Yes, you can play Duck Hunt without a television (but I can't) | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you can play Duck Hunt without a television (but I can't)

nicole.express

171 pointszdw68 comments

I think I was in my 30s before I found out that with NES Duck Hunt, if you plugged in a controller, player 2 could control the duck.

He can WHAT? Omg I need to go buy a Nintendo! And a CRT!

Dont bother, it sucks. The duck is still trying to fly a certain way and you're really just tugging at him.

If you want to try it out just run Duck Hunt on an emulator. You dont need a crt to just play with the duck

Parent just needed an excuse to buy a vintage tv and NES :)

Rookie mistake. My bad.

um... well, I just found this out at 32... granted I don't have access to my nes to confirm this.

Can confirm. 39 now, but as a child I liked to troll my bro with player 2.

I'm 42. Was doing this at age 8. Cuz what else was I going to do during times I wasn't allowed to play but read all the manuals?

I think it was late 20s here, but I’d had the damn thing since I was like 6, including Duck Hunt. Mind was blown.

The highest purpose of this feature is to surreptitiously control the ducks while someone who doesn’t know about the feature is playing. You’ll have them cursing in no time :-)

The zapper goes into port 2, and a standard controller goes into port 1.

The game manual says that you can control the duck with the control pad (which is in player 1's controller port), which would usually be controlled by a second player. This isn't a secret to anyone who bothered to read the manual.

https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Nintendo_NES/manu...

A bit harsh. I didn't know this. I mean, it could be that some people were not able to read english. I was too young to read english and it wasnt my native tongue. Also, my dad used to let us rent a NES and some games at our local video rental shop, so it just didn't come with a manual to read in the first place.

Who’d have figured a bunch of people who didn’t read the docs would go on to become software developers

It’s not like we need to write docs

I don't remember reading any of the manuals of any of the games I played as a kid in the 80s. I don't even remember seeing them. I just remember putting the game in the console as quickly as possible and figuring it out.

I remember getting charged $3 every time I returned a rented game without the manual.

Haha. I completely forgot that game rentals came with a manual. I remember them always being absolutely beat up, and near shredded, but usually there!

Some games weren't intuitive, or had various power-ups and items that weren't obvious. Most of the manuals for the Sega Master System and Genesis games were just a few pages, so it only took a minute to read them. (And then there were the RPGs...)

You learn something new everyday.

My bro was so good at duck driving he made me rage quit duck hunt.

I would personally check that capacitor first before even touching the bulb.

That thing is well past the average shelf life for an electrolytic.

And he means check it without touching it with bare skin or unprotected eyes and mouth.

Who is checking capacitors by touching them to their eyes!?

It's not about testing it with your eyes, but about where the shrapnel might end up if things go very wrong.

I think he means that this is a high-voltage circuit, the same as found in xenon strobes and camera flashes. The 350V rating on the cap definitely confirms that.

If it is a flash type circuit, the capacitor will be connected directly across the xenon tube, and a separate trigger circuit will generate a much higher voltage to start the xenon conducting, and allow the capacitor to discharge it's energy and trigger the flash.

So, it might be the 350v capacitor has failed and is not storing enough charge to generate a meaningful flash, or the trigger circuit which is not generating the initial >5kV to get the xenon conducting.

Either way, i'd check the circuit before the xenon tube.

Probably is worth a check; I usually default to assuming that a good brand capacitor without any evident signs of corrosion, leakage or swelling is probably fine, but this is very old and also a higher voltage circuit than what I'm used to.

Since that looks like your normal camera flash circuit with xenon tube (the cap values are on point for one) I'd agree its likely the cap, unless there is anything visibly wrong with the flash tube.

That was my suggestion of what to try first when I responded to her original post on mastodon.

Anyone have ideas on why there aren’t more of these point and shoot at home games? I loved the ones I played as a kid. It always felt like something relegated to arcades

the most recent one i had at home was the Resident Evil rails shooter for the Wii

it was really fun with a friend

There might not be many new games, but for the old games getting a used crt is free and the consoles are cheap too! I’ve been playing through the ps2 light gun games and it really does feel like you’ve got an arcade at home.

The CRT requirement has pleasantly eroded recently.

A kickstarter a few years back for the Sinden light gun [1] realized that by using webcams, some quick image processing and perspective transforms, you could make a light gun work anywhere and could get real-time performance on non-CRTs by essentially adding a small border region of the screen, making it work on essentially any monitor. He filmed and wrote extensive technical breakdowns about the build process and mechanics at play, which were great.

The maker also seems to have had a solid understanding of what made those old light gun games cool, because he made sure to build versions with solenoid-based recoil as well as the big chunky metal foot pedal you’d use for games like time crisis.

[1] https://youtu.be/grcGpr_8W9Y?si=z800V7f62dDS1KGs

Sinden is no longer the way to go. Most lightgun enthusiasts have now gone the Gun4IR route [0]. It uses the IR sensor from a WiiMote plus a microcontroller in the gun (either a gutted commercial controller like the PS Guncon, a modified Nerf or similar, or something straight up 3d printed) and four IR LEDs placed around a monitor / TV at the midpoints of each each. This system is extremely accurate and there is no flashing border around the screen like with Sinden. Unfortunately, the whole shooting match (see what I did there?) is closed source code and (as of now) Window's only for the calibration-based PC software.

The current open source competitor to Gun4IR is the Samco light gun [1]. It uses four LEDs as well, but with two on the top edge and two on the bottom edge of the screen. A couple Wii LED bars will do the job here as well. I don't think it is quite as accurate as the Gun4IR as I don't think it accounts for perspective correction if you move from the position it was originally calibrated at. But...

Sam & a few others are readying a new design called OpenFire [2] that will be at least on par accuracy-wise as Gun4IR and will be fully open source and cross platform. It should be available relatively soon. Pair this with the PiCon [3] and you have a lightgun with a pretty crazy feature set. All the guns mentioned support some kind of solenoid & rumble support, but the PiCon kicks it up a notch with exclusive OpenFire features like an OLED display, NeoPixel LED, accelerometer, and analog joystick.

[0] https://www.gun4ir.com/

[1] http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=160517.0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE9a-fsnMwU

[3] https://diylightgun.com/lightgun-details/?lgid=506

edit: make more specific reference to OpenFire

That's true, but crts are basically free and plug and play while looking extra crispy. I think if you're okay spending a lot more to get an equivalent setup those are good options, but harder to recommend.

It was a major genre on the Wii. The Wii Zapper was an optional attachment that gave the WiiMote a pistol grip. Titles off the top of my head include CoD III, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Cronicles, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, and House of Dead II & III Return.

I think the main reason that it never took off much was that it kinda sucked. It worked great when it worked, but the tracking was often glitchy and it was super frustrating when you're counting bullets to have the occasionally shot go offscreen. I have a feeling we had a higher tolerance for this with Duck Hunt due to the novelty and arcade games due to the format. (I feel like arcade games tend to avoid showing you a reticle for this very reason, but I don't have data to back this up.)

That being said, I still ended up beating Metroid and both Resident Evils, so they were still super fun!

Also, I was in Dave and Busters recently and they had Time Crisis 5. Beat that too!

FWIW, I had until now completely forgotten that I was playing these games at home, on a PC with a "shooter" experience.

They were mouse controlled, but I had a gyration air mouse -- (with the clever thing of instead of requiring infrared, it just had a 3rd button that had to be depressed for actual movement)

I'm surprised you call it glitchy. I heard elsewhere that Resident Evil 4 on Wii was easier than the GameCube original because the aiming was more precise than with a stick.

They can both be true! It worked great probably 97% of the time, but the 3% where it flicked 20px to the left for a frame or lost tracking entirely add up over the course of a boss fight. Missing when using a joysticks feels like a skill issue. Missing when using the WiiMote could be frustrating.

"relegated" seems like the wrong word - the best ones IMO were the later arcade versions like Gunblade NY (pivot mounted machine gun style) or the Time Crisis series (big foot pedal to take cover) with special hardware that would be too expensive for home sales.

There were home console versions of most of the Time Crisis games on PlayStation consoles. I think the 3rd and 4th games were on PS3 along with light guns. There were probably about 10-15 games on each console (PS1/PS2/PS3) which supported light guns. Although I don't think the home console versions had foot pedals, instead using a button or gun movement to achieve the same thing.

Some dedicated players with soldering irons may have hooked up a simple pedal switch across the gun's "cover" switch. Omg how I loved Time Crisis and arcades in general. Sigh.

I played a Time Crisis on the ps3 using a gun handle attachment for the ps move [1].

Tbh I don't remember if it had a cover option or not.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/PlayStation-Move-Shooting-Attachment-S...

You could buy third party guns that had pedals though. I had one that also came with a cool realistic moving thing at the top that made cool shooting sounds when you pulled the trigger....and gave you a massive headache after a while.

This is a common game type for VR headsets now.

LCD televisions became popular which don't work with old light guns. We might have the sinden gun now but it kind of came too late, i don't think you can play much on it except for old/emulated games. although there was the Wii so i think people getting bored of light gun games could be a factor, they are all quite similar after all.

Which people are voted of light guns? Young people never had a chance to try them.

It still exists nowadays, works alright actually, very analog with interchangeable shapes, 2 guns, etc.

https://www.smythstoys.com/uk/en-gb/toys/games-puzzles-and-b...

That's exactly a disposable camera flash circuit.

Oh, Duck Hunt! I was a big fan of this classic in my childhood during the 90s, and I was always wondering how the gun does know if I am pointing it to the flying duck. Until recent years and, from nowhere, YT suggested this video to me where I finally deciphered this puzzle: https://youtu.be/cu83tZIAzlA

Capacitor is #1 suspect. If not, probably flash tube is dead after dropped or had another type of impact. Just replace the flash tube with something similar to this:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/165491505983

> In this case Nintendo was doing what Seg-already-did

Delicious reference

Brings back memories. In the mid 1980s Duck Hunt was one of the games that came included in the bundle (along with Gyromite and ROB the robot) when you bought the NES.

Duck Hunt holds a special place in my heart

a bunch more pictures of the bulb would help.

How does the projector version work?

Why doesn't a regular light work to trigger the hit?

How can a shot of light bounce off the wall and back into the projector sensor, but only if the shot is near the duck image? A wall isn't a mirror, and the gun isn't a laser.

The patent says that the gun receives "invisible light", rather than transmitting it. If the patent is referring to the same type of system as this Duck Hunt device (it's for a similar clay-shooting game), the purpose of the capacitor is to transmit a signal to the game device to tell it a shot has been fired. The gun wouldn't have a flashbulb but a photodiode. When the trigger is squeezed, if the photodiode is receiving the right frequency of flashing light, the gun will transmit the signal as a hit. This is similar to how I understand the NES Zapper to work.

Caveat: I don't know enough about electronics to look at the photos in the attached article to confirm what I'm saying, but I am fairly confident that I'm reading the patent correctly. (It refers to the gun as "light-receiving" many times.)

ETA: If this is how the non-functioning Duck Hunt works, it's possible that it isn't the gun that's broken but the infrared emitter in the projector.

ETA again: Found a YouTube video where someone has this device and points it at the camera and shoots. There's a visible light flash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsh-WTZFX58 So it's not the same as the patent. The projector itself has a sensor on it, as mentioned in the article, and the light emitted by the gun flashes in a predetermined pattern.

If you could reverse engineer the expected signal you could probably make your own gun

Capacitor might be toast. You can try replacing the flash bulb with one from a disposable camera, perhaps?

maybe OT but what's the Saint Seiya-themed "victory shoot" box?

Was it a game where you could shoot _people_?

It's a handheld pachinko game. A real one in a plastic case, not software.

> Plus, being from the 1970s, no attempt was made to make this look like a toy.

This probably isn't just a '70s thing, but a Japan thing.

Even today, toy guns in Japan don't have the tell-tale orange tips or plastic-y appearance; they try to look as real as they (cheaply) can.

While walking up some stairs in a public park, I once stepped over a toy gun left on the edge of the steps. Being an American, the sight of a pistol just left lying in the open a step in front of me gave me quite a momentary shock, before I remembered what country I was in.

My understanding is that this is because real guns are so uncommon in Japan, people generally wouldn't make the assumption that they're not toys.

Supposedly it has the added safety benefit of dissuading would-be-robbers from using firearms in robberies, because even confronted with a real firearm, the victims would assume it's a toy rather than the real thing, and so it wouldn't be as effective of a threat.

A little demonstration would take care of that.

> the victims would assume it's a toy rather than the real thing, and so it wouldn't be as effective of a threat.

I dunno... I was once mugged by a guy holding a gun that I was probably 95% sure didn't work. It was a pistol that was rusted and filthy and looked like he'd found it in the ocean or something...

Nevertheless I have him what (small) money I had.

I don't think a lot of people are willing to risk their life on the chance a gun might be a toy, you know?

There are basically no guns in Japan.

The homicide rate in Japan is extremely low, owing largely to the extreme small number of firearms in the country: approximately 0.2% of the population own firearms (compared to 40% ish of US households)

In a country of 125 million, there are only single-digit numbers of gun homicides each year.

(The USA has about 20k, with a population a bit more than double at 333 million; about 800x the rate in Japan)

It wouldn't even cross anyone's mind that it is a real gun.

Americans intentionally kill more people with non-gun means (per capita per year) than either the Japanese or say Europeans or Australians total.

Whatever their problem is, it's not guns.

Yes, the guns just helps with scale.

‘owing largely’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here have you been to the US or Japan?

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