Tangential, but fascinating to me: I realized a few years ago that you cannot play duck hunt with an original light gun and original NES connected to a flatscre

Tangential, but fascinating to me: I realized a few years ago that you cannot play duck hunt with an original light gun and original NES connected to a flatscreen TV. I’m sure there are people on HN who can explain this more eloquently than I can, but basically the flatscreen TVs have some latency that the original NES hardware cannot handle. You pull the trigger and the gun looks for the white square immediately, but the TV has some digital processing going on that takes some fraction of a second before the image is rendered, and it’s enough that the NES doesn’t think you hit the target. I seem to recall some thing about the CRT refresh rate as well but I don’t remember what that had to do with it. There are apparently after market mods and stuff that people have come up with to work around this, but it takes some effort. As you can imagine I discovered this by trying to play duck hunt and being perplexed when I was literally unable to hit any target, which made a very poor demo for my kids haha.