I just wanted to play Duck Hunt: on a mission to bring back the light gun

theguardian.com

18 points·charlieirish··7 comments

> Typically, a light-gun game will make the screen flash white when you pull the trigger. The console will then check the light sensor in the gun to read when it goes from perceiving black to sensing white as the beam reaches the part of the screen the gun is pointing at. The console can then work out how long it took from the start of the screen flash to the moment when the gun sensed white, and that timing reveals where the gun was pointing.

Is that really how it worked? My understanding was that when pressing the trigger, the game drew the targets as white rectangles on a black background and a light detector in the gun was checking whether it's pointing at white. That's why an easy way to cheat was to point the lightgun at a lamp

You are correct, the NES lightgun was very simple and just used white boxes in otherwise black frames to determine hits. The method described of timing the electron beam was used in other, more versatile, lightgun implementations.

NES light guns aren't that simple because it has to have a way of detecting which target the gun is pointing at. In Duck Hunt, there can be multiple targets on the screen at once.

According to various sites and videos, it flashed a white target box per frame. It makes sense for duck hunt, because it had a limited amount of targets.

iirc the SNES gun used that more precise beam-detection technique

Seb Lee-Desile built a laser version of Duck Hunt a few years back

Played it at a conference and it was good fun!

https://twitter.com/sassquad/status/847564268404748288

I still keep a pair of CRTs around for light gun games. Time Crisis 2 on system link (2 TVs, 2 PS2s) is particularly awesome.

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