4 ms·
There's also different type of lightgun, that was used in arcade shooters: it flashes whole white frame, and measures exact delay of scanning beam determining a
by garaetjjte 3y ago
There's also different type of lightgun, that was used in arcade shooters: it flashes whole white frame, and measures exact delay of scanning beam determining arbitrary X-Y position. This doesn't work at all on LCD, but I wonder whether it be done by drawing rainbow frame that encodes pixel position as equation of pixel color values, and using RGB sensor in the gun.
- userbinator 3y agoThe IBM EGA had a "light pen" feature which functioned similarly (the CRTC had registers dedicated to this), but it seems to have been little-used and disappeared with the VGA.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rasz 3y agodidnt disappear entirely: "Can your VGA card provide a hardware source for random numbers?" https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=95843 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=95843
- userbinator 3y agoVery interesting. Looks like a vestigial feature that was carried over from the EGA but hadn't yet been removed.
- jdiff 3y agoThe article mentions these towards the end, it seems the light gun for Sega's Master System did the same.
- kmeisthax 3y agoYes. In fact, "gun latches position counters using CRT beam timing" is the common approach. As far as I'm aware, blanking out white boxes to do a single target test per frame is something exclusive to the NES Zapper, and I'm not sure why Nintendo built things out this way.
- KMag 3y agoIf I were engineering a light gun from a blank slate, I would probably first try Nintendo's method and see if I could meet requirements that way. It seems less timing-dependent and faster to market. It may also reduce the differences between NTSC and PAL versions of the product. Of course, blanking out the target for a frame makes the solution not scale well to a large number of targets. Presumably, one would perform something like a binary search (flash all targets, then flash half the targets if there was a hit somewhere, etc.) for a large number of targets.