zapper could detect this white box, and if it did, it was a hit. How the game determined what exactly was hit, I do not know though.

[DemonWasp]

Did it ever have to differentiate between targets? I seem to recall Duck Hunt only ever having one target on at a time.

[ecookman]

you could have up to 2 ducks bouncing around the screen...so yes

[[Gandalf]]

DemonWasp @ 2009-06-01, 7:45 pm wrote:

I seem to recall Duck Hunt only ever having one target on at a time.

Clearly you weren't very good at it then.

[DemonWasp]

/me never owned said console, game, or weapon.

It could probably differentiate between two targets easily enough - all you need is two different "hit" shades and one "miss" shade, so just use #fff and #888 as hit shades and #000 as miss (white, middle grey, black).

[Clayton]

I could also be possible that they place the hit boxes at separate times. Though this could have gotten messy depending on the game. There's one game I have (I believe it's called Operation: Wolf) which could have upwards of 10 targets on the screen at a time.

[tjmoore1993]

OMG I LOVED DUCK HUNT!!! I still got it too people with the mario game!