Light Guns As Fast As Possible 

Yeah, I've played duck hunt with a light gun recently, and it's actually pretty impressive how accurate they are. We could be standing 20+ feet away from a 26 inch screen, and it would still properly register the hits.

I still have a CRT just for duck hunt. My 5 year old son was blown away and thought it was amazing.

While the idea behind why modern light guns don't work as accurately anymore is generally correct, it is a bit misleading. The real reason, at least with the popular cathode ray tube timing (CRT timing) guns like the Nintendo Zapper and the PlayStation GunCon series, is because the sensor detects phosphor *decay*. That is, it notices when a CRT phosphor representing a pixel dims before it is lit up again on the next screen refresh. Modern LCD/LED panels do not have their elements dim or decay noticeably in between refreshes, and thus the old CRT timing guns no longer work. Having faster refresh rates actually compounds this issue, and would have given older light guns problems instead of improving them as the video suggests. The newer controllers use different methods. For example, the Wii Remote and the GunCon 3 simply senses two or more infrared diodes (in that black bar you place next to your TV) to determine the controller's position and orientation. A newer method has the gun controller actually take an image capture of the screen and analyzes it to determine where the player has shot, but I don't know of any popular controllers yet that use this.

so CS GO competitive gamers should by CRT monitors, consider that some of them think that low resolution 4:3 is better.

who remembers house of the dead

If the lightgun is looking for white pixels to register a hit, would you be able to put a piece of white paper in front of the gun and trick it into thinking you're hitting with every shot?

One of the greatest childhood mysteries explained! Thank you!

That was an awesome segway to lynda

3:50 "We've got a guy with a pretty dank super scope... Looks pretty lethal" Pretty good..

One of the better fast as possible videos in a while now. Great topic!

LOL The orange hands from the "LTT Edition" build. XD

Linus, I'll have to correct you here. Even the fastest LCD's wouldn't work with a lightgun. Light guns don't use just the changes in brightness, they also use the timing of the refresh of the screen. CRT's don't update the whole screen at once, so when you pull the trigger, the flash must be at a certain point in time to register. That's also why pointing it at a lamp doesn't work. So basically, it doesn't matter how fast the screen refreshes, it matters HOW it refreshes.

Batteries as fast as possible?

thank you so much for explaining this. me and my friends were just debating about this guns few days back and now we have an answer. thanks a lot. really appreciate your work in research and easy explaining to us.

I remember playing Dunk Hunt with the NES back in the days :P Wouldn't a plasma TV work since they have super high refresh rates?

The Wii Remote (including Wii Remote Plus) used IR sensor to detect, not like the old light guns which had a light sensors to detect difference in light levels

Why so yellow hands tho? aaannd Daaaamn Linus, back at it again with them brown Saaandeels

Do Linus Tech tips as fast as possible.

NEO GEO ,Duck hunt ,VCD 300 games ,Dune 2000 ,fifa 1998 ,Metal Slug ,Contra ,NFS II SE....Best days of my life

Love how the first recommendation is from the forgotten weapons channel

i dont play CoD but the hit marker cracks me up every time you use it in a video!

3:51 can't believe you did that bro

how does airport security link to lynda.com, good vid though

I remember playing Time Crisis And Die Hard: Trilogy with the original PlayStation controller d-pad because I didn't have a light-gun. That really sucked.

i love those old retro game like duck hunt, legends of Zelda and Mario... and wow can't Believe the way it has became...

Time Crisis 1,2,3,4 good shit, 4 lives 0.25$

3:00 What about 144hz?????????

Hey. let's all play Duck Hunt at full volume so we can really hear that snickering dog when we miss the shot! Doesn't that sound fun? He-he-he-he-hee 😁

Figured the zapper out by playing the games. Took a bit to get used to everything blinking like that when you pulled the trigger. Never figured out how my super scope worked though, and now I see why. The Wii is really simple, was easy working that out.

It's true that the superscope and light gun uses different light sensor diode, however, it's up to the software to use sequental frames or just count down the timing of the electron beam and search for a match once it detects light, but both technics use timing for matching incoming signals. The nes should be able to count down the electron beam if software will support it but at a lower resolution.

There were variations in "light gun" technology. Some of them simply relied on the brightness of the CRT hoping that only the target dot was visible. I used to test these machines by pointing the gun at a fluoro-tube. I'm referring to the really early machines that were single-chip variants of "pong". The next smartest was as you describe, a brief screen refresh showing only precise target locations to see if any registered on the gun. Again these could give 100% scores by pointing at a fluoro. The highest level was equivalent to that used by the IBM light-pen port (yes, go back through your old hardware. Every graphic card prior to VGA had a 5-pin light-pen connector, although the actual pens were few and far between). In this case, a complete "white screen" refresh was done and the actual CRT scan trace that was detected by the pen/gun gave a "pixel-accurate" calculation. Given the increasing quality and resolution of cheap camera sensors, I would imagine that a hand-held "gun" could achieve such accuracy because it "sees" LCD better than our eyes do, and image recognition has advanced so far (think about an optical mouse), that newer games consoles could determine a shot with extreme accuracy.

that animation at 3:12 made me laugh so hard XD

still use a crt for my older games, not just for light guns, but new tvs insist on trying to deinterlace stuff that wasn't interlaced to begin with

Linus ability to break tech-talk and computers/components, As Fast As Possible.

linus has been working them hips lately

This guy has a video for everything

Always wondered how they worked and why disappeared. Do you think light guns can be used with projectors, or DLP chips have high lag too? Not sure if they still make CRT projectors, but light guns should definitely work with those.

Wish u had shown progressively all the consoles guns ever to hit the market. I had a light gun for house of the dead for my sega dreamcast, that console didnt take off cuz it was too ahead of its time, controller memory cardridges that had screrns of there own? Whaaaaat! What purpose you ask, along with an arrow pad an 2 small buttons for the screened ones you could control your options, manage and organize them all by themselves and even featured top connections to tranfer ur saved games to another cartridge and some featured basic games that could be played all by itself, no console no controller, was like a rudimentary game boy

Your explanation of the NES Zapper makes it seem like it cant tell which target it's pointed at, as they'd both be white blocks. But that's not the case. In Duck hunt, when two ducks flew by, the game knew which on you were pointing at.

360 no scopes with the Nintendo scope

So even Duck Hunt was a remake? I knew nothing was original these days, but I didn't think it reached that far back :P.

csgo + lightgun = Global elite supreme haxorz

i love this series where u learn stuff u really ever though about 😂👌👌👍 keep it up bro!

0:24 - I swear to god, Taran, or who's ever responsible for editing this vid, you HAVE. GOT. TO RELEASE A CLIP, IN A LOOP, OF LINUS DOING THAT LITTLE DANCE OF HIS. THE FANS MUST SEE IT!........ embarrassingly quirky music is optional, but would be greatly appreciated.

The Super Scope came with a receiver box that you plugged into the SNES, and I always assumed that was how it determined the where the gun was pointed, especially since the games always had a calibration screen on startup, but after watching this video I checked the Wikipedia page, and it appears it determined the position based on the CRT scanning process. I guess that receiver box was just for wireless communication.

I've heard this explanation before but what I don't get is how the gun knows which one square you have fired at. Take time crisis, you can have multiple enemies on screen at once and the gun could be pointed at any one of those so how does it identify which one? The only way I could think this would work is by almost having a fish-eye type magnification so it was able to identify a much wider range than just the area the lens of the light gun would suggest but I can't be sure. It would have to guarantee that the whole screen could be seen by the gun even if pointing at an enemy in the corner or if the user was very close to the screen. If anyone knows let me know

I've read a few posts on the subject, and it seems like the lag is not the main reason. Supposedly, light guns had an IR sensor and since CRTs embitted IR, that would be picked up by the IR sensors. In contrast, today's displays won't emmit IR in the way CRTs did. Add to that the latency and you've got an unusable light gun.

Why can't they have it track the location of the screen relative to a camera mounted on the front. Then, on trigger it sends the location of the 4 corners to the console. What kind of lag time do you get on detection of that kind of thing, I wonder? Probably not bad if you use gyroscopes to get a first approximation of which way it's pointing and just use detection for precision.

The nintendo light guns don't work with modern TVs because of the way the screen is drawn, not because of latency. The latency issue could be corrected rather easily.

Running Out Of Topics As Fast As Possible

Want high refresh rate? Use CRT!

VR and light gun would be cool

Light guns = The gun is the receiver. The TV screen sends the signals. Wii = The Wii bar is the receiver. The Wii remote sends the signals.

I tried HTC vive with space pirates today. The "lightgun" works really well, and now i really want a vive

Why not add a latencey detection? Use a setup of pointing the gun at the screen and checking how long the flash needs to be and how much delay to compensate for?

Ducks, I hate ducks, they drive me crazy. I was crazy once, so they put me in a room. A rubber room, with rubber ducks. Ducks, I hate ducks, they dried me crazy...... Nes is love, Nes is life

Hah! I was actually going to suggest doing a video about Light Guns. Good work! :D

Sooooo... if I’m understanding this correctly. I can put a solid white screen up on my phone and shoot at my phone and the game will register it as a hit?

Input lag isn't necessarily the reason, it's because HDTVs don't line scan like CRTs do

What are you talking about? All arcades have new light guns in them ex. Aliens and terninator. With HD LCD displays that work.

the nintendo wii remotes didn't use the screen as a reference, they use a light bar that displayed infrared leds that flickered at 2 different frequencies while in each wiimote are cameras to pick up the leds.

How low of input lag would you need to have for it to still work?

Linus is approaching teenage hood

You guys should do a "Graphene As Fast As Possible" vid

0:25 i finna died

(cought, cought) 8-Bit Guy.

As soon as I saw that zapper I thought of the old Barnacules Nerdgasm intro

looking cool in hoodie, linus

Could you answer if Nvidia Shadowplay wears out an SSD, will using a Ramdisk for shadowplay help with this?

that's a pretty good intro for the ad.

finally a decent transition

Lol the green tint of the keying on Linus

Screenblanking and drawing white boxes only applies to very early lightguns. Playstation 1&2 uses more modern ones that sync to the video signal and use sensors that are sensitive enough to detect when the CRT ray passes in front of it. This gives almost pixel perfect precision for more acurate shots and damagemodels. Ofcourse, this also won't work with LCD, since there's no CRT Ray.

I guess you have no idea how a lightgun really works. It doesn't just sensor significantly bright objects on the screen. It actually sensors the CRT's ray 50 times a second while the ray updates the screen's contents. At this very short moment it sends a signal to the computer, which is copying the X- and Y-positions considering the system's videochip to special memory locations where the apps can read them and calculate the position the gun is pointed at (so drawn crosshairs are always 1/50 second too late). Working like this, the computer can calculate the gun's position even on a blank white screen (without significant objects "seen" by the gun). My 30 years old lightpen works like that and is used to draw directly on the screen's blank white canvas. The reason why Lightguns don't work on an LCD simply is that the LCD's screen isn't updated from top to bottom 50 times per second, from left to right like 31250 times a second (on PAL monitors). LCDs deliver a still image (technically).

So... if I pointed the gun at a lightbulb or a screen displaying pure white, the game would have registered a hit every time back then? O_O

Completely lost my shit at 3:06 That's why i love Linus Media Group.

That is a man in dire need of a good nights sleep.

Used to fucking LOVE Ghost Squad in the arcades.

Take My Money!! Bring This Back!! Someone!!!

I miss Time Crisis. Had a blast playing that in arcades and on the original Playstation.

"Dank super scope" I died.

If a company would release a new light gun, one that could be calibrated to read the light using intentional latency based on the display latency of the monitor used, it could theoretically be calibrated to work with modern LCD/LED based displays, with a little calibration. I imagine that the calibration would involve said light gun being used constantly for a brief period while the device/computer sends a single grey frame to the display, with at least five repeats, one in each corner and one in the center, to give a solid time frame of which to have the light gun scan. Theoretically, this could work almost as well as CRT light gunning, if not with a little bit more latency, well under 100ms on a good (say, 5ms rated) monitor.

My favourite games were time crisis and ghoul panic. I loved playing those game. Anyway there is a buisness which makes a sensor kit you can use to mod light/toy guns. It pretty much uses the same set up as a wii. they even sell playstation style lightgun shells

I just realised the title- tech QUICKIE Fast As Possible ------------- -- -- --

Also, light guns require single pixel accuracy, which is not possible in LCD displays because, LCDs draw the whole frame at once, (plus they have backlight which is effectively always on.) Unlike CRT TVs which scan all pixels one by one.

That explains why the duck hunt did not work when I used a projector at the wall.

Wait... so... THE TV SHOOTS THE LIGHT AT THE GUN INSTEAD?!?!?! >Tim&EricMindBlown.jpg

Came here after watching the latest LTT video about light guns :D

Sorry Linus I did not quite get the idea! is the light gun an input & output device (based on systems engineering)? and if that is the case how does it register the position?

Haha, like I always say, "Technology lets us take two steps forward, but makes us take one step backwards."

You should get that jaundice checked out Linus.

I still own a light gun for the ps2 and the original Nintendo. How much would they be worth now???

CRTs as fast as possible as well as a look into CRY applications in modern gaming would be nice.

Wow.. That's just a terrible segway Linus. Bravo!

I still have a NES with DUck Hunt and the Zapper, but I don't have a VRT TV to use them with. Makes me sad. I need to find one somewhere.

They did have light guns for the PS2 console release of some of the Time Crisis arcade games.

If light guns don't work with LCDs that have high display-lag, would it work with, for example, a 1 ms response time monitor?

wow lynda is back

Linus has been eating too many cheesies

Wow, I used to always wonder why Nintendo did away with the Blaster. Oh, well. Thank you, Linus and team.