light gun for lcd screen quotation

The Sinden Lightgun® is the world’s first true LCD compatible Lightgun, providing all the functionality and game experience of the original CRT Lightguns without requiring additional hardware such as infra red sensor bars.

Remember all that fun you had playing Duck Hunt on the original NES? How about Time Crisis in the arcades, which seemed to be everywhere in the late 90s. Remember how gutted you felt when CRT TVs made way for LCDs and your light guns stopped working? Well, now someone has made an LCD-compatible light gun, which works with your TV without needing any additional sensors.

The original NES lightgun used some trickery to register where you were aiming. The tech in the Sinden Lightgun is much more modern, using a high-speed camera, some smart image recognition, all wrapped up in some clever maths running in software. Basically, it takes a picture of the screen and then works backward to find out where you’re aiming. Not bad, right?

Currently, to use a light gun on an LCD screen you need an infrared emitter where the screen is. Then you need to calibrate for your seating position, and then recalibrate every time you move. Pretty cumbersome, right? Plus, even if you don’t move your body, just moving your hand can throw off the accuracy of the sensors.

The Sinden Lightgun even goes further than replicating the existing functionality in a modern way. It has inbuilt 3D tracking, so when using compatible software, it can actually show different content based on your position. Imagine being able to peek around the edges of the screen or obstructions by moving left or right. You could also control your aiming position in Time Crisis in the same way.

The Sinden Lightgun works on PC, but it’ll also work on a Raspberry Pi, turning the little development board into a fantastic lightgun emulator. If you’re interested, you can head on over to Kickstarter where roughly $104 will get you a Sinden Lightgun once they go into production, with an estimated delivery date of September of this year.

Just remember, we always advise caution when backing any crowdfunding campaign. You’re buying in for the ability to bring a cool thing to the market, not necessarily to get the item as you would if it was a retail purchase. Delays might happen, or in some unhappy cases, not get the thing you backed.

Light guns were a fun way to learn to shoot things on consoles, enjoying their heyday in the 80s and 90s. The original designs largely relied on the unique characteristics of CRT televisions and the timing involved in the drawing of their frames. Unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons (dependent on the exact techniques used), they typically do not work at all with modern LCD & plasma screens.

Recently, there has emerged a new project called the Sinden Lightgun. In the How It Works video, it seems to use a fairly standard 30fps camera inside the gun to image the television screen being used by the game. The display is then rendered in 4:3, letterboxed on a 16:9 aspect ratio display, within a rectangular bezel. The image from the camera is then processed, and the distortion of the game image is used to calculate the position of the gun and the direction of its aim. Processing is handled by the host computer running MAME and the requisite coordinates are fed back in to the game code.

The basic concept seems sound, though as always, there’s a healthy amount of skepticism around the project. We’d love to hear your take, on whether the concept is plausible, and whether the lag figures stated are cromulent. We’re always excited to see new developments in the lightgun space! Video after the break.

DIY kit to replace the USB cable on an Ultimarc AimTrak gun with Bluetooth. Read the PDF manual before purchasing. Not for use with a recoil AimTrak since it does not replace the recoil power cable.Price $29.95

a) AFAIK most light guns initiate a timer on the vertical sync which is then stopped when light is recieved and the resulting value provides relative position so as acharris stated any refresh rate over 50hz (Europe) or 60Hz (USA) could cause problems with reading the correct value.

b) the LCD set may be internally conveting the image so that signals transmitted as interlaced are display as progressive scan which could again cause timing issues.

c) CRTs work by firing an electon beam at phosphur on the screen, the phospher is energized by this and emits light in the form of photons (plus some x-rays), I believe that that LCD displays work by absorbing colour rather than creating it therfore the amount of unabsorbed light reflected from the screen is to low for the light guns to detect.

2) connecting something like a high intensity white led to your light gun which shines towards your LCD set, the idea behind this is that the increased amount of light hitting the screen will result in a increased amount of reflected light thus allowing detection, however you would have to set the LED at the correct angle to ensure that any reflected light enters the light gun but this angle will differ depending on the range so once set you will have to use it a approximately the same distance from the screen every time you use it.

Sorry I can be more helpful than that, but until I have time to investigate this myself I have no idea which item or items mentioned above is the problem and therefore I have no definative solution.

And now for something completely different! The GUN4IR project is retro, and you technically hold it in your hand, but it"s definitely not a retro handheld. If you"ll allow us this brief side excursion, we recently were able to test out this system and felt that it would resonate enough with our readers to post about it here. We"ll be back with our regularly scheduled portable gaming coverage, but for now, let"s talk light guns.

Light guns hold a special place in the world of gaming. Few controllers map so closely between player input and the action they"re trying to simulate. Not only that, but light guns predate video games themselves. The earliest light gun games were electro-mechanical installations taking advantage of light-sensing vacuum tubes. For as long as we"ve been able to detect or emit light from a handheld gadget, someone"s been trying to turn it into a shooting gallery. Light gun games have been a permanent fixture in most arcades, and they came along for the ride when home consoles entered the scene.

The first home light guns were simple light detectors. When you pulled the trigger, the screen would briefly flash a mostly-black image, and if the gun detected a white block of light, they"d know they were pointed at a target. Later light guns would improve on this technique, taking advantage of the internal refresh rates and timings within a TV itself to identify where the gun was pointed. CRT TVs made it unusually easy to determine precisely where a plastic gun accessory was pointed without needing any extra equipment or hardware. With the rise of LCD displays however, light guns needed a new approach. Interestingly enough, it"s one that many gamers are already familiar with.

GUN4IR is a project created by French developer Jean-Baptiste "JayBee" Bongrand. As the name implies, it once again leverages IR technology. Rather than using a simple sensor bar on the top of a display however, it uses four IR LED targets around a display to improve the accuracy. Get it? Gun-4-IR? The interesting aspect of the GUN4IR project however is that, well, it"s a project. JayBee"s working on making an off the shelf GUN4IR product, but for the time being its a DIY affair. (Update: The official GUN4IR store with pre-build guns is now live!)

In its most basic form, a GUN4IR setup needs four IR LEDs around a screen, and a gun equipped with an IR sensor, a trigger, and an Arduino. Beyond that, the system is completely customizable. You can add as many additional buttons to the gun as you"d like, equip it with rumble force feedback, provide it with solenoid kickback, or even add flashy LEDs to your gun. GUN4IR also has optional support for accessories like pedals and Wii nunchucks.

Building a GUN4IR light gun can cost more than a Sinden depending on how you spec it out, and it"s various components aren"t without their own lead times. But it"s the customizability that"s really taken the community by storm. Rather than being forced into a one-size-fits-all generic pistol, light gun enthusiasts can build the exact formfactor they"re looking for. House of the Dead 3 fans can create a plastic shotgun with a working pump-action reload, Time Crisis fans can repurpose legitimate arcade hardware to create a PC-friendly light gun with a slide action recoil, and the DIY crowd can cobble together all sorts of interesting experiments based off of various NERF guns and Super Soakers.

This article was originally meant as a how-to guide, but it turns out that it can be tricky to document your build process when you"re still figuring out things for yourself. If you"re looking for a step-by-step build instructions, we"d recommend checking out Arcade Pirate"s informative GUN4IR Ground Up Build video. Additionally, the ArcadeControls forum post on GUN4IR is a wealth of information, as is their community Discord. Instead, the rest of this article is going to focus on providing a starting point parts list for beginners, and give a general impression of what it"s like to build and use a GUN4IR light gun.

The most comprehensive guide online of GUN4IR-tested parts is the Lightgunpedia wiki. Incidentally, this page is also completely in Spanish. Machine translation gets the job done with this particular page thankfully, and the GUN4IR firmware comes with an English PDF guide that provides useful circuit diagrams for most parts of a GUN4IR build.

The overall cost of a GUN4IR build will depend on how many DIY projects of this nature you"ve performed in the past, and what sort of soldering setup you already have on hand. There"s nothing in this build that"s too technically difficult, it"s mostly through-hole soldering and wire splicing, but the cramped nature of this project puts the difficulty closer to a moderately complex DIY project. There"s a decent amount of equipment you need to buy, so it might be worth getting your feet wet with a beginner Arduino project beforehand if this is your first time working with embedded electronics.

There"s a few 3D printed parts that makes this build significantly easier. If you don"t have access to a 3D printer, you can send these parts out to a print-on-demand service, or see if your local library has a printer you can borrow for an afternoon. (This is actually a thing, look it up.) If you don"t want to use 3D printed parts, you can also generally get by with smart use of hot glue and super glue.

This parts list is designed with US shoppers in mind. Mouser Electronics carriers the IR sensor and several cheap components, and Amazon has the rest of the parts in stock with free shipping. The Lightgunpedia links are more focused on the Chinese Aliexpress storefront, since their components are often a third of the price and can be shipped internationally. When working on a DIY project however, it can be frustrating to have to wait an additional 2-3 weeks to get a new part in the mail if you accidentally burn out an LED, so it"s nice to have some domestic alternatives.

You"ll want some relatively high gauge stranded hookup wire for this project, and wire strippers to cut them into the appropriate length. A wire"s "gauge" is how thick the wire is, with higher numbers indicating a smaller diameter. "Stranded" wires are the opposite of "solid core". They"re made up of several smaller strands of metal, and are more flexible. They can be slightly more tricky to solder, but they can bend around the inside of the gun"s case more easily.

There are several different techniques when it comes to creating the four IR targets for the light gun. The two main schools of thought generally revolve around either providing a large amount of power to a single bright IR LED, or sending smaller amounts of power to a cluster of several dimmer LEDs. The community has mostly congregated around this latter approach. Using a fluster of three SFH 4547 LEDs on each of the four IR targets provides a good balance of brightness, beam angle, and it even comes in an easy-to-hide black color. Better yet, unlike the single high power option, the LED clusters don"t need a complex dedicated power supply. The entire setup can be powered by one standard 5V USB input. This can be either a dedicated power brick, or a USB port on the side of your TV or computer.

As you solder your emitters, you can check if they"re working by pointing your phone"s camera at them. Infrared "IR" light can"t be seen by the human eye, but thankfully smartphones have no trouble picking it up. Once the emitters are ready, fire up the GUN4IR utility on your PC and start the gun calibration mode. This screen will indicate exactly on your display where the emitters need to be positioned. Each cluster of LEDs should be placed in the center of each side of a monitor. Thankfully GUN4IR has support for a variety of aspect ratios, including ultrawide displays. Now that your emitters are in place, let"s take a look at the bare minimum needed to get a GUN4IR light gun itself built.

The heart of every GUN4IR build is a DF Robot SN0158 IR positioning camera. Conveniently for us, it comes in a handy gun-barrel shaped package that slots right into the GunCon housing without any need for a 3D printed part. If you can"t get ahold of the SN0158, there"s technically a method where you can salvage the IR camera from a broken Wii remote. This technique can work in a pinch, but it"s significantly more involved. Unless you"re working with a gun that"s too small for the SN0158, or it"s going through a severe part drought, it"s worth being patient and waiting for the Mouser restock.

The fisheye lens mod is usually listed under optional steps when building a GUN4IR light gun, but it"s useful enough that you probably just want to factor it into your initial build. The GUN4IR sensor needs to be able to see at least two of the four IR LED clusters in order to properly track your gun. With the standard camera configuration, this means you need to stand back a considerable ways from your screen. Using a fisheye lends gives the camera a wider field of view, allowing you to stand a bit closer to your monitor. It"s still not holding-a-Zapper-up-to-a-TV levels of closeness, but it"s still a godsend depending on your setup. Most of these fisheye smartphone camera lens kits also come with a macro lens, which can be a good compromise of distance and accuracy. The community has developed a 3D printed fisheye lens mount for the front of the GunCon, and there"s usually enough friction to keep it in place without the need for permanently gluing it on.

Having a single thin USB cable can look a little strange dangling out of the bottom of a gun however. Additionally, the next few sections have some additional optional cables you can run to your light gun. Thankfully, there"s a variety of cable management solutions you can use to make your gun look like a real arcade installation. I personally like using a simple nylon sleeve. It"s plain, lightweight, and easy to work with. Once you"ve run a few cords through the sleeve, it starts to look more like the beefier cable you"re used to seeing snake out of light guns. The half-inch diameter option worked well for the three cables I ended up using in my build. If you want to go all out however, you can always use a metal shower hose to give your light gun a true arcade feel.

When budgeting out your light gun, it"s important to remember that while GUN4IR is a DIY project, it"s not an open source project. Make sure you factor in the $20 USD license cost for the GUN4IR"s GUI software. It"s a one time fee for as many guns and systems as you need, and JayBee"s put a lot of hard work into this project. He currently manually sends out the licensing files, so make sure you purchase one before you want to start testing out parts of your build.

If you want, you can stop here in the build guide. You"d get a basic, feedback-free GUN4IR light gun. Depending on how many of these parts you already own and where you source them from, you can end up with a device that"s roughly in the ballpark of an entry-level Sinden light gun. But there"s a lot more we can build into this gun, so let"s talk force feedback.

If you only include a rumble motor in your gun, it will give you a small vibration each time you shoot the gun. If you have both a rumble and a recoil solenoid in your gun, the rumble will activate when you perform a "reload" action. This can be simply pressing your gun"s A button, shooting outside of the screen area, or stepping on a GUN4IR foot pedal.

The nice thing about repurposing an Xbox 360 controller"s rumble motor is that it runs off of the Arduino"s 5v power. If you"re looking to make a simple and straightforward GUN4IR build, it"s generally worth including a rumble motor. It provides a nice amount of feedback without overly complicating the project. If you stop here, you can still just use the single USB cable for your gun.

Solenoids are a type of electromagnet. When you pass a current through them, a metal slug is pulled through the coil, triggering some mechanical action. Solenoids aren"t particularly common in consumer electronics, but you"ve probably come across a few in your day to day life. The "clunk" of your washing machine door locking into place is triggered by a solenoid for example. They"re good at rapidly applying a strong amount of force across a small space.

For the purposes of this build however, we decided to incorporate a solenoid on the inside of the light gun instead of building out a full slide-action. Seeing those sorts of moving parts on the outside of your light gun are super cool, but they also add a significant amount of complexity and cost. Mounting the solenoid on the inside of the light gun still provides the kick that you"re looking for, and if nothing else it gives you experience working with them for your next light gun build.

We chose to go with a JF-0530B solenoid for this build. It"s on the smaller side of things, but it still gives you a nice kick each time you fire your gun. You can definitely feel the gun rock back and forth, but it doesn"t distract from your aiming or wear out your hands. There"s a larger JF-1039B solenoid which reportedly can fit inside of a GunCon 1 shell, but we had difficulty getting the two pieces of the gun shell to come together fully with the beefier solenoid inside of it. It"s worth noting that the JF-0530 and JF-0530B are slightly different parts. Make sure you go with the B model.

You"ll need a dedicated power cord to get the extra voltage to your gun. Normally this would mean your gun would have two cords dangling from it, but that"s why we included the nylon sleeve in the earlier parts list. The power cord and USB will sit snugly together in the sleeve, letting you plug the power supply in down at the base of the cable near where you plug the USB cord in. I ran into trouble using a 3-12v variable power supply that I already owned, so the one I included on the parts list is a larger 3-24v variable power supply. Even though I was only using a 12v solenoid, this larger power supply works like a charm.

That was a weird note to end on. For an extra $6, adding rumble support to a light gun is a no brainer. Recoil costs quite a bit more at $40, but the Sinden light gun has a larger jump with its recoil option adding on an additional £50/$67. If you"re going to all the trouble to build a light gun, you may as well go all out. If you"re worried about the additional build complexity though, sticking with just the rumble is fine.

As a brief aside, you may notice that the kickback Sinden light gun runs completely off of 5v USB power. Instead of using a dedicated power supply, the Sinden has a capacitor in the gun that stores a charge over time. When you pull the trigger, the capacitor dischargers and the gun"s solenoid triggers. It takes a while to charge the capacitor however, so several rapid fire shots in a row will have smaller and smaller kickbacks until you stop shooting and give the gun a chance to charge. The GUN4IR system has its own complexities with a dedicated PSU, but it does manage to avoid this particular issue.

On the software side of things, the GUN4IR is smart enough to know when you"re shooting at the screen. The gun will recoil when you"re shooting at an enemy, but it will hold off on triggering a recoil when you shoot outside of the screen to reload. The recoil itself does produce a decent amount of noise, so there is an option of disabling the solenoid recoil if your housemates are trying to focus on something a few rooms over.

The most straightforward approach is to just buy a separate pedal accessory. Amazon has a variety of $15 USB foot pedals, and for most emulators, you shouldn"t have a problem mapping the GUN4IR"s inputs and the USB foot pedal to different actions in your game.

In the case of software which can only recognize one input at a time however, it can be nice to have the pedal directly wired into the GUN4IR system so that it can handle everything. Additionally, if you plug a pedal directly into your GUN4IR, its firmware will know when you step on the pedal, and can trigger effects such as a gentle gun vibration when you successfully put your foot down.

To get things started, buy two 10ft headphone extension cables, and trim the male connector off of one of the extension cables. The remaining 10f of cable and the female connector are going to be the length you incorporate into the light gun"s cord. Once again, we"ll be leveraging the nylon sleeve to keep everything looking nice. Solder one of the headphone cable"s signal lines into the foot pedal pin on the Arduino, and then connect the ground pin to the headphone jack"s ground wire.

It turns out modern headphone cables aren"t as easy to splice and solder onto as the inside of a USB cable. Your typical pair of earbuds use a much finer wire than your standard cable, and they"re spray-coated with nylon instead of easily strippable insulation. If you ever find yourself in the situation of trying to solder onto this type of cable, your best bet is to bust out a lighter and burn off the insulation itself. You"ll eventually get enough exposed metal to solder onto, but this is clearly not the ideal cabling choice. If you have a bit more time to spend browsing around Mouser"s cable and connector department, we"d recommend attempting to come up with something a bit more sturdy.

GUN4IR is incredibly flexible when it comes to adding additional hardware components. For the more flashy individuals out there, GUN4IR allows you to add an RGB LED in addition to the other types of feedback discussed above. The firmware allows you to have the lights flash different colors based on different actions such as shooting and reloading. It can be a nice option depending on the type of gun you"re building, but we were seeking to maintain the GunCon"s classic look and feel for this build.

The GUN4IR also supports more than just the GunCon"s A and B buttons. As we touched on briefly earlier, it fully supports button-laden guns such as the d-pad equipped GunCon 2. For the DIY crowd, there"s nothing stopping you from drilling into your gun and adding a new button or two. The community of GUN4IR owners modding NERF guns has gotten particularly clever when it comes to new button placement.

Finally, you can add a Wii Nunchuck controller port to your GUN4IR. This gives your light gun two additional buttons, as well as an analog stick. The stick itself is mapped to 4 digital directions in the GUN4IR firmware at the moment, but full analog support may come in the future. While holding into another controller during a light gun game can be a bit unwieldy, this is a nice option for building a minimal gun that can still scale to more complex games.

As a DIY passion project, it"s no surprise that the GUN4IR system has a plethora of software options to go along with the customizable hardware. The majority of the software runs on the light gun itself. The Arduino mimics a standard HID mouse and gamepad, allowing it to run seamlessly with most emulators and games on the market. There"s a PC GUI for GUN4IR"s configuration options, but they just send various configuration commands to the gun. Unlike the Sinden light gun, you don"t need the GUN4IR software running on your PC. Quite the contrary, you technically don"t even need it installed.

When you first get your GUN4IR system built, you"ll want to run through the GUI"s calibration screen to get the gun tracking properly. This only needs to be performed once for a given setup, so unless you move your gun to a different machine or display, it should just be pick up and play for future gaming sessions.

There"s also a variety of options for the force feedback components we discussed earlier. You can tweak the solenoid timings, or temporarily disable the kickback recoil completely if you need a quieter gaming session. GUN4IR also supports a "full auto" recoil mode for games that have you press-and-hold the trigger button. Rather than having the gun kick back once, it will provide a steady rhythm of solenoid thumps. You can also adjust how intense the rumble motor vibrates if you installed one in your gun.

Outside of that, there"s not much more that the firmware and GUI need to perform. There"s a few sensitivity tweaks you can make to how the gun tracks, but we found that the default option works pretty well out of the box. Once you"ve gotten your gun properly configured and set up, the feature you"ll be adjusting most often is the 4:3 and fullscreen modes. Certain emulators map gun movements to a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio, and the GUN4IR will need to know to send these adjusted movements. Otherwise, fullscreen mode works well for most software.

JayBee"s also done an excellent job of providing automation hooks into the GUN4IR. Depending on your frontend or emulator, you can have tools such as Launchbox and MAMEHooker automatically reconfigure your light gun when you launch specific titles.

GUN4IR shows up on your computer as a mouse. When you plug in your light gun and point it at your PC"s screen, the cursor will begin tracking across your desktop. Pulling the trigger will cause a left click, and reloading will cause a right click. Most emulators support some sort of mouse-to-light gun shooting that the GUN4IR can leverage. This isn"t unique to the GUN4IR either. The Sinden light gun, the AimTrak, and other light gun projects behave the same way.

Unfortunately, very few emulators have a completely straightforward mouse-to-gun experience. Console emulators for platforms like the NES and the SNES are the most straightforward, but wrinkles start to emerge from there.

On the PCSX and PCSX2 side of things, you"ll need to use the "Nuvee" input plugin to handle light gun games. It"s not too difficult to use once you get it working, but the initial install and configuration was surprisingly obtuse. In addition to installing the plugin, there"s a decent amount of manual config file creation that needs to be performed before you can start playing. RPCS3 doesn"t fare much better for PlayStation 3 games. If you"d like to get an instance of Time Crisis 4 running, you"ll need to leverage AutoHotkey scripts just to get past the gun calibration step.

Most installs of MAME will be set up with a joystick-to-cursor setup out of the box for light guns, which means delving into some .ini files before you can start playing. None of this is particularly onerous, but it does mean that setting up certain games can feel like an afternoon project.

This isn"t the fault of GUN4IR. Their community Discord has a channel dedicated to assisting with game configurations, and the Sinden light gun wiki has configuration instructions that also work with GUN4IR for nearly all light gun compatible games you can play on a PC. It"s just worth noting that each platform has its own quirks to it, and things may not be as straightforward as a brief experience pointing-and-clicking around Battle Clash in ZNES would lead you to believe.

GUN4IR"s mouse masquerading technique means that it could hypothetically work on any system that accepts mouse input. However, the GUI software is designed exclusively for Windows at the moment. Light gun game support is limited on Macs, so that isn"t a huge loss there, but there is the occasional interest in Raspberry Pi light gun gaming online. There are technical ways of getting the GUN4IR working with a Pi involving writing serial commands to the gun in order to change configuration settings, but it can be a bit more trouble than its worth unless you"re creating a custom MAME cabinet installation.

So, you"ve gone to all the trouble of building a GUN4IR light gun, plugging in it"s USB cord, powering up the external PSU, attaching the pedal, and booting up your game-specific emulator configuration. How"s this all actually feel to play?

It"s damn near perfect. If you grew up in an arcade, your muscle memory will come back nearly instantly. If you"ve played a few Wii light gun shooters, it"s hard to overstate how fun it is to go back to some of the older titles that didn"t need to constantly draw a cursor on the screen. Everyone"s probably has their own specific title that drew them to the idea of getting a light gun for the home, but the big draw for this specific build was in revisiting the arcade game Point Blank.

There"s one mini-game which presents a straightforward challenge. You have one chance to shoot a tiny apple off of a character"s head. This challenge was always a good test of how well your local bowling alley"s light gun was calibrated, and sure enough, the GUN4IR shot the apple on the first try.

Overall, we were incredibly pleased with the GUN4IR system. It"s been a delight revisiting these classic games without needing to schlep across town to the arcade, if that"s even an option in your area anymore. The GunCon 1 also proved to be an excellent basis for this built. The parts have a nice distribution of weight, and the small amount of heft that the light gun has makes it feel like it has a more solid construction than its humble PlayStation accessory origins.

If you"re on the fence about building a GUN4IR gun, hopefully this overview has given you a good idea as to what you"re signing yourself up for. If you"re curious about the light gun but aren"t quite ready to bust out the soldering iron, JayBee"s currently in the process of putting together some prebuilt units to sell online. Light guns remain a niche area of video gaming, but if you"ve been waiting for the tech to finally allow them to come home, your time has finally arrived.

First, mount the LED bar on the top of the monitor using the adhesive pads. Note if you wish you can remove the casing from this unit for installation in an arcade cabinet. See the Aimtrak Module instructions for this.

Movement of the gun should cause the mouse pointer to move. Its as simple as that! At this time the pointer may not move to the edge or may go off the edge and bounce to the other side. This is normal as the gun is not yet calibrated.

DO NOT use a supply with a current capability of greater than 4 amps as the mechanism relies on the current-limiting feature on the supply to prevent overload. If using two or more guns you will need one supply per gun.

Hold the gun at the approximate location you will be using it. Note that the gun calibration must be done at the height the gun will be used at. This means if you intend to look through the gun-sights when playing you must do this when calibrating, or if you "shoot from the hip" you must do this when calibrating.

The mouse cursor will eventually start to move and come to rest, pointing at a location near the top left corner of the screen, and begin to flash. Aim the gun at the cursor and pull the trigger again. The timing is not important as the cursor is an indicator only. The aim is the only important factor.

The cursor will then point near the lower edge of the screen. Aim at this point and pull the trigger. Note the position to aim is offset to the left of the screen center-line.

This utility is not required for normal operation or for calibration. It is used for initial configuration (unless the defaults are used) and for troubleshooting.

Assigning ID.If you are connecting more than one gun to a PC, each one must have a unique ID.The ID is assigned by clicking on the "Assign ID" tab.

General Troubleshooting: Clicking on the "SHOW DATA" tab causes various information to be continously read from the device, including X and Y location.

Displaying Calibration Errors: Any calibration errors are displayed as text either in the "Display Data" tab screen or the "Sensor View" tab screen.

These drop-downs allow configuration of the trigger and other connected buttons. Each can be assigned as a mouse left or right button, or a gamepad button. Every button has two possible assignments, an on-screen and off-screen setting. Off-screen would normally be used for "off-screen reload".

OFF:This setting disables all tilt functionality. This means the cursor will move when the gun is tilted. This should be used only for "air mouse" or other uncalibrated applications. It gives the smoothest cursor movement but is not accurate to "line of sight". It might also be useful in gun applications which have a visible "cross-hair" target which does not require any visual aim of the gun.

INTELLIGENT:This setting compensates for tilt by averaging and then applying the compensation when it decides is the best moment to do so. This means the cursor may temporarily lose accuracy when the gun is tilted left/right but in normal gaming use this is not an issue.

CONTINUOUS:This setting causes tilt compensation to be constantly applied. This may result in a slightly choppier cursor than the above two settings.This is not an issue when the cursor is not visible, which is in most gaming situations.

This display shows the Infra-Red LED as seen by the sensor. Note that this shows the raw uncalibrated display so will not correspond to cursor location on the screen.

This display can be used to determine why calibration is failing. You can start the calibration process from this window. When you aim at the flashing cursor each time, check the display as well. If the red dot is not visible, calibration will fail. You can move the gun slightly to find which direction the error lies.

On this window you can change the ID of the device to one, two, three or four. This is required to be done if you have more than one device connected. After the device is re-assigned, it will "disappear" from the PC for a few seconds and re-appear as a new device with its new ID.

The IDs such as "PID_1601" are part of the ID which Windows generates for all connected devices. Only this part of the full device ID needs to be used as MAME will scan the full string for a match.

The "ATRAK Device #1" and "ATRAK Device #2" refer to the gamepad function of the two guns. This configuration includes these, as buttons/trigger can be configured as gamepad buttons.

These IDs can be seen, if you need to, in the "hardware Properties" of the device in Device Manager or by launching MAME from a command prompt using "MAME -v". But in fact these will always be as shown for guns with IDs 1 and 2.

Use a digital camera or phone and first make sure it can see infra-red light by aiming a TV remote and check it sees the beam when buttons are pressed. (Some recent phones have IR filters)

Check the LEDs of the bar appear as shown in the picture below, when the camera is held in the approx location the gun will be used in. They should be very bright and the right-hand one slightly dimmer.

If they do not appear as in the picture, remove the screws from the base of the bar and re-check without the case. If this cures the issue the LEDs may be bent too far down. They should be bent approx 16 degrees, so they aim roughly at the gun. Email for advice if necessary.

Aim the gun at the screen and move to all screen areas. There should NOT be any visible cursor movement. If there is any movement this indicates the gun is picking up an extraneous infra-red light source such as sunlight from a window behind the cabinet, a window reflecting in the screen, or a conventional or halogen light within view of the gun, or reflection of a light. Fluorescent/CCFL lamps are not a problem.

Move the gun over all screen areas. The red dot should move. The movement is "backwards" as this is the view which the gun is seeing, not the result of the data moving the mouse pointer.

There is also another special check which is useful. When aimed at the bottom center of the screen, the "Visible Points" should show "Two". Both ends of the LED bar need to be seen by the gun at this location otherwise calibration will fail.

Dot turns orange or disappears while away from the edge: Infra red light too dim. Gun too far away, LED bar not aimed at gun (this can be checked using any digital camera, as these can see IR light).

"Visible Points" does not show "Two" when aimed at bottom center of screen: LED bar out of line, insufficiently powered, Gun too close or far from the screen.

Yet somehow, one massive retro-gaming category has been left unmined for a nostalgic buck: the light gun genre. Nintendo never packed shooting-gallery classics like Duck Hunt into a plug-and-play Zapper, while companies like Sega and Namco have never released their legendary arcade gun games as convenient, shoot-at-the-TV collector"s editions.

Until recently, the wisdom preventing such a launch has been limitations with modern HDTVs; light gun games were largely coded for older screen technologies. But one enterprising Indiegogo project from 2019, the Sinden Lightgun, set its sights on solving the problem in a roundabout, DIY way: with a new plastic gun, starting at $110, that combines an RGB sensor with incredibly low-latency response times. After wondering how such a system works in practice (and increasingly wanting a retro-arcade experience in my locked-down home), I finally got my hands on the Sinden this week, provided by its namesake creator, British engineer Andy Sinden.

Nintendo"s Zapper is the best-known example of a light gun and the one you"re most likely to have lying around in a pile of home-console controllers and peripherals. Many arcade guns worked like the Zapper, as well: by blacking out the gameplay screen whenever you pull the gun"s trigger. This black-out lasts for a few "frames" of screen refresh and triggers a brief wave of bright-white boxes flashing from left to right. At this point, a simple binary light sensor inside the toy gun looks for a bright off-on-off flash, quicker than your eye can perceive. Whichever millisecond it notices the flash, that corresponds to whichever duck or target is blinking on the screen. (In other words, pointing at a bright light or piece of paper and pulling the trigger won"t work.)

This method of light-flash recognition relies on the specific refresh speed and direction of cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs. In the Zapper"s case, a CRT"s left-to-right refresh directionality could be interpreted to more precisely define where the Zapper is being aimed at a certain moment, though this method wasn"t necessarily used in NES games. Take away the specific refresh rate and pattern of a CRT, and you take away these light guns" working methodology. That"s why they don"t work on modern TVs like LCDs and OLEDs. Advertisement

Some arcade light-gun systems released after 1985"s Zapper used different methods. Terminator 2: The Arcade Game relied on a potentiometer (pages 2-12 and 2-13) to measure the precise angle that a bolted-down gun was aimed and send X/Y data to the game accordingly, while many Sega arcade games used the "Type II" gun system with a Wii-like array of infrared bulbs. Thus, neither had to measure flashes as rendered on a CRT and could conceivably work on modern monitors, but neither is cost-effective or convenient to swoop in as a 2021 solution.

Meanwhile, the Wii"s infrared sensing bar, which powered a number of satisfying arcade shooter games in the "00s, has a huge caveat: it delivers relative aim, not precise. You can"t look down the sights of a Wiimote or the Wii "Zapper" and expect precision—and that"s exactly why most Wii light gun games include an on-screen aiming reticule at all times. (Plus, this requires attaching a wired infrared sensor bar to your TV, which isn"t everyone"s home-theater cup of tea.)

The Sinden Lightgun"s black version, complete with its incredibly long 15-foot cord and some nice plastic molds in the grip for fingers to slide into.

As an aiming peripheral for modern TVs, the Sinden Lightgun is simpler than some older options—but that"s a low bar to clear, and it"s certainly not a Nintendo-caliber, just-works kind of gun.

The first restriction is that this is primarily a PC peripheral. Hence, you can"t plug this gun"s USB Type-A port into an Xbox or PlayStation and expect it to function. But Linux does work with the Sinden, as does the Raspberry Pi platform, so if you"re the kind of gamer who typically dumps your retro collection to a device outside the Windows ecosystem, you"re in luck. (However, I only tested on Windows 10, so I cannot speak to how your favorite distro will react to the Sinden.)

Sinden"s physical setup is the simplest part, since it"s an all-in-one gun. Hook its cable"s USB Type-A port to a compatible device, and that"s it—no infrared sensor bar or other attachments required. If your ideal retro gaming room is particularly massive, that"s OK: the Sinden"s cord is over 15 feet in length. If the cord ever has any issues, however, you"ll need to remove the Sinden"s Philips-head screws and fiddle with its internals, as the cord"s other end is built into the gun"s innards.

In terms of physicality, the 1.21-pound Sinden is up there with Namco"s classic Time Crisis guns in terms of construction and heft. In particular, the trigger"s action is satisfying, and the grip includes welcome plastic ridging for adult fingers to press against. But this gun doesn"t include faux-gun material like metal or leather—which is arcade-appropriate, of course, but worth noting that your minimum $110 purchase, before shipping and other charges, isn"t going into higher-end build quality. A few of its aesthetic flourishes are tinged with the kind of plastic shading you"ll find from higher-end 3D-printed filament, but otherwise, it has a clever all-around style, feels solid in the hand, and screams ""90s arcade" in all the ways that I appreciate. Advertisement

Once you"ve plugged in the Lightgun, download the Sinden software suite and boot it. This software is required to trigger and identify the Sinden"s key component: its 480p, 60fps RGB sensor (in other words, a webcam). Before doing this, the software will also ask you to phone a Sinden server and check for a hardware firmware update, then pick through menus to confirm the exact size of your TV or monitor. According to Sinden documentation, this real-life measure is combined with the gun"s ability to estimate its distance from your TV for a more proper estimate of where you"re aiming.

The "default" Sinden Lightgun white border, which the built-in webcam uses to track your aim and angle. It adds a black border to increase contrast, as well, but this can be removed in your own custom border settings if you want.

The last crucial step before turning the Sinden"s webcam on is to enable the ecosystem"s secret sauce: a white border overlay that fills out the edge of your visible desktop. The Sinden Lightgun"s webcam then translates whatever bright white box outline it sees into an aiming grid, proven out by a preview display where your monitor becomes a clear, blue box. At this point, the gun becomes a mouse pointer with a variety of keyboard and mouse buttons built in. Yes, it"s faking like a standard-issue mouse—but, you know, with a gun"s trigger and pump-action built in.

Before booting any games, I tested the Sinden by enabling the white border (which can be toggled on or off with a built-in button on the Sinden"s side) and clicking around with my trigger as the mouse"s left button. Sure enough, Windows treated it as a mousing device, and a highly responsive one, at that. Even when I had a massive white-background window filling out my desktop, it worked fine, and whatever input lag might be inherent to Sinden"s translation of webcam data felt minuscule—arguably slower than a CRT-reliant light gun, but as I already explained, those guns must inherently buffer a few frames to confirm what you"re shooting at, so the comparison might be a wash.

Even with ideal lighting, Sinden"s on-screen pointer is usually a bit shaky, twitching around just a bit, and that"s arguably reflective of holding a toy gun in your hand. It"s enough to make clicking on pixel-perfect Windows desktop elements a bit of a pain, but not enough to make me miss sizable targets in an arcade shooter. I adjusted the Sinden software"s "anti-jitter" compensation sliders, but this was never enough to make me want to use the gun as, say, a normal computer mouse. I didn"t get the urge to roll hard on my desktop and pop caps to pick through spreadsheet cells.

Without ideal lighting, however, Sinden"s usefulness can vary. I struggled to get it working on a 24-inch monitor on a desk in the middle of a well-lit room, even after using Sinden"s software to modify the white border and add a surrounding black edge to better establish contrast. My 55-inch TV, set up directly against a wall, has consistently worked better. Think about how finicky the Nintendo Wii"s sensor bar could be in well-lit rooms and estimate your gaming room"s Sinden-friendliness accordingly.

A type of video game where the player uses a pointing device in the shape of a gun to shoot at targets onscreen. In many cases, the targeting sensor is built into the gun itself, and the moving targets light up, instead of the other way around. Most light gun games double as Rail Shooters, in that the player"s path is fixed and they can proceed only after all hostiles have been eliminated, although older examples tend to not feature player movement of any kind, making them akin to gallery shooting.

The light gun shooter genre is popular in arcades, some of the most popular being Lethal Enforcers, Virtua Cop, and Time Crisis. Console light gun shooters have also popped up from time-to-time, but fell out of favor in the early 2000s with the rise in popularity of First Person Shooters. It should also be noted that many older lightgun games won"t work on modern televisions, as the guns relied on the way CRT TV sets refreshed the screen to tell where you were aiming. Instead, current gun games, particularly those in arcades, use infrared sensors tracked by the gun (which is an infrared camera designed to resemble a gun), so that the monitor and the gun aiming are completely independent of each other; this allows for modern gun games to use plasma and LCD screens. The Wii is similar, using a "sensor bar" that is tracked by the Wii Remote to determine the location of the on-screen cursor (if any), making it an affordable platform for native gun games and arcade gun game ports. The PlayStation Move add-on for the PlayStation 3 is also compatible in the same fashion.

Some of these arcade games are technically not light gun games but "joystick gun" games, as the aiming mechanism is actually a joystick firmly mounted on the face of the cabinet, upon which the gun is mounted. This makes holding and aiming the gun as if it were real simply impossible, but makes keeping your aim steady a hell of a lot easier. In T2 the gun requires calibration as part of its boot sequence, though this is not true of other "joystick gun" games like the sprite-based Jurassic Park motion seat game. The later 2010"s saw a resurgences of mounted light gun games in arcades due to them allowing for faster gameplay plus being cheaper to produce than the plasma screen sensors though there are some occasional instances of the traditional set up.

Notable arcade joystick gun games:Alien Covenant in a rather rushed attempt to tie in with the then upcoming 2017 movie. Other the then title change, though, it"s still the same game).

The laserdisc game Galaxian 3 is this on a large scale. Originally a theme park attraction with support for up to 28(!) players, it was later released as a 6-player arcade game using the "Theater 6" system (this version is subtitled "Project Dragoon")noteIt was later released for the original Playstation in Japan, but without light gun support.

Aerosmith. Not just on the soundtrack, but also as part of the resistance against the oppressive NON. Find them all in the places they"ve been hauled off to for score-multiplying "Wings" and the best ending.

Other:From the makers of Lazer Tag, the VHS-driven Action Max console. Games were score-based and played by firing the gun at flashing targets throughout each tape—And there were only five.

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