How light pens and light guns work NES Zapper 

It always blew my mind

RIP my friend

Could've googled it for at least 20 of those years. Fail lol

Same I was also wondering how the heck this worked

did it also works with multiple ducks? did they die at the same time?

@@chrisakaschulbus4903 No, you will make a quick click and you will kill the ducks at the same time. The developers of this game didn't think about this hack :)

yup, was gonna make the same comment

Me too

I did that accidentally i was shooting up and than point it to screen

I picked up the controller and tried to control the duck purely as a joke. What a surprise it was when it worked!

@@palaceofwisdom9448 that was the best part!

i want a pet duck

Mouse Trap and I want to die

Agree

I had to pause the video to find this exact comment!

im triggered because you called the independent self sufficient human female "the wife"

High speed video proof: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3BJU2drrtCM.html

r/iamverysmart

What the hell?!! Reading that made my head explode. I suppose next you're going to tell me the light in the refridgerator goes out when you shut the door! :-p

@@benstalls208 r/ihavereddit

@@NateROCKS112 r/okayand?

So it worked like the light pens?

I remember the light gun on my PS1/2 was very accurate and worked as a cursor on the screen as well all the time, no matter if hitting fire or not.

The video "Playing Light Gun Games on a Modern LCD TV" from chipos81 used this method with the NES lightgun. Maybe both Master and NES used the same thing? Because you need to show bullets explosions, even if not hit a target.

Nope. Not the same. Chipos81 discribed the nes light gun wrong. Funny enough he discribed the sega gun more than the zapper. It just happned to work because he is emulating a tv screen essintually.

@@yvesnyfelerph.d.8297 That's because the PS1 and PS2 GunCons used that extra cord to plug into the video signal

Also development time. Now you can download a game engine and have access to libraries for just about everything you need for a game, and software to tell you what syntax error you have and how to fix it. Back then you had no such luxury so why waste time learning how a niche controller works when you already know how to write code for a regular controller.

That's how technology advancement works though

Top ten facts spitted so hard it sticked to the screen

Show me an AAA developer who you think doesn't care about optimization and I'll show you an overworked underpaid bastard who was given N months on a game that realistically would've needed N*2

Games these days are 100x more complex than those games. I'm sure they're innovative on many levels.

Chadwyk Gaming - Playthroughs, How To's and More! Who reads manuals these days

Bryan Aca We are talking for before 30 years, not now.

if u had some naughty kids who fight to share the game with ya at home, u would had known that info☺

30 years have gone by. OMG!

VS Duck Hunt is also two-player; you also have a bonus round where you can *_shoot the dog_* lolz

uhhh yeah yeh nerd.

That duck is the one shooting us?

In Soviet Russia TV shoots you!

Barnacules Nerdgasm hi Jerry aka barnaclease.

i need to learn game programming , teach me , oh godly figure of nerdism.

Oddity Archive pointed an Action Max gun at an incandescent lamp and managed to cheat, I'm guessing a NES gun would want a lamp that flickers in time with the TV/mains line frequency (one and the same)

i remember finding out you could cheat by just putting your finger over the tip. not sure why that worked.

Notice how when he explains the zapper that when you pull the trigger the screen first goes black so the gun can calibrate, before it displays the white box. In other words when you pull the trigger the gun needs to see black and then white at a specific time to determine if it hit anything.

It depends on the game. Some games detect the black screen to prevent cheating and others don't. Flashlghts are not likely to work but on rare occasions certain types of AC powered lights can also trick the games since they are technically flashing. The gun will see black at one instance and white the next but it depends on the type of bulb and the timing of the game.

You could cut the barrel of the zapper right in front of the sensor thus giving the sensor line of sight on the entire screen.

I am totally taking that as a compliment :)

Bedford Level Experiment It is :D

SteelSkin667 never heard of a light gun for PS 1

Vladimir Stajilov Namco made the GunCon, also sold under the name G-Con 45 in Europe. I still have mine, as well as copies of Time Crisis and its botched sequel Project Titan. But I don't have a CRT TV to use it with anymore :(

those games were so awesome!! I always dreamed of a giant CRT to play on because mine was only 10 inches diagonal :-D pick up one from classified ads or craigslist, they come for free or very cheap!

There was also the Konami Justifier gun for the PS1, as well as a ton of 3rd party lightguns (mostly compatible with GunCon games). Some even had recoil, just like the arcades!

+Felix Dietz as wlllppwpwpppqwpp my

Ya, that seemed pretty obvious to me. Anything that doesn't neatly fit into a hand (like normal controllers) usually needs to be either balanced or so light that it doesn't feel like one is holding something. Otherwise there would be risk of fatigue or even injury from using the product. As someone with a joint disease in my extremities I am keenly aware of this lol.

supermario18 mama mia no spaghetti

I think it's even more sad when you were born in the 90s.

and you are a raster-sandwich with potato

@@chrisakaschulbus4903 uh what

@@mischiefthedegenerateratto7464 woooosh

Wasn't Nintendo the expensive option, too?

@@dafoex I think so, i heard somewhere it was built "cheaply" at least its cart connector is.

Zx spectrum or Amstrad cpc were much cheaper

Maybe the Famicom but the American NES is notoriously faulty due to the inane design with the cartridge loading mechanism and the unreliable lockout chip.

sorry but tech moan doesnt appear here

David Sucesso no, but he released a video today as well.

Arne Schmitz ahh now i understood

This is a load of barnacles

David Sucesso

Wtf are those "jokes". Un oroginal and just making fun of death. Useless generation

@@RicoLee27 wtf is that spelling

@@RicoLee27 What is that grammar

Matthew Kinney now it's 10?

We don't need him trending to know that he makes a good job 🤔

michael1234252 I see what did there

back to the future

+T Orrent I noticed, but didn't comment on it because I figured everyone noticed. Guess I was wrong about that...

+michael 123452 you must be into bondage then

What?!?!

VR is a pointless technology that'll probably die out soon. It's basically two TV screens in first person that you cover eyes with. You may as well just shove your face into the TV.

Carlos Vera Yeah but if you try it it's gonna be hard, cuz you can't relax your eyes because in the headset it has a foam thing, and it has a dent so you're not to close to the screen, and when you put the headset on its complete darkness unless u have a game on it, but in reality when you shove your face on the TV you wouldn't be able to see anyway.

ARM0R3D_G1ANT I meant as in "getting really close to it" but I guess people need to be precise and can't just accept "close enough". Want to know what real VR is? First person view.

I disagree it is like saying TV is radio with moving picture. Believe me in the 30's people were saying TV was going to be a fad. I think VR is more than just what you described. I am not saying VR is perfect just yet but just imagine the amount of applications beyond video games. There are people considering making VR movies. Movies where you basically can interact.

@@MultiBlueblanket haha your funny ._.

I was thinking about the same thing. Wall of text incoming: 1: It should be possible if you modify the button part to send the input signal with a delay, synced to the delay of the screen. I don't know what kind of precision we are talking about, though, and if the screen delay is constant or variable. If the screen delay isn't constant, you would have to constantly detect its delay somehow, and adjust the extra button delay for every frame. 2: With emulation it could be possible if you change the right part of the game code, depending on how that code works. If there is a timer in the original code that checks for a light signal on the screen after a small delay from when the button was pressed, you could probably change the timer value stored in the (virtual) ram to last longer, and detect the late signal. To do it with a physical game, you would have to properly edit the game file, like patching it, for a permanent change. However, if there isn't a timer in the code, and the check for the signal is instantaneous, you would have to rewrite the function of the code and add such a timer. And if the delay is variable, you either hack around in emulation and somehow adjust the game code for each frame. With an actual console you would have to put all that tinkering in the actual rom, which would be insane and probably impossible. I have a feeling that this comment was slightly more in depth than necessary xD

derkevevin Interesting, thank you for the answer

I was thinking something along those lines as well, like adding some kind of a timer chip onto the gun, between the trigger and the connection to the console, perhaps adjustable with plus and minus buttons or something like that. But I still think it wouldn't work because of the slowness of LCD technology - the panels aren't as fast at producing lit and unlit pixels as other types of displays, there's always a delay when the LCD panel turns a pixel on, changes its color and when it shuts one off (this is always mentioned in the specs of LCD displays, eg. 5ms grey-to-grey). I'm not however an expert or a display engineer, somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

derkevevin but if the input is delayed, the screen will not flash, right? it will only flash when the console receives the input and the sends the flashing image to the screen.

I don't think number one would work. Once the flash hits your LCD it had already happened on the NES. Delaying the zapper is only going to make it worse, since opportunity long passed and now it's being delayed more.

But turning every color cell black and every sprite white one per frame wasn't hard at all

MarioKart7z true

The problem with making EVERY sprite white at once leads to the problem... which sprite was the NES pointing at?

With the NES that as true, there was a few games like that and the problem was after just 5 or so targetable sprites on screen, the flashing was getting too crazy. Sega's first light gun game easily overcame this since it worked like a light gun, the end result knew roughly which pixel it was aimed at like the light pen. Safari Hunt had many sprites (and targetable background objects) and all it needed was a single screen flash. In the end, how many light gun games could someone come up with without all of them being a tired idea while competing with other titles being released. Somehow Nintendo actually pulled out 20 games that used it and Sega had 13 at the time.

Well, there's a basic timing issue. You have 60 or 50 frames per second on the NES depending on whether it's NTSC or PAL, Let's say PAL since that makes the problem bigger. Now to figure out what happened and what you hit, you first need a black frame. That's 1 black frame for every time the gun is fired. Now you need to show each target rectangle for a single frame. That's 1 frame per target. Now say you have 9 targets. That means your screen is near enough to blank for 10 frames. That's almost 1/5th of a second. That is very distracting. And it only gets worse the more potential targets there are. And if for some reason you had say, 49 targets (I don't think that's plausible on an NES, but it's possible on snes - and notice how the Snes Super Scope - the Zapper equivalent actually works more like the light pen than the zapper) then the screen is going blank for a second or more every time you pull the trigger? That.... Seems quite maddening. A second of a mostly blank screen, but with a sequence of flashing white squares? Very noticeable, and headache inducing (if not a major epilepsy threat too.) So there's a pretty strict upper limit on the number of targets with this kind of technology...

The Mayans were thrilled.

She wanted to shoot at the ducks.

@@Iliek So because someone has autism it means they can't enjoy things? Idiot.

@@twistedyogert The world is going to be vegan sooner or later. 🌏 Be a pioneer.👏 Save human life, animals (wild too), plants(yes), drinkable water and climate. Why Vegan? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-y2k4NHjAP84.html

Zekester 2016 what does tfw mean????

Tfw?

it means "that face when"

Do you happen to know if also shooters on rail with LCD screen at the arcade use an infrared camera?

KuraIthys This may have changed with age and updates but previously the only way to play duck hunt on the Wii was a homebrew which replaced the "hit/miss" zapper with the location tracked wiimote.

Duck Hunt was released on Wii U virtual console and does indeed use the Wii Remote pointer!

I have no idea how arcade games do it. XD But the Wii definitely demonstrates one possible option. The basic idea that any such shooting game needs to deal with is determining where the gun is pointing. But there are a lot of different ways to make that happen, so I really couldn't tell you how arcade games do it, or even if any given two arcade games do it the same way. by chance I happen to know how the Wii remote pointer works. and to be specific about that, in case you're interested, the hilariously misleadingly named 'sensor bar' contains 10 infrared LED's in 2 groups. Although there's 10 of them, it really just seems to be to make it brighter, since it's set up in a way that to the sensor in the remote looks like 2 points. The Sensor itself is a 128x96 infrared camera with a field of view of about 30 degrees. (there's a filter in front of the camera to ensure that it mostly responds to the infrared light frequency of the sensor bar, rather than anything else) This camera has a dedicated special purpose processor built into it that takes the camera output, finds the 4 brightest light sources, and using some calculations based on multiple pixels outputs 4 sets of coordinates. (it's impossible to read the raw camera data, so you can't actually tell what it's seeing.) The output is a screen coordinate for a pretend screen with a resolution of 1024x768, with the usual quirk of computer screens that 0,0 is considered the top left of the screen. Although this is all relative to where the sensor bar is, so if you want to use it in software you have to guess the relationship between the sensor bar position and the actual screen. So what this little sensor gives you is an X coordinate, a Y coordinate, and a 'brightness' (0-15) for the 4 brightest light sources the sensor sees. The point there being 4 points is that if you arrange 4 IR lights in a suitable pattern, and know what that pattern is, you can fully determine a position and orientation of the sensor relative to the tracking marker. Unfortunately for whatever reason Nintendo chose a tracking marker (incorrectly being called a 'sensor bar'), which for all intents and purposes consists of only 2 IR lights. This means you can determine an X and Y position, and rotation (but only 180 degrees, you can't tell the remote being upside down from right side up, it looks the same. Fortunately the Wii remote has an accelerometer that is pretty good at telling you which side is down.), and a very rough guess at the distance between the marker and the remote, by looking at the distance between two points, and also the brightness of the points. The distance calculation unfortunately isn't very accurate because with only 2 points being off to one side looks largely the same as being further away. So basically you can't tell being at an angle to the tracking marker (sensor bar) apart from being further away from it. Still, an x and y coordinate is good enough by itself to mimic light gun games. And the rotation is a fun feature as well. It's just that a minor modification to the sensor bar design (which would not be all that much more expensive than the one they included with the system) would have meant fairly reliable 6 degree of freedom tracking, though it would still be limited by the very small field of view of the camera. Still, for what it is, it's arguably more useful for gameplay than the main feature of the wii remote - the accelerometer. It can mimic a light gun, and a mouse, and several other comparable input devices to a decent degree, which few modern consoles have been able to really do. Especially I can't think of any console that has really had anything comparable to a mouse since the snes... ----- And Duck hunt made it to the Wii U virtual console huh. That does make sense. It's far from being an entirely accurate representation of how the zapper works, but it's close enough to be playable, which is the main thing you'd expect from the virtual console...

Thank you! It was an excellent explanation!

hmm.. I don't.

The 8-Bit Guy another interesting and cool video😎!

zhbvenkhoReload DURRR BURRRKK??!!

??????????????

zhbvenkhoReload Maybe it was DSP lol

thanks I wish you the same

CTmacintosh86 thanks bro!

We random guys thank you and wish the same to you.

Happy New year from 2018

it would need to be INCREDIBLYYYYYYYY fast.

Tj & Ja well, there are cameras with 170k fps, if I'm not mistaken... But 20000 fps should do the trick, too...

Tripplehelix the slow-mo guys did an episode on crt

go ask slow mo guys, and dont forget to tag me...

There’s a high-speed camera that can record light moving. #mindblown

tohopes you Sir. stole my idea

a SP4T* switch would probably be better (*Single Pole 4-Throw)

the software could also just mask out the upper nibble of the $DC00 CIA register and consider any non-zero value as pressed. i'd have thought that the Fire button (bit 4) would be inuitive assignment and become a defacto standard.

+Gert Brink Nielsen it looks like it says SPAT switch

+Martin Wagner : It's the design decision that the fire-button pin was already wired as the trigger-signal from the photo-diode. And only this pin could trigger the transfer of the raster-counter to the lightpen-register (directly by the vic-chip, for timing precision), so you could only use one of the other pins to act as button.

I feel like a straight port of Duck Hunt on the Wii might actually be too easy, because the technology has improved so much in terms of accuracy and screens have gotten so big

@@joebykaeby Even if you managed to connect an NES console to a HD TV through a SCART/HD adaptor, the zapper wouldn't work on it, but than I don't think the Wii went HD either

I did used to play a few shooter games on the Wii that used a shotgun style case to hold the wiimote pointing at the tv and the Chuck to be held by the hand holding the barrel. It was pretty cool and didn't have to many gameplau issues

@@whatagreatnameaye1169 Ya i remember that too & since the NES & SNES have gun games why can't they include them but like i said a wasted opportunity

P.S. I hope you and yours had an excellent Christmas and looking forward to a great New Year.

Or a monitor mounted on a hinge in a desk, not unlike a sewing machine. Folded down for writing, lifted up for viewing

Timing

lol, actually

It would probably start writing lines across the screen, though this wouldn't take long to fill the entire screen

It would open the door to the Magical world of Narnia

I've seen video of extremely old CGI workstations (for Pixar, I think) that actually used that basic setup for use with light pens.

Thanks :)