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Gun for older systems, but works on new TVs

 
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Zalmoxis



Joined: 28 Nov 2008
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 7:59 am    Post subject: Gun for older systems, but works on new TVs Reply with quote

I'm not sure how many people feel my pain but I do know that I am not alone. I have so many light gun games that I love and want to keep playing but I no longer have a TV that works with them. I guess for the gun to sell well it would need to be universal, like the Top Gun light Gun that works with PSX, PS2 and Xbox. I'm looking more for a gun that would work with Sega Saturn, Dreamcast and PSX/PS2 just to help it sell. It would just need to work with DLP, LCD, Plasma, VGA Converters and projectors. There are so many great light gun games that may I may not be able to enjoy and my children will not enjoy them as I did when I was a child. That is just my 2 cents on a new product idea.

Just some links to guns that do work on any display.

LCD TopGun
http://www.hkems.com/product/xbox/LCDTopGun.htm
TopGun uses bars on the side of the screen like the Wii I think.

G1
http://www.iconic-corp.com/gaming/g1/index.html
The G1 uses something similar to head tracking.
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radorn



Joined: 08 Jul 2007
Posts: 6

PostPosted: Sun Jun 07, 2009 11:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I see that this thread is very old now, but I hope the answer is still helpful for someone that may read it.

Zalmoxis, I'm sorry to say this, but what you want is quite hard to accomplish, and if it were to be done it would probably have a very slow response and hence would not be suitable for real play.

The problem is those old guns for CRT's work thanks to a property of the CRT displays that other more modern display methods don't have, which is scan lines.

In a CRT display, an electron beam is scanned from left to right about 15000 times a second. And each of these scans is a done a bit lower than the previous one. It goes from the topmost to the lowermost parts of the screen 50 or 60 times a second (depending on the TV norm).
Even thogh your eye sees a, mostly, stable image, actually that's because your eyes' luminic receptor cells keep excited long enough for the electron beam to reach that part of the screen again before your eyes can tell your brain that the light is no longer there.
Actually, the trail of light the beam leaves as it moves trhough the screen is VERY short, much shorter than you can imagine.

And this is what these lightguns are based on.
That trail is so short, that an appropriatelly fast CCD receptor in the barrel of your gun can receive that light if you are pointing at the part of the screen being illuminated, and, in synchronicity with the video signal (that's why these guns need to be connected to the video plug), they can tell what part of the screen were you pointing at in the moment that you pulled the trigger with a minimum precission of 1/50 or 1/60 of a second, and show the results in the next frame.

LCD's and other forms of pixel matrixes don't have scan lines, and all the dots are changed and, more importantly, LIGHTED at the same time, so these technologies can't work.

Now, I don't know how the guns, after determining where you are pointing at, transmit that data to the console through the controller ports, and so it's hard for me to imagine if you could obtain similar data from other lightgun technologies that you could feed into games designed for CRT dependant lightguns, but I'm going to assume that it's not an easy task, and the product would be very expensive, complex and probably would offer suboptimal results.
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