light gun for lcd screen brands

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.

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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.

For those who haven’t heard of it, the Sinden Lightgun is a crowd-sourced piece of hardware intended to allow modern monitor/television users to experience lightgun games.

Unlike the cathode ray tube versions of yesterday, this guy works using computer vision and a built-in camera.The Sinden Lightgun® is the world’s first true LCD Lightgun, providing all the functionality and game experience of the original CRT Lightguns without requiring additional hardware such as infra red sensor bars.

The Sinden Lightgun® communicates by controlling your mouse cursor which ensures compatibility with nearly all Windows and Linux applications that can use a mouse

There was a blank screen but that is quite usual for first boot on a new Pi image, not least because often first boot kicks off a shell script that expands the drive usage to utilize the whole SD card and so on.

It doesn’t help either that the “dedicated image” was RetroPie with lightgun games, but you still need to configure the lightgun. Without configuring Sinden you get very few games that will respond.

In use it became apparent that the trigger was sticky, while it is spring-loaded, the trigger would not return back to position correctly. Moving the trigger back and forth manually seemed to give a much better result.

Once you have a fully working unit and the correct games system set up, the Sinden Light Gun is brilliant and delivers exactly what it promises. Make sure you give it beefy hardware, and preferably something pre-configured, and it is just like being in the arcades.

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.

First up – I’m not going to get into the debate about what the all time best lightgun is. There are loads of great contenders from the Namco Gcon guns to some of the Sega releases and some people prefer the old NES Zapper.

Im also going to be focusing on PC light guns or at least PC compatible light guns. These are generally going to be USB but there is no reason that they won’t be compatible with other systems. It all comes down to drivers and the emulators that you will be using. Most of these light guns just work like a mouse, so so long as the platform supports a mouse then it can be made to work with that system.

Basically, that rules out all of the classics. If you have a CRT TV and want to play on that then you have a huge amount of selection and you will need different light guns for each console.

The criteria that I will be using is that and Light Guns listed must work on a modern TV and must also work on a PC because to get the most out of these games and the most flexibility, you need to emulate them ion a PC.

A quick note on these light guns is that they are all USB. That is the most reliable way to play with them on the PC or any other system as you want very fast response times.

The Aimtrak light gun has recently releases a wireless conversion for their light gun which runs on bluetooth. It looks great and is the only option that I am aware of that lets you play without wires with a light gun on the PC

I think it was probably a combination of light guns being of poor quality initially once LCD tvs became the norm. That made people less excited about playing them and manufacturers probably read that as reduced demand.

At the minute, you are limited to a Infra Red based solution. This is where you position some IR LEDs on your TV and the light gun sees them and works out where you are pointing.

This is exactly how the Wii remote works and it is best implemented on the Aimtrak light gun. This solution can be extremely accurate if the software is good ( its mainly down to the software interpreting position rather than the hardware). The big problem with it is that that if you move the software has a hard time dealing with that and the result is that the aim tends to go off a little bit. Its still consistent but will no longer be pointing where you re aiming exactly.

Any Wii remote will work fine, it does not need to be a branded one and you can pick some great ones up on Amazon. There is also the option of getting one second hand. You can pic up a whole wii with the nunchuck for a bargain price now.

Lastly you will need an IR bar. The one that comes with the Wii would work but it does not have a standard usb adapter. You can pick up a third party one with a standard usb adapter for under $10.

TheAimtrak lightgun is basically plug and play. There is some software to install which helps you set up the light gun and then calibrate it and then you will see it working in WIndows as a mouse.

It is not as good as the old school CRT light guns because of the issues when you move but it is probably the best that is available right now. (see the bottom of the article foe some exciting upcoming developments that might change this).

Until very recently, I would have thought that this was outside the realms of possibility for normal people without electronics experience. That is until Samco over on the Arcade Controls forum released his design for a DIY light gun using an Audrino and a clever little IR camera from DFRobot.

I put one together myself and was very pleased with the result. It performs almost exactly like the Aimtrak but you can get it built for around £40 – £50 – and you get the satisfaction that you have built it yourself!

There is also another project based on the Samco one but using 4 leds instead of 2. That one claims to remove the need for calibration and also be more accurate when you move around. I am excited about that design from Jaybee but I haven’t gotten around to building it yet.

Most of these options are pretty authentic looking. The Samco and Jaybee do it your self light gun options are obviously the most customizable because you are making them your self and can put the components in whatever case you like.

The Aimtrak comes in a recoil version as does the Sinden Light gun. The Aimtrak needs an extra power cable to power the recoil. The Sinden light gun takes its power from the USB cable. I haven’t had a chance to compare them against each other so I can’t say what the power difference will be.

And secondly the Sinden lightgun which is the one that I am most excited about. Its a kickstarter at the minute and should be delivering in December or January, but it looks like it be the first gun to allow genuine line of site aiming and no calibration on the pc and modern TVs. I can’t wait for it and I will update this article when it arrives.

The Arcade Europe Light gun features a modern looking sleek design and is compatible with retro gaming systems, PC and Raspberry Pi. This light gun has easy "on the fly" calibration and works with LCD, LED, CRT, Projectors and Plasma displays out of the box. The AE light gun does not require any additional software or complicated installations to work.

We can NOT ship this product outside of the UK with any courier air shipping service (such as DHL Express) as this product is scanned by customs in the destination country and may cause a security alert due to the shape and nature of this product (gun shape).

Customers who wish to order more than two light guns must checkout separately for each pair (when ordering 2 x guns AND other products, the light guns MUST be ordered separately), as more than two light guns would be too heavy for the Royal Mail shipping service (2kg maximum).

The AE light gun is compatible with Windows PC, Linux and Raspberry Pi and emulates a USB mouse pointer and/or game controller. No Drivers are required for this light gun to function on these systems. AE Lightgun does not require any additional software, update downloads, complicated installations or borders to work.

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.

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What types of games have suffered a painful decline to the point where the genre barely exists any more? Brawlers, perhaps - Final Fight’s characters now live inside Street Fighter, and attempts to revive Golden Axe have stalled - though one could argue a certain breed of 3D character action game is descended from them, and last year we had a solid revival in Streets of Rage 4. Arcade sports games feel to have fallen out of the mainstream - indie efforts appear from time to time, but I wonder if we’ll ever get a game like NBA Jam, Red Card Football, or NFL Blitz ever again.

But, no. The most suffering of all genres is the light gun shooter - and it isn’t even completely the fault of the games. To see this content please enable targeting cookies.

It is fair to say that the games were partially to blame. In the mid-2000s titles like Time Crisis 4 and a slew of Wii light gun shooters were released - but at a time when games were bloating in size, length, and complexity, the hour-long rollercoaster of an arcade light gun game with some extra bonuses seemed a less than generous value proposition. Some games stuffed in extra modes to try to make up for it - slightly rubbish first-person-shooter style extras that arguably dragged the rest of the package down. The release of a bunch of all-timer FPS games can’t have helped, either - things like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 were providing the cinematic thrills that were previously the purview of arcade shooters.

It wasn’t all the fault of the games, however. The other factor was technology. As the world switched to flat-screen LCD and LED displays, light guns had a problem: the traditional mechanism by which the gun registers where you’re pointing on-screen flat-out doesn’t work on modern displays. That’s why, if you bought one of the rare PS3 light-gun games, you had to dangle a bunch of crap around your TV to play. That’s why the genre was so prevalent on Wii, where a sensor bar was an integral part of the console setup. That’s why in actual arcades, modern shooting machines such as the newest House of the Dead have enormous bezels around the screen - it hides the sensors.

Sales of light gun games in that generation proved the dark truth. People couldn’t be bothered with that stuff. I barely played Time Crisis 4, a game I’d clocked in arcades many times, because I was too lazy to mess around with sensors. In many ways TC4’s PS4 release seemed to herald the end, showcased perfectly in the hideous design of Namco’s GunCon 3 accessory, breaking a streak of iconic PlayStation light guns with a hideous design that welded a Wii Nunchuk onto the front of the gun, a concession for those previously-mentioned add-on modes designed to pad out the package.

Over on Wii, however, the genre was thriving. Endless plastic gun-shaped shells for the Wii remote filled every bargain bin in the land. But the Wii Light guns had an open secret: they weren’t quite right. The Wii solution worked like a mouse pointer, which meant that rather than aiming on instinct, you dragged a cursor around the screen. The cursor wasn’t even that accurate to where you were actually aiming, and that meant the magic light gun feeling of being a sharpshooter, a veritable Clint Eastwood - was gone. You were a guy moving a laser pointer around.

For years a solution has seemed out of reach. But finally, we have one: the Sinden Light Gun. This solution comes from one light gun fanboy in the UK, who after slaving to create a prototype of his idea took it to Kickstarter. That Kickstarter (which, full disclosure, I backed) raised £239k, and since guns began shipping, a further £1.75 million has been raised for further production runs via IndieGoGo.

The Sinden has raised so much cash because it bloody works. It feels like black magic. In many instances, it actually feels more accurate than the CRT-based light guns it’s aiming to replace. It’s no longer crowd-funding - it’s a fledgling business for its creator. The guns now exist in multiple colors (red, blue, and black) and can be had with or without arcade-style recoil when you pull the trigger or yank its pump-action reload.

Here’s a basic explanation of how it works. Rather than a mere sensor, the barrel of the light gun actually contains a camera. On the game side, a small border is drawn around the game"s visual output - depending on the conditions you’re playing in, this could be as little as 1% or 2% of the screen. When the gun is pointed at the screen, rather than the game, it looks for the border - and then uses smart image recognition and some software trickery to figure out where exactly within that border you’re aiming. It then feeds that back to the game, and… down goes that target, militia soldier, duck, or alien.

No cursors (unless you want them). Very little lag. Minimal to no game-specific calibration. It"s a dream. Yes, the first setup was a little fiddly - the Sinden config app throws a whole lot of options at you in a very raw, unfiltered and as-yet unpolished way, so I was left poring over the official wiki and soliciting advice from the lovely Discord community that"s sprung up around the gun. Once I got past that however, everything was smooth. I’ve been experimenting with my Sinden light guns, pushing them as far as I can, and, well - they just work. Simple as. To see this content please enable targeting cookies.

When I say I’ve been pushing them, I mean seeing how much further they can go than traditional light guns or pointers. For instance, 3D tracking tech built into the software means that the gun is still pin-point accurate when you’re standing off at an angle from the screen. So long as it can see the border, it works it out. I played the first few stages of Time Crisis standing at a nasty 45 degree angle - it worked great. Moving around mid-game won’t lose your calibration. In general, you can stand further back, at angles, and actively move around more than with the alternatives.

I tried different displays - a 50” 4K OLED, an older 24” LCD display that sits behind an arcade machine’s protective plexiglass front, and a larger, curved LED screen. All worked. All of this was possible with two guns and players, too. I even got it working on a projector, which meant House of the Dead on a 100-inch screen, which is, y’know, the dream. (Incidentally, the 3D tracking has me wondering if Konami arcade shooter Police 9/11, which had a full body-sensing setup, could be somehow emulated with this gun).

The Sinden Gun is most at home on a PC or Raspberry Pi, but it’s actually compatible with a range of older machines including PS1 and PS2, though you will need a Raspberry Pi or similar as a ‘middle man’ machine to run the software. Some of the PC light gun games that were built to be played with mouse just work with this gun, like the old abandonware versions of House of the Dead 1-3. There’s even a decent number of light gun shooters hiding away on Steam. And, of course, the gun pairs perfectly with emulators or dumps of modern or classic arcade shooters - so long as you have the right to play them. To see this content please enable targeting cookies.

Anyway. I’m astonished by this thing. It’s an incredible piece of technology, and what’s particularly exciting is that in many ways it’s still early days. Production is still very ‘indie’, and the software is still being regularly updated to bring more functionality, settings, stability, and features. I was perhaps predisposed to hope it works; I’m a light gun fan, I own a couple of arcade cabinets, I’d used many functional but less-satisfying Wii-style guns for emulation, and I did back the kickstarter. But it has already generously exceeded my expectations. The biggest downside, though subjective, is probably the price, which is reasonable but not exactly cheap - £80 for a gun without recoil, £130 with, and £155/£250 for two-player packs with or without recoil. But one hopes, if these things take off, that mass production could drive the price down.

And that leads me to the ultimate point of this article. Video game publishers - I’m calling you out. Bandai Namco, Sega - you pair in particular - there is no longer an excuse. Light Gun Games can now work on modern displays. It’s time for Time Crisis, Point Blank, House of the Dead, and Virtua Cop collections on modern hardware. We"ve heard word of remakes of HOTD 1 & 2 already - but honestly, these games don"t need to be remade or even remastered. They just need to run, and be compatible with this new technology - which is already the case through emulation on PC. If a developer is building a port and it doesn"t support similar technology to this, they should bin it. There’s also a range of newer light gun games that have been trapped in arcades - Time Crisis 5, House of the Dead 4 and Scarlet Dawn, and many arcade shooters from other publishers have no home ports at all.

The Sinden Gun tech is owned by its creator, but he has already proved willing to work with third parties. Mini arcade cabinet producer Arcade1Up has used Sinden tech for the guns on its Big Buck Hunter machine, which is out now, and all-in-one retro console Polymega is releasing an officially licensed Sinden-powered gun for players to experience classic shooters on their machines. Sinden’s software could easily run in the background on PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch - and the PC solution already exists. All we need are official releases of the games, and for publishers to pick up the phone and license this technology.

Basically: it’s time for the GunCon 4, powered by Sinden. One can dream, right? And even if that doesn’t come to pass, at least we now have a reliable, accurate way to play the classics.

The Dreamcast video game console had several light guns released as accessories between the years of 2000 and 2003. The official light gun from Sega was released in Europe and Asia, but not in the United States due to concerns about bad press soon after the Columbine High School massacre.Mad Catz for the U.S. market.

Several Dreamcast games support light guns, as well as various homebrew titles. The light guns work with a CRT TV or a CRT VGA monitor in 640x480 mode.

The Dreamcast Gun is a light gun that was released only in Europe and Asia, where it is the official light gun for use. It works on American consoles, as all Dreamcast peripherals are region-free. However, American games such as Confidential Mission and House of the Dead 2, are region-locked and will not work with the Japanese gun, displaying a message like "This gun incompatible in North America" (HOTD2). Other North American releases, such as Virtua Cop 2 are not soft-locked. Not releasing and locking out the official gun in North America was an intentional move on Sega"s part, who were worried about bad press after the Columbine High School massacre. Instead, Mad Catz released an officially licensed light gun in America, which does work with Sega"s US gun games. The official European and Asian Dreamcast Gun does not work with any American games. American consoles can run Japanese games using this gun since it is the software that disallows the gun, not the console.

Mad Catz"s Dream Blaster is the official Dreamcast light gun for use in the United States. It features official Sega branding on the side of the gun and has a design mimicking the Dreamcast Gun. This gun also features an auto-reload feature. However, unlike the Star Fire Light Blaster, it lacks the delay, thus giving the player an infinite stream of ammunition.

This light gun was manufactured by Interact. This accessory features a directional pad on its left side and two start and B buttons on each side. It has an auto-reload trigger (located just in front of the gun trigger). With a Jump Pack plugged in, it can simulate recoil when shots are fired. The left side has a 4-way mode switch, they are 1. Normal, 2. Intelligent reload, 3. Auto fire, and 4. Auto reload plus Auto fire Modes.

The Bio Gun is identical in form to the Saturn light gun, but is a beige color similar to the Dreamcast console. It incorporates auto fire and auto reload functions, has internal vibration, an 8-way directional pad, and B/Start buttons.

If the "Silent Scope" mode is chosen with the mode selector, the player can control the scope with the 8-way directional pad at the side like with the analog stick on the normal pad. There is a mode selector switch at the side of the gun. The selector switch has two modes, auto and single fire.

It looks very similar to the Dream Blaster except that it is slightly shorter and does not have a rubber grip. It has a small 8-directional D-Pad, B and START button on the back of the gun. There are 3 shooting modes: manual, auto-reload and auto-fire/reload (3-position slider button on the left side of the barrel). The auto-fire/reload does not have any delay. It has a VMU slot, but a rumble pack is unnecessary as it has a built-in vibration function that can be switched off with the 2-position slider button on the right side of the barrel.

The DCX Blaster is an almost exact clone of the original Dreamcast Gun, except that it is painted black and has minor stylistic variations. It features a single expansion slot and is compatible in all regions. It has variable firing configurations which include manual-reload & triggered-fire, auto-reload & triggered-fire, and auto-reload & auto-fire.

Hais DC Lightgun with Kick-Back has 3 modes of operation which are selected using a switch: "Normal" (single shot), "AR" (single shot with auto reload) and "AR+AF" (automatic fire with automatic reload). The gun features a kick-back feature where the slide actually kicks back and forth every shot (which can be disabled using a switch). For this functionality, however, the gun requires an additional power supply to be plugged into the gun"s plug on the Dreamcast console.

The gun is modeled after a Desert Eagle, and is white with orange buttons. There are also versions sold under the "Desert Eagle" label that are all black. There is no VMU slot. The gun features a D-pad and Start and B buttons be