@@tekgeekster I dont remember what console Time Crisis was on but its one of those that you mentioned ps2 probably and it had a light gun which was very fiddly to calibrate properly.
It's not a "CRT filter". The limitation of the original Light guns is that they can only "see" infrared, because the CRTs also emitted infrared amongst visible light. It was made like this because it was cheaper, as they could use the same infrared photo-receptors that were used for remote controls everywhere. And LCDs emit no infrared light. Those clone guns seem to use a different photo receptor that's able to operate on the visible light range.
This is an interesting comment! It's not a theory I've seen put forward before. The filter explanation I offered in this video was based on analysis others had made of its schematic, and some testing of my own, but I have not personally investigated every possibility and I had not considered wavelength of the light. Though I would say that in my tests I got the zapper to respond to both CF and LED light sources. I'm not sure which (or both) you're including under LCD TVs not emitting infrared light, I don't know very much about the non-visible emissions of these things. The CF it responded to continuously, but the LED it only responded to at the moment of being switched on or off, and both of these observations appeared to fit the filter theory. If you have a source for the infrared idea, I'd love to read more on it.
@@SakanakaoThe source is my own research on the topic. :) The MSX computer uses exactly the same light-gun as the NES. Adapting from one to another is just a matter of rewiring. See here: frs.badcoffee.info/hardware/lightgun_adapters.html You can test it the IR reception yourself: The light-gun works as a remote control receptor unit. Just point any IR remote control to it, it will see the pulses.
If the NES Zapper can only "see" infrared then how did Chipos81 get it to work with a blue LED? ruclips.net/video/DzIPGpKo3Ag/видео.html LEDs only emit a narrow band of light and blue is almost completely on the other side of the color spectrum from infrared.
CRTs don't emit any IR. The P22 phosphors used in color CRTs emit narrow-band red, green, or blue light only. Even old B&W CRTs used phosphors that emit only white visible light, with no IR component.
casually looks from right to left. Whistles and slides across a case of beer and a sticker. Then starts running to avoid angry mob with torches and pitchforks. I don't understand why nobody yet has made a modified light gun equivalent so you can play these old games on a LCD television. There are quite a few really good shooter games out there that From what I know you still can't play on an LCD, such as the games for the Nintendo super scope. You can bet your happy ass. I am not going to attempt to move a 36 inch color vacuum tube television in order to play Nintendo super scope games I want to play them on a 60+ inch flatscreen, dammit! There was several I never got my hands on back in the day and you can't play them without using one of those old televisions, . Then there's games like house of the dead time prices Terminator two revolution and the list goes on.. You'd think somebody be making a little unit like attaches to the Nintendo will and the other end plugs into whatever emulator machine you're using and then you can use your light gun on a modern TV
@@PapadumGeek .what I wouldn't mind finding is some sort of a gun that will work on Roms running on a system connected to a LED type television games like time crisis revolution and a host of others that were in some cases arcade only releases would be really nice to be able to play them with some sort of a gun on a modern television where it's just a unit you buy for like 50 bucks and plug it into the machine and plug whatever gone into it or it comes with said gun. I'm a very basic person who prefers things that are plug-and-play ready for it. There is a particular console. I've got my eye on that will run most arcade ROMs by simply putting them on a memory card and putting the memory card in the machine. It doesn't require you to know a lot about programming and such. . For guys like me ROMs are the best option we can have access to all those games. We couldn't have access to as a kid, especially things like forgotten arcade games and now you've got things like save states. You also don't have all the clutter of having hundreds of cartridges and CDs all over the place multiple consoles and all the rest of that stuff. Don't get me wrong, I've got a PlayStation/Xbox collection that would scare people with how many games I have. But when you get into things like snatcher for the Sega Saturn. I had a brand-new sealed copy that I sold on eBay and never played because the game became so damn valuable that I didn't even want to attempt to run it. I'm hoping to one Day play it on a Emulator system with a light gun.
The Slow Mo Guys did an awesome video about how CRT displays work differently from LCD. They show in very slow motion the scanning pattern of CRTs verses the "fade wipe" style transition LCDs have. Very cool. I understood there are two models that the zapper could use. One used the timing of the electron beam scanning across the screen to figure out where the gun was pointing. If the gun saw light at the instant the NES was drawing the target in the screen it would know you were pointing at the target. Most games used the other mode that would blank the screen and show a white square, one frame for each target. If the gun saw light for that frame it would register a hit.
I don't think the zapper has enough sensitivity to be a scanline-type gun, like later guns had in the 16 and 32 bit consoles. The SNES Super Scope, or the Namco GUNCON do work the way you describe, with very granular timing and sensitivity to detect positions on the screen based on the exact time the electron beam lights them. But the NES Zapper, probably doesn't have enough sensitivity. Also, it would bog down the CPU testing each pixel, whereas, with black frames and white targets, the CPU only has to test the gun each line, perhaps each frame. which is a lot less checking... at least 341x less xD, which is the number of pixels in each line on the NTSC NES, counting active video and blanking.
@@radornkeldam I believe you are correct that the Nintendo Zapper did not use the scan line method. In fact looking into it a bit more I found that the controllers were polled by the CPU to get their state which would probably happen between frame renders. You are correct that the polling would have been exponentially more for the Zapper than the controller since it would need to know multiple times per scan line instead of once per frame. It would be possible if the controllers used interrupts instead of the CPU polling them. The Zapper button would activate the sensing circuit and trigger an interrupt when it saw the scan line. That would cause the CPU to check where in the scanning process it was. If it was in the middle of a target then it would score a hit. But I digress...
Talking about this something just occurred to me. I don't know, by any stretch, all Zapper games there are on the NES, but it seems to me like most of them probably are very similar to duckhunt in the sense of there being a static screen, with not much going on, and one or two moving targets. No scrolling, no music generally, no animated backgrounds... Maybe it's because polling the Zapper is already so intensive that it prevents doing much else? Perhaps I'm going too far with the conclusions xD
would this "Patch" idea, only work for Duck Hunt?? I have 5 Zapper games, and I wanted to see if this "Patch" idea would would be successful with other Zapper games like "Hogan's Alley" or "Gotcha"??
I kinda want to try this but then again, I kept my CRT for this purpose and the living room is the retro room, bedroom is the newer PC room with a PS2.
I still have my PS2 going between the new TV and the old giant CRT TV. I use the CRT for Time Crisis 1 through 3, point blank, and the vampire gun game I can't think of the title right now.
@@JuggaloSupreme I only got the GTA games on my HDD for my PS2 so I don't like connection to the old TV in the livingroom. I use a component to connect to my TV in the bedroom. 480i or 480p(hitman blood money) is so much better than the 240p you get with composite, S video and RF. Also it's close to my PC where I store a majority of my games and load them over the network to play.
@@Y34RZERO - on the main TV we use the Wii U, Xbox 360, and PS4. On the 42 inch CRT I use the PS2, but only for the PS1 games and the PS2 light games. The PS1 games are not supported by my HDTV. But the setups are probably 12 ft from each other so yeah downstairs is our gaming, music, and DJ area. I use component for the PS2 and HDMI for everything else of course. The Nintendo and Super Nintendo have no problem being played on the HDTV, but not light games obviously. We have like 70 games on our Wii U, classic games, but most of the Nintendo and Super Nintendo games I play are on the computer which is also downstairs. I just plug in a PlayStation 4 or Xbox 360 controller and map the buttons.
@Master Darius My eye vision is perfect when I last went to the eye doctor a few months ago and I stared at a CRT at work 12-14 hours a day 5 days a week for roughly 12 years. Now memory issues, that's another story lol.
It's not for everyone though. To get a decent size CRT in good working order, and come up with a place to set it up, not gonna be worth it for many players.
But if you want ones from the 1980's, that's when they start getting pricey, I do have a 1980's TV in my bedroom closet, but unfortunately the little device that converts terminal input to coax got damaged and I can't find a replacement so now I'm stuck playing the NES on a analog CRT TV from the 2000's.
I wonder if the NES and game creators would have ever predicted their work would soldier on for 30+ years in the future. This brings me way back. My brother and I got our NES in 1990 and played on a 27" Trinitron back in the day. I think our patents got so fed up with us hogging the TV they bought us one for our games room upstairs and a couple bean bag chairs.
It depends on the TV, but yes many do have an update pattern that goes from top to bottom, though that's not the only pattern I've seen. It doesn't matter for the issue in this video, though, the signal is still buffered and delayed, and the rate of light change is generally too slow to be picked up by the NES Zapper.
@@Sakanakao the update pattern is controlled by the input, mostly being 1080p (top left to bottom left, the most popular one rn) and 1080i (interpolated, does left to right on odd lines then even lines)
A flickering backlight makes your eyes tired quicker than the constantly lit screen. That's why they got rid of the PWM brightness control. (Actually they didn't, just use an integrator circuit to filter out the flickering.)
This was fascinating, I don't even remember why I subscribed to your channel.. I think it was on accident being completely honest, but I am sure glad I stuck around!
Interesting observation about televisions, though I'm fairly confident this isn't the case for computer monitors. That might not be immediately obvious because even on CRT televisions and monitors, a lot of computers (especially from the mid 90's) were using double buffering in hardware, which creates the same effect, roughly speaking... However, if you disable VSYNC on a modern graphics card, and can render a scene at higher speed than the monitor's refresh rate, you still get screen tearing, indicating it's still updating the display as the information comes in. The NES light gun however depends on a technique that just doesn't work on modern displays. However, the SNES technique (aka the light pen technique also seen on older systems in a different context) is even less likely to work on a modern display, since it depends on the actual scanning pattern of a CRT, timing, and the fact that while persistence of vision and phosphor decay disguises this somewhat, the actively drawn screen location is vastly brighter than anything else onscreen. Which simply isn't at all true for an LCD no matter whether it's updating in realtime or not. Even if you mimic the update pattern of a CRT, which many LCD monitors still do, you still won't get the kind of visual brightness changes that a light pen depends on. However, the NES Zapper is not based on this principle, instead it seems to be based on flashing a bright frame to tell when the light gun needs to respond, then flashing a bright box around each possible object the light gun can hit in turn to determine which of these causes the light gun to respond, if any. Thus the system knows because of the relationship between the response and the timing, which object was hit. Quite why this doesn't work on modern displays, I'm not entirely sure. (the light pen method can determine actual screen coordinates of what the light pen/light gun is pointed at, but is perhaps even more finicky...)
There's also another way: VR In VR, you already have a (or rather two) highly accurate motion controllers, so it's fairly trivial to have an emulator that support this. New Retro Arcade Neon has this feature. Since VR headsets run at 90Hz, it can be really fast and accurate.
Nice. Now I want 2 things: 1: Repro carts of all light gun games on NES with the patches (I have Ever Drive but still carts would be cooler). 2: Super Scope and Enforcer replicas that work and repro carts of all light gun games on SNES with the patches (I have Ever Drive and SD2SNES but still carts would be cooler). Other consoles would be cool but those 2 especially.
Thank you for this succinct and informative video, it saved me from going down this rabbit hole myself 😆 I was sitting here thinking "so I know about the timing issue, but if you hacked the ROM, or even had the emulator just save state and rewind..." and so I'm glad to find out that a) there's another issue involved and b) this problem is thoroughly solved already!
Possibly down the line. Some guy in Greece has already managed to modify a Dreamcast Lightcon to not only work via bluetooth, but also on modern tvs. Here's the link. www.dreammods.net/
I can tell the background music is the Duck Hunt intro theme music when I play back this video at twice speed. It's like a slow motion Duck Hunt theme.
Nifty. What gets me is that everyone is always talking about Duck Hunt with the Zapper. I know, it was the pack-in, but Hogan's Alley is arguably a much more challenging and entertaining Zapper game. I'd even recommend Gotcha! over Duck Hunt, on which you play capture the flag paintball on a 2d side-scrolling field, while using the dpad on a controller in port 2 to move left and right while shooting your opponents. It was really, really cool to play that way when it came out.
It would be even better if the entire screen didn't go black every time you squeezed the trigger. As soon as that bug is squashed, then it'll be golden. The next logical step would be to put out an NES Classic version and start selling those shooter roms.
All you need is the Sinden Light gun.... It's kick-starter made 10x the original amount required, they release regular updates of progress and it should be going on commercial sale after the Kickstarter orders are fulfilled.
I have a challenge for you now: I would like to see if you can get a Super Scope to work on a modern TV set. I have a Super Scope and loved playing it when I was younger, but was majorly disappointed when I read online-and later confirmed in real life-that it only worked on CRT sets. I still have this old CRT set from my childhood so I could still use it, but it’s only a matter of time until it fails.
I had a plug and play 40 games in one thing, and the lightgun sensor built into the top of the controller (it was shaped like an N64 controller) worked amazingly
I wonder if you can use the Tomee Zapp Gun and an NES to NES Classic controller converter on the NES classic (and use Hakchi to load the patched gun game roms).
Brad, by FAR your video is the absolute best on this topic!! Obviously you take an engineer approach and that's why. I am one too and so it's to the point, clear and informative. I was wasting so much time on the web trying to get my zapper to work and you're the only person to point out that the original NES zapper will NEVER work because of a physical restriction. (You found out directly the hard way and did francis bacon trial/discovery) SO thank you for that!! Once I realized I was wasting my time I have everything set up (The nes mod page is not really clear on the source rom required but thankfully he did provide a checksum so EVENTUALLY I found the proper rom to patch) So I am asking this favor, do you have any info or links. etc. to a workbook to upgrade the LED on the original NES zapper? I figure I could get what I need from Greybar but I am not going to "Guess" at the A-Z (Basically convert a NES to a Tomee diode wise) for example is it just a matter of the diode or do I need to get a board or modify the in-series board ? etc. I could take the guts out of a tomee and put it into my old shells but that's a bit of an expensive way when I have the tools and iron to do the upgrade to the existing NES branded hardware. BTW Props on the home-made gunverter!! Obviously that is really the best solution (if he does a port for all consoles) as it's a physical bridge so it would work with every game without mod and every console without mod of the game itself. If we can present a large enough presence or get a crowdfund going maybe start a project to do full turn-key kits. Basically a gun that has the "Wii" hardware inside of it, a box/adapter that plugs into the console and sits in front of the TV (like the Wii sensor) and boom. We just mass market them, maybe even sharktank it. but anyone who would fund production would need to know it's going to sell.. I am content with crowdfunding, getting a hopefully large list of buyers and then just make-to-order ship them. I have two zappers, so I will take one, gut it, gut my Wii remote and get the parts for a sensor. Check out the source at that openNES page and make my own just to have it (a Wii embedded zapper) and then if it is easy enough and successful... push for the crowdfund route Let me know your thoughts and thank you for you forthcoming support on this!! By the way your speaking voice is IDENTICAL to JP!!! ruclips.net/video/z0O_VYcsIk8/видео.htmlsi=GXHiSwQeWh4VWBhx
I've never tried modifying the original zapper. I think you might be able to disable the high frequency filter by snipping one of the pins of its internal chip, but I'm not sure which one. The LightGunVerter seems like the best general purpose solution, but its creator has never put it into common production. They left behind source and instruction on how to build it, at least, but you'd have to find the parts and put it together yourself. I have not wanted to try this yet.
The lag can be eliminated in most LCD TVs by turning off the upscaling/memory buffer. In mine, it's even labeled as "game mode." And I HAVE to have it turned on to play Smash Bros. online.
Or goto goodwill and buy a CRT for $5 and play the NES the way it was meant to be played. Pretty cool modding though, I do appreciate that as well. But when I get my man cave build I'm definitely gonna find a good CRT for this. I actually had a really nice large flatscreen CRT. I just didn't have room for it when I moved to my apartment, really was heartbroken to let it go.
In more densely populated areas, CRTs rare. Nobody wants them, even the local goodwills. I know a few people who wanted to donate their CRT, and couldn't. Got refused everywhere. Too big and bulky.
Does the Zapp Gun really work on LCD TVs? I was looking into it on Hyperkin's website and the product description says it won't work on LCD, LED, and most modern HDTV television sets.
That Wii remote adaption seems to me like all one would need to do is make a “translator” for the zapper. Something that plugs into the end of the zapper but looks exactly like the original, just making the zapper look slightly longer. As for power, those batteries used in the Dreamcast VMU’s would be good candidates. I personally prefer finding a way to play original carts with a original zapper or a quality replica that gives the same feel of the original. Instead of modifying an original cart, use something that hooks up to the cart like the Game Genie. Maybe playing around with the TV settings can help.
I have a lightgunverter and it works well. Wish the setup was less messy but better than nothing. Hopefully we will see a good solution for all older systems
Dude! I’m a 80s kid and Duck Hunt is a classic for me. This was an interesting video to see but what I wanted to comment on: you should make audiobooks for children :) I would like to test this video with my 7y and 3y old kids. If put this to play on the background when they go sleep, I bet they will fall asleep quite quick. Regards from Finland :)
Something I've never seen addressed: When I first got my NES I played it on a small Black and White set. I soon discovered that if I aimed at the tree leaves, it counted as a hit, every time. I was able to get to (what I considered) absurdly high levels like this, but it was *very* dull to repeatedly shoot the same spot on the screen with no chance of failure for an extended period of time. I don't think I ever had the patience to get to level 100, as I have no memory of the now known glitches at that level. Once my parents became convinced the NES was indeed safe for a color TV set, I moved it over and was never able to replicate the trick. I had wondered why aiming at a light bulb didn't have the same effect. The filter you mention explains that part. I wish I still had that set to experiment with changing brightness and contrast settings. The "green" of the trees translated to a brighter white than the sky. Perhaps there was enough image persistence for it to register. I don't remember if I ever tried shooting the bush or grass, which would have been the same color. Any thoughts?
Hmm, it shouldn't be persistence, as Duck Hunt first checks for a "black" frame before it checks for the white hit square. (That will filter out most light bulbs even if they flicker rapidly like a CF.) I don't know a lot about how black and white televisions differ from colour ones. It seems plausible that it was producing zapper-visible light with the right timing and location for what you're describing, but I think it would take a bit of scientific work on that original machine to figure out the real details.
@@Sakanakao Well, it's nice to at least be able to rule that out as a cause, and to know that there's not a known, straightforward answer. Thank you for taking the time to reply.
Thanks for the information, I may pick this up myself!! Small critique: I noticed the background music's emotional tone was great for the whole video's topic while it was a mystery but while you were rejoicing at the end, the emotional tone was no good.
Now this actually brings a big spin on the old outdated hardware. Although the NES Classic game pack is free on the Nintendo Switch E-shop. But this brings a big question for Nintendo, although they can't re-release the Black Boxed light gun games like Duck Hunt and Wild Gunman and have it play like the original NES release. But Nintendo can actually re-release the NES Zapper as a modern Switch controller version. The way I can see it working for the Switch is by taking advantage of the IR sensor.
Lots of people used to say the Zapper didn't work because of lag alone, but all you have to do is point out ROB to prove that wrong. ROB isn't connected to the NES in any way so you can have all the lag in the world and it shouldn't matter, but ROB still doesn't work with LCD.
At least that one has a d-pad alternative mode. TBH I find its convoluted range-finding process extremely hard on the eyes. I think your Zap Ping game has a much better claim to worthwhile non-compatible use here.
I discovered, that at least my TV showing white background from top to down, so there is noticeable delay from top to bottom part of the screen. Check my last video.
This is a much nicer comment than all the people below saying "just get a CRT", or "CRTs grow on trees". I am glad someone appreciates that owning a CRT isn't a simple undertaking for everyone. :)
@@CrescentZelda unfixable? Wrong. It's not so hard to fix a CRT, only problem is it can be extremely dangerous if you're doing so while they're plugged in or have been unplugged recently (when i had to fix mine i waited a week before working on it). Also, a very important thing if you're repairing one, you gotta discharge it before touching anything inside. There are tutorials on youtube if you don't know how to do it.
It's alittle controversial but a other way you can get duck hunt to work on a flatscreen tv is if you have a Wii with emulators download the duck hunt Rom and use the Wii remote as a zapper it feels weird but it works
A custom light gun can be made using Gravity IR sensor in junction with the Xbox IR bar thingy. It was demonstrated on a channel called Samco. I couldn't buy the sensor in my location, so I tried using a gyro but it needed to be reset for every run to compensate for drifting. I was thinking of using a wiimote, but that wouldn't be as satisfying as something DIY.
Interesting. I haven't had luck getting my Sega menacer to work on my flat screen. Same thing with lethal enforcers 1 and 2. And a terminator game to. Even my Xbox silent scope game with the big green rifle. As well as house of the dead. I loved light gun games. They were quick and easy to use. Now I see why I was getting so frustrated trying to set them up. I thank you, and I would like to learn more on this.
I have a 36" CRT TV with 6 Video Inputs that I tend to use for Classic Systems. The last time I had it serviced was 2010 about 2 months before the shop closed (my uncle was the manager and I knew about the closing ahead of time). When it finally dies I will be a Sad Panda!
People tend to forget the Wii U VC version of Duck Hunt as an option to play the game. It uses the Wii Mote and a modified ROM for shot recognition. While it plays slightly differently and it's fairly easy due to the displayed reticle, you can still hide the reticle for a more authentic experience.
I picked up a nice CRT yesterday for 5 bucks, busted out my modded original XBOX, and fell asleep watching Braveheart on DVD. Next I'm going to replay Doom 3.
I've seen modern TVs that still go line by line without any buffer the slow mo guys showed that wit ha modern 4k OLED TV, with thed slow mo camera you were able to see how it was drawn
Yes, most TVs do in fact have a rolling update (or some other update pattern), but it is not at all equivalent to the CRT's progressive scan for this purpose. "Without buffer" is very unlikely, though. A rolling update does not indicate a lack of buffer. The slow-mo-guys video isn't comparing for latency. You can get low latency "gaming" TVs, but unfortunately there's just no reason to make a TV with the kind of immediate response a CRT has. Humans can't see/use that speed, it's only necessary for machine-to-machine communication like this, and for every kind of TV except CRT it's much cheaper/practical for it not to be as instant as that.
This music makes me feel like I'm strapped down in a chair and listening to am evil villains speech about how he's gonna take over the world with ducks and televisions
probably not because I have heard that Plasma TVs also have had issues with light guns. OLED works similar to Plasma with regards to the fact that each pixel is its own emission source.
Sinden, Gun4ir and Aimtrack guns are all good alternatives to play lightgun games on modern display for pc however if you’re not playing on an emulator and got the og nes you gotta get a crt 😎
Well that was a lot easier and cheaper than I'd expected it to be. Okay, I'll give it a shot. I'm on front projection, so I might not have enough brightness, but it only costs me a few bucks to find out.
Holy jeez, my gun arrived today and sure enough, it worked that easily! Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding an extension that works with my light gun, so I have to stand way in back, but wow, duck hunt in 2019, on a big ol' front-projection setup--today feels very special. Thank you for this video. I know what I'm doing all weekend.
Part of the problem may be lack of understanding how the light gun works. You can’t just point it at a white screen. When you pull the trigger, the gun reads 2 or 3 separate frames, not just one, depending on game mode. The first frame, the screen goes completely black and the game checks for that so you can’t cheat. The second frame places the white square. If the gun reads black for 1 frame and white the next, you get a hit. If it doesn’t detect the black first, then it’s a miss. When you play 2 ducks it reads 3 frames. First is black, then the second frame, 1 duck lights up and the other is dark. The third frame then blacks out the first duck and the 2nd duck turns white. When the gun reads black then white and on the specific frame, it can determine which duck is hit. If you watch your video when running in slow motion, you can see the screen go black first, then the duck turn to a white box, then back to a normal screen.
Duck Hunt does use a full frame of black, but it's not really inherently required. On a normal CRT the Zapper will read "black" during most parts of a frame except when the beam is actually going past the point where you're pointing. It's important for this specific game to see the right sequence of black and white on subsequent frames, but it's not really an additional special problem on top of the existing latency + visibility problem I've outlined in the video, so I don't think I mentioned it explicitly here. There are other games that rely on more complicated sub-frame timing like that, such as Operation Wolf. Even Duck Hunt could be modified to skip that black frame on a CRT and use the black during the vertical retrace part of a partial frame to be just as reliable at rejecting "cheating".
This is why the commonly-cited "lightbulb trick" doesn't actually work. It's a great little shibboleth to spot people who didn't actually grow up with the NES and are just repeating bullshit internet rumors and framing them as something they actually tried.
I wonder if this would work with all light gun games or just Duck Hunt because even though Duck Hunt is a great game but actually my 2 favourite light gun games (in no particular order) are Wild Gunman and Hogan’s Ally
I would just point out that this takes advantage of the fact the NES used an uncommon technique for a light gun. At the time light guns generally worked on the principle that a CRT TV is really only showing 1 pixel at any given time. It's just doing it so fast it looks like moving images. If you had a fast enough still camera you could capture this.
That’s the reason why hyperkin will come with a hyperblaster gun HD along with a patch software cart to make duckhunt work on lcd screens, however it does not work with duckhunt on multi rom carts and it will also not work with other games, but if i was hyperkin, they should add an update feature on the patch cart sothat it can work with other games in the future.
The sample-and-hold infographic is not very accurate. It would not make sense to wait and write the whole image at once. So that does not happen, it would demand very weird display panel wiring to instantly feed 6 MB of pixel data into all those cells while the rest of the 16 milliseconds it can take a nap. The pixels memory does follow the scanlines, but it keeps each pixel active till it gets an update. The delay comes from another problem with LCD cells: overshoot. Compare it to an elevator. If you want an elevator to go from floor 0 to 255 in a cycle, it is no problem, it just hits the ceiling and stops immediately. But if you want it to go from floor 100 to 105, it needs way more precise control. It is the reason why you get horrible ghosting with grey-on-grey moving objects, but not with white on black staff rolls or such.
You should try to do the same type of thing to genesis light gun games, I would pay legit money for a patch for those and master system games, specifically missle defense 3-D
Ahhh... so no wonder you dont see the CRT TV through an old video camera (with the static lines going down the TV in a rapid pace)... The screen flickering on a CRT is too fast for that camera to keep up.
That, and a few other things. It's not just the rate at which it refreshes I believe. I can't remember what else factors in that you need to sync up with a crt refresh rate.
CRTs display an interlaced image, meaning the odd number lines of the images are shown (drawn out line by line), then the even numbered lines are drawned out. This happens at 60 frames a second. Video cameras will be out of sync with the CRT.
The reason the original light gun for the NES nor the ones released for the 16-bit systems don't work is because modern TVs display at full 60 frames, and not scanline fields like old TVs from the past. It being a LCD and not a CRT is not the defining factor. Because CRT HDTVs are affected by this too. I found this out a while back when I bought my first HDTV, it was a Samsung TXR3075WH 30" 1080i tube HDTV, it cost $899 back in 2005 but it did not work with my Zapper gun nor Menacer gun for the Genesis. Zapper works just fine on a Sansui 27" non-HDTV tube I bought the previous year.
Yes, incorrectly interlacing 240p60 into 480i30 is another issue, but it takes a backseat to the two main factors I explained in the video. For example, the TV I show it working on the end is still doing the 480i30 thing, but the software lag compensation deals with that problem in the same way as the rest of the lag.
I replaced the photodiode in my original Zapper and had a repro made so I could have a legit looking duck hunt setup at home that works with my LCD TV :)
Tommy zap gun is the replacement for the Nintendo zapper I've haven't played duck hunt since I had the power games console and before that the NES Console when my father had one
I remember when I found out that the 2nd player can control the ducks. I used that to get them until I figured out you could just shoot a white piece of paper. That was before I realized the point was to be challenged by the game and now it's more fun.
That trick never actually worked with the NES zapper. It checks for a frame of no light followed by a frame of light specifically to prevent that kind of cheating. Older light guns were susceptible to it though, which is probably where this rumor comes from.
I wish there was more information on creating light gun games. Sadly NESmaker does not support it, and there is little to no information on light gun programming.
Recently people tried to use it but the mode doesn't work on original nes because of the pin headers being to short, maybe just work with theirs products only.
Factual errors here: the CRT does not draw a line but a single dot (or 3 if color) at any given time; while the LCD (or any modern screen) CAN'T show the entire screen at once (it would need too much wires and even power) but a whole line (or worst case column) and while it can buffer for sure (if transposes from lines to columns certainly), it can also be almost as fast a CRT or even faster -- 144-240Hz displays aren't rarity anymore -- well, depending the input format. There is however a fundamental difference in the structure of the picture: the CRT draws interlaced images (only odd lines then only even numbered lines), while most if not all LCD screen uses some sort of deinterlacing and only after that displays the screen line by line, so you don't see jagged edges. The scaling to panel-resolution could also takes time.
1. Yes it's also dot by dot, but from the point of view of the light gun, "line by line" is sufficiently instant (15kHz). I didn't want to split unnecessarily fine differences for the purpose of this video. 2. 250Hz is nowhere near 15000Hz. Modern TVs are just not fast enough. There might theoretically be non-CRT technology that could simulate the CRT's immediate and progressive response, but I doubt a TV like this will ever be built. 3. Maybe this will sound surprising but the NES picture is actually progressive, not interlaced, when correctly interpreted by a CRT. Most modern TVs will incorrectly interpret 240p as 480i, but there is explicit alignment of the fields in the NES signal that makes it progressive. (Also produces the well known gaps between scanlines that some people like to simulate.)
There is a lot of variation in TVs that I had to gloss over. This video isn't really about all the types of modern TV, but my goal was to describe the general issues that more or less universally apply to the problem of playing light gun games on the NES.
Who here noticed that the ambient background music is just some songs from Duck Hunt, but slowed down by a lot?
Is that what it was... I thought it was from a 1965 porn video.
Simply Retro DX that’s friggin cool.
@@brendongyde Why not both?
🤯
Well, Duck hunt used the music from a 1972 porno movie sped up.
Duck hunt is fun for about 5 minutes. Making it work on a modern tv is fun for 5 years. LOL
It's a great game.
It's more of a novelty. It'd be great if they could adapt it for other consoles like xbox, ps2/one and dreamcast. That'd be neat.
@@tekgeekster I dont remember what console Time Crisis was on but its one of those that you mentioned ps2 probably and it had a light gun which was very fiddly to calibrate properly.
rimmersbryggeri It’s history important to be preserved more than anything.
@@rimmersbryggeri I remember. It has a calibrate option in every light gun game and it was a pain to center some times.
really like the way you animated how the NES sent the signal to CRT's and how that varied to newer LCD's, Very nice.
Why is this man's voice so soothing?
To help put you to sleep so he can scoop you up in his white van.
I know strangely I can't stop listening I keep trying to switch off
It's soothing in a weird creepy way. Lol
His voice reminds me of this guy JangBricks on RUclips that does Lego
It's not a "CRT filter". The limitation of the original Light guns is that they can only "see" infrared, because the CRTs also emitted infrared amongst visible light. It was made like this because it was cheaper, as they could use the same infrared photo-receptors that were used for remote controls everywhere. And LCDs emit no infrared light.
Those clone guns seem to use a different photo receptor that's able to operate on the visible light range.
This is an interesting comment! It's not a theory I've seen put forward before. The filter explanation I offered in this video was based on analysis others had made of its schematic, and some testing of my own, but I have not personally investigated every possibility and I had not considered wavelength of the light. Though I would say that in my tests I got the zapper to respond to both CF and LED light sources. I'm not sure which (or both) you're including under LCD TVs not emitting infrared light, I don't know very much about the non-visible emissions of these things. The CF it responded to continuously, but the LED it only responded to at the moment of being switched on or off, and both of these observations appeared to fit the filter theory.
If you have a source for the infrared idea, I'd love to read more on it.
@@SakanakaoThe source is my own research on the topic. :)
The MSX computer uses exactly the same light-gun as the NES. Adapting from one to another is just a matter of rewiring. See here: frs.badcoffee.info/hardware/lightgun_adapters.html
You can test it the IR reception yourself: The light-gun works as a remote control receptor unit. Just point any IR remote control to it, it will see the pulses.
@@Sakanakao The 8-Bit Guy was the same problem with an old camera:
ruclips.net/video/ixgsYAfZ8eo/видео.html
the camera only "see" warm light.
If the NES Zapper can only "see" infrared then how did Chipos81 get it to work with a blue LED? ruclips.net/video/DzIPGpKo3Ag/видео.html
LEDs only emit a narrow band of light and blue is almost completely on the other side of the color spectrum from infrared.
CRTs don't emit any IR. The P22 phosphors used in color CRTs emit narrow-band red, green, or blue light only. Even old B&W CRTs used phosphors that emit only white visible light, with no IR component.
Retro gaming needs to come back. Duck hunt and Hogan’s alley are gems.
The background music is haunting
Petrectet 123 its just the duck hunt soundtrack slowed down
it is duck haunting
@@AlejandroRodolfoMendez lmfao
It's actually duck hunts music slowed down lol
Ok, now lets do Time Crisis :P
Right? Last I heard, there was this dude in Greece making wiimote mods for the dreamcast, but he said he wasnt doing it anymore.
casually looks from right to left. Whistles and slides across a case of beer and a sticker. Then starts running to avoid angry mob with torches and pitchforks. I don't understand why nobody yet has made a modified light gun equivalent so you can play these old games on a LCD television. There are quite a few really good shooter games out there that From what I know you still can't play on an LCD, such as the games for the Nintendo super scope. You can bet your happy ass. I am not going to attempt to move a 36 inch color vacuum tube television in order to play Nintendo super scope games I want to play them on a 60+ inch flatscreen, dammit! There was several I never got my hands on back in the day and you can't play them without using one of those old televisions, . Then there's games like house of the dead time prices Terminator two revolution and the list goes on.. You'd think somebody be making a little unit like attaches to the Nintendo will and the other end plugs into whatever emulator machine you're using and then you can use your light gun on a modern TV
@@peterparker6584hahaha.
actually there is a product called aim track. But works with pc Roms. It's actually not that bad.
@@PapadumGeek the real question is can you use it with your snes classic?
@@PapadumGeek .what I wouldn't mind finding is some sort of a gun that will work on Roms running on a system connected to a LED type television games like time crisis revolution and a host of others that were in some cases arcade only releases would be really nice to be able to play them with some sort of a gun on a modern television where it's just a unit you buy for like 50 bucks and plug it into the machine and plug whatever gone into it or it comes with said gun. I'm a very basic person who prefers things that are plug-and-play ready for it. There is a particular console. I've got my eye on that will run most arcade ROMs by simply putting them on a memory card and putting the memory card in the machine. It doesn't require you to know a lot about programming and such. . For guys like me ROMs are the best option we can have access to all those games. We couldn't have access to as a kid, especially things like forgotten arcade games and now you've got things like save states. You also don't have all the clutter of having hundreds of cartridges and CDs all over the place multiple consoles and all the rest of that stuff. Don't get me wrong, I've got a PlayStation/Xbox collection that would scare people with how many games I have. But when you get into things like snatcher for the Sega Saturn. I had a brand-new sealed copy that I sold on eBay and never played because the game became so damn valuable that I didn't even want to attempt to run it. I'm hoping to one Day play it on a Emulator system with a light gun.
The Slow Mo Guys did an awesome video about how CRT displays work differently from LCD. They show in very slow motion the scanning pattern of CRTs verses the "fade wipe" style transition LCDs have. Very cool.
I understood there are two models that the zapper could use. One used the timing of the electron beam scanning across the screen to figure out where the gun was pointing. If the gun saw light at the instant the NES was drawing the target in the screen it would know you were pointing at the target. Most games used the other mode that would blank the screen and show a white square, one frame for each target. If the gun saw light for that frame it would register a hit.
I don't think the zapper has enough sensitivity to be a scanline-type gun, like later guns had in the 16 and 32 bit consoles.
The SNES Super Scope, or the Namco GUNCON do work the way you describe, with very granular timing and sensitivity to detect positions on the screen based on the exact time the electron beam lights them. But the NES Zapper, probably doesn't have enough sensitivity.
Also, it would bog down the CPU testing each pixel, whereas, with black frames and white targets, the CPU only has to test the gun each line, perhaps each frame. which is a lot less checking... at least 341x less xD, which is the number of pixels in each line on the NTSC NES, counting active video and blanking.
@@radornkeldam I believe you are correct that the Nintendo Zapper did not use the scan line method. In fact looking into it a bit more I found that the controllers were polled by the CPU to get their state which would probably happen between frame renders. You are correct that the polling would have been exponentially more for the Zapper than the controller since it would need to know multiple times per scan line instead of once per frame.
It would be possible if the controllers used interrupts instead of the CPU polling them. The Zapper button would activate the sensing circuit and trigger an interrupt when it saw the scan line. That would cause the CPU to check where in the scanning process it was. If it was in the middle of a target then it would score a hit.
But I digress...
Talking about this something just occurred to me.
I don't know, by any stretch, all Zapper games there are on the NES, but it seems to me like most of them probably are very similar to duckhunt in the sense of there being a static screen, with not much going on, and one or two moving targets. No scrolling, no music generally, no animated backgrounds...
Maybe it's because polling the Zapper is already so intensive that it prevents doing much else?
Perhaps I'm going too far with the conclusions xD
A really great video that deserves more support. The animations are great, and vary informative!
Here is the guide in steps:
1. Buy an Everdrive-N8.
2. Patch a ROM of Duck Hunt.
3. Buy the Hyperkin Zapp Gun.
Step 4. Give up. Buy a crt.
There is no patch existing for SNES Super Scope or for Sega Menacer so still impossible!
would this "Patch" idea, only work for Duck Hunt?? I have 5 Zapper games, and I wanted to see if this "Patch" idea would would be successful with other Zapper games like "Hogan's Alley" or "Gotcha"??
This is great news! I’ve actually been contemplating whether to get rid of my Trinitron and light gun games was kinda my last hurdle. Great video!
Dont the trinitron is dank
I kinda want to try this but then again, I kept my CRT for this purpose and the living room is the retro room, bedroom is the newer PC room with a PS2.
I still have my PS2 going between the new TV and the old giant CRT TV. I use the CRT for Time Crisis 1 through 3, point blank, and the vampire gun game I can't think of the title right now.
@@JuggaloSupreme I only got the GTA games on my HDD for my PS2 so I don't like connection to the old TV in the livingroom. I use a component to connect to my TV in the bedroom. 480i or 480p(hitman blood money) is so much better than the 240p you get with composite, S video and RF. Also it's close to my PC where I store a majority of my games and load them over the network to play.
@@Y34RZERO - on the main TV we use the Wii U, Xbox 360, and PS4. On the 42 inch CRT I use the PS2, but only for the PS1 games and the PS2 light games. The PS1 games are not supported by my HDTV. But the setups are probably 12 ft from each other so yeah downstairs is our gaming, music, and DJ area. I use component for the PS2 and HDMI for everything else of course. The Nintendo and Super Nintendo have no problem being played on the HDTV, but not light games obviously. We have like 70 games on our Wii U, classic games, but most of the Nintendo and Super Nintendo games I play are on the computer which is also downstairs. I just plug in a PlayStation 4 or Xbox 360 controller and map the buttons.
@Master Darius My eye vision is perfect when I last went to the eye doctor a few months ago and I stared at a CRT at work 12-14 hours a day 5 days a week for roughly 12 years. Now memory issues, that's another story lol.
I still have my ps1 and ps2, I even have my old dreamcast still
I think buying a CRT would be cheaper.
Much cheaper. You can get one for free if you look hard enough. People don't want them anymore, yet they're too dangerous to just throw away.
It's not for everyone though. To get a decent size CRT in good working order, and come up with a place to set it up, not gonna be worth it for many players.
But if you want ones from the 1980's, that's when they start getting pricey, I do have a 1980's TV in my bedroom closet, but unfortunately the little device that converts terminal input to coax got damaged and I can't find a replacement so now I'm stuck playing the NES on a analog CRT TV from the 2000's.
The Tommy gun on Amazon is like $8... but, yea, if you dont have a ROM cart, it can get a little expensive
yeah but i cant find any
I wonder if the NES and game creators would have ever predicted their work would soldier on for 30+ years in the future. This brings me way back. My brother and I got our NES in 1990 and played on a 27" Trinitron back in the day. I think our patents got so fed up with us hogging the TV they bought us one for our games room upstairs and a couple bean bag chairs.
Dude. I could listen to your voice forever
The Slomo Guys showed that modern TVs, though fully lit at all times, do actually "fade" from top to bottom.
It depends on the TV, but yes many do have an update pattern that goes from top to bottom, though that's not the only pattern I've seen. It doesn't matter for the issue in this video, though, the signal is still buffered and delayed, and the rate of light change is generally too slow to be picked up by the NES Zapper.
@@Sakanakao the update pattern is controlled by the input, mostly being 1080p (top left to bottom left, the most popular one rn) and 1080i (interpolated, does left to right on odd lines then even lines)
72, why the quotes around "fade"? Is it not actual fading (but too fast for us to see it)?
A flickering backlight makes your eyes tired quicker than the constantly lit screen. That's why they got rid of the PWM brightness control. (Actually they didn't, just use an integrator circuit to filter out the flickering.)
@@peterkiss1204 no screen is constantly lit.
Very well made! I love the pixel art animations :)
Spoopy background music
Spoopy? 🤔
Sean Thompson it’s 2019 and you’ve never heard spoopy?
@@HillBillyBrown it's 2019. Nobody says spoopy anymore.
@@Porygonal64 Nobody's a furry anymore
@@HillBillyBrown Lots of people are. I just happen to not be one of them.
Hopefully we can eventually get light guns back. I miss Time Crisis 1 and 2.
This was fascinating, I don't even remember why I subscribed to your channel.. I think it was on accident being completely honest, but I am sure glad I stuck around!
Interesting observation about televisions, though I'm fairly confident this isn't the case for computer monitors.
That might not be immediately obvious because even on CRT televisions and monitors, a lot of computers (especially from the mid 90's) were using double buffering in hardware, which creates the same effect, roughly speaking...
However, if you disable VSYNC on a modern graphics card, and can render a scene at higher speed than the monitor's refresh rate, you still get screen tearing, indicating it's still updating the display as the information comes in.
The NES light gun however depends on a technique that just doesn't work on modern displays.
However, the SNES technique (aka the light pen technique also seen on older systems in a different context) is even less likely to work on a modern display, since it depends on the actual scanning pattern of a CRT, timing, and the fact that while persistence of vision and phosphor decay disguises this somewhat, the actively drawn screen location is vastly brighter than anything else onscreen.
Which simply isn't at all true for an LCD no matter whether it's updating in realtime or not.
Even if you mimic the update pattern of a CRT, which many LCD monitors still do, you still won't get the kind of visual brightness changes that a light pen depends on.
However, the NES Zapper is not based on this principle, instead it seems to be based on flashing a bright frame to tell when the light gun needs to respond, then flashing a bright box around each possible object the light gun can hit in turn to determine which of these causes the light gun to respond, if any.
Thus the system knows because of the relationship between the response and the timing, which object was hit.
Quite why this doesn't work on modern displays, I'm not entirely sure.
(the light pen method can determine actual screen coordinates of what the light pen/light gun is pointed at, but is perhaps even more finicky...)
There's also another way: VR
In VR, you already have a (or rather two) highly accurate motion controllers, so it's fairly trivial to have an emulator that support this. New Retro Arcade Neon has this feature. Since VR headsets run at 90Hz, it can be really fast and accurate.
That's a lot of commitment for an old game
Kudos to you
Nice.
Now I want 2 things:
1: Repro carts of all light gun games on NES with the patches (I have Ever Drive but still carts would be cooler).
2: Super Scope and Enforcer replicas that work and repro carts of all light gun games on SNES with the patches (I have Ever Drive and SD2SNES but still carts would be cooler).
Other consoles would be cool but those 2 especially.
Thank you for this succinct and informative video, it saved me from going down this rabbit hole myself 😆 I was sitting here thinking "so I know about the timing issue, but if you hacked the ROM, or even had the emulator just save state and rewind..." and so I'm glad to find out that a) there's another issue involved and b) this problem is thoroughly solved already!
Could this method work with, let's say, Sega Light Phazer or any of the PS1/PS2 light guns?
Possibly down the line. Some guy in Greece has already managed to modify a Dreamcast Lightcon to not only work via bluetooth, but also on modern tvs. Here's the link. www.dreammods.net/
Probably would work on the PS1 (Depends on the model?), but I would think the ps2 would work with a modern tv
I can tell the background music is the Duck Hunt intro theme music when I play back this video at twice speed. It's like a slow motion Duck Hunt theme.
I want to play duck hunt. I want to show my son duck hunt but unfortunately after watching your video, I still don’t know what to do.
Nifty. What gets me is that everyone is always talking about Duck Hunt with the Zapper. I know, it was the pack-in, but Hogan's Alley is arguably a much more challenging and entertaining Zapper game. I'd even recommend Gotcha! over Duck Hunt, on which you play capture the flag paintball on a 2d side-scrolling field, while using the dpad on a controller in port 2 to move left and right while shooting your opponents. It was really, really cool to play that way when it came out.
Nice ASMR I like it
(Like really it’s quite calming)
It would be even better if the entire screen didn't go black every time you squeezed the trigger. As soon as that bug is squashed, then it'll be golden. The next logical step would be to put out an NES Classic version and start selling those shooter roms.
It would be cool if there was a company making widescreen modern thin crts. That would make retro gaming feel more modern
All you need is the Sinden Light gun.... It's kick-starter made 10x the original amount required, they release regular updates of progress and it should be going on commercial sale after the Kickstarter orders are fulfilled.
I have a challenge for you now: I would like to see if you can get a Super Scope to work on a modern TV set. I have a Super Scope and loved playing it when I was younger, but was majorly disappointed when I read online-and later confirmed in real life-that it only worked on CRT sets. I still have this old CRT set from my childhood so I could still use it, but it’s only a matter of time until it fails.
I had a plug and play 40 games in one thing, and the lightgun sensor built into the top of the controller (it was shaped like an N64 controller) worked amazingly
edit: I found it :) "118 Arcade Classics"
Now i want a Sega lightphaser, a konami justifier & a namco guncon to work on modern displays
I wonder if you can use the Tomee Zapp Gun and an NES to NES Classic controller converter on the NES classic (and use Hakchi to load the patched gun game roms).
Brad, by FAR your video is the absolute best on this topic!! Obviously you take an engineer approach and that's why. I am one too and so it's to the point, clear and informative. I was wasting so much time on the web trying to get my zapper to work and you're the only person to point out that the original NES zapper will NEVER work because of a physical restriction. (You found out directly the hard way and did francis bacon trial/discovery)
SO thank you for that!! Once I realized I was wasting my time I have everything set up (The nes mod page is not really clear on the source rom required but thankfully he did provide a checksum so EVENTUALLY I found the proper rom to patch)
So I am asking this favor, do you have any info or links. etc. to a workbook to upgrade the LED on the original NES zapper?
I figure I could get what I need from Greybar but I am not going to "Guess" at the A-Z (Basically convert a NES to a Tomee diode wise)
for example is it just a matter of the diode or do I need to get a board or modify the in-series board ? etc.
I could take the guts out of a tomee and put it into my old shells but that's a bit of an expensive way when I have the tools and iron to do the upgrade to the existing NES branded hardware.
BTW Props on the home-made gunverter!! Obviously that is really the best solution (if he does a port for all consoles) as it's a physical bridge so it would work with every game without mod and every console without mod of the game itself.
If we can present a large enough presence or get a crowdfund going maybe start a project to do full turn-key kits.
Basically a gun that has the "Wii" hardware inside of it, a box/adapter that plugs into the console and sits in front of the TV (like the Wii sensor) and boom. We just mass market them, maybe even sharktank it. but anyone who would fund production would need to know it's going to sell.. I am content with crowdfunding, getting a hopefully large list of buyers and then just make-to-order ship them.
I have two zappers, so I will take one, gut it, gut my Wii remote and get the parts for a sensor. Check out the source at that openNES page and make my own just to have it (a Wii embedded zapper) and then if it is easy enough and successful... push for the crowdfund route
Let me know your thoughts and thank you for you forthcoming support on this!!
By the way your speaking voice is IDENTICAL to JP!!!
ruclips.net/video/z0O_VYcsIk8/видео.htmlsi=GXHiSwQeWh4VWBhx
I've never tried modifying the original zapper. I think you might be able to disable the high frequency filter by snipping one of the pins of its internal chip, but I'm not sure which one. The LightGunVerter seems like the best general purpose solution, but its creator has never put it into common production. They left behind source and instruction on how to build it, at least, but you'd have to find the parts and put it together yourself. I have not wanted to try this yet.
The lag can be eliminated in most LCD TVs by turning off the upscaling/memory buffer. In mine, it's even labeled as "game mode." And I HAVE to have it turned on to play Smash Bros. online.
Or goto goodwill and buy a CRT for $5 and play the NES the way it was meant to be played. Pretty cool modding though, I do appreciate that as well. But when I get my man cave build I'm definitely gonna find a good CRT for this. I actually had a really nice large flatscreen CRT. I just didn't have room for it when I moved to my apartment, really was heartbroken to let it go.
In more densely populated areas, CRTs rare. Nobody wants them, even the local goodwills. I know a few people who wanted to donate their CRT, and couldn't. Got refused everywhere. Too big and bulky.
Does the Zapp Gun really work on LCD TVs? I was looking into it on Hyperkin's website and the product description says it won't work on LCD, LED, and most modern HDTV television sets.
Because the gun by itself wont. You also need the software changed to compensate for the lag.
That Wii remote adaption seems to me like all one would need to do is make a “translator” for the zapper. Something that plugs into the end of the zapper but looks exactly like the original, just making the zapper look slightly longer. As for power, those batteries used in the Dreamcast VMU’s would be good candidates.
I personally prefer finding a way to play original carts with a original zapper or a quality replica that gives the same feel of the original. Instead of modifying an original cart, use something that hooks up to the cart like the Game Genie. Maybe playing around with the TV settings can help.
The music in the background of this video is great.
It's the duckhunt title screen music slowed down by roughly 16 times
I have a lightgunverter and it works well. Wish the setup was less messy but better than nothing. Hopefully we will see a good solution for all older systems
Dude! I’m a 80s kid and Duck Hunt is a classic for me. This was an interesting video to see but what I wanted to comment on: you should make audiobooks for children :) I would like to test this video with my 7y and 3y old kids. If put this to play on the background when they go sleep, I bet they will fall asleep quite quick. Regards from Finland :)
Something I've never seen addressed: When I first got my NES I played it on a small Black and White set. I soon discovered that if I aimed at the tree leaves, it counted as a hit, every time. I was able to get to (what I considered) absurdly high levels like this, but it was *very* dull to repeatedly shoot the same spot on the screen with no chance of failure for an extended period of time. I don't think I ever had the patience to get to level 100, as I have no memory of the now known glitches at that level.
Once my parents became convinced the NES was indeed safe for a color TV set, I moved it over and was never able to replicate the trick. I had wondered why aiming at a light bulb didn't have the same effect. The filter you mention explains that part.
I wish I still had that set to experiment with changing brightness and contrast settings. The "green" of the trees translated to a brighter white than the sky. Perhaps there was enough image persistence for it to register. I don't remember if I ever tried shooting the bush or grass, which would have been the same color. Any thoughts?
Hmm, it shouldn't be persistence, as Duck Hunt first checks for a "black" frame before it checks for the white hit square. (That will filter out most light bulbs even if they flicker rapidly like a CF.)
I don't know a lot about how black and white televisions differ from colour ones. It seems plausible that it was producing zapper-visible light with the right timing and location for what you're describing, but I think it would take a bit of scientific work on that original machine to figure out the real details.
@@Sakanakao Well, it's nice to at least be able to rule that out as a cause, and to know that there's not a known, straightforward answer. Thank you for taking the time to reply.
You have a very sleepy voice. I like it. :>
Thanks for the information, I may pick this up myself!! Small critique: I noticed the background music's emotional tone was great for the whole video's topic while it was a mystery but while you were rejoicing at the end, the emotional tone was no good.
Now this actually brings a big spin on the old outdated hardware. Although the NES Classic game pack is free on the Nintendo Switch E-shop. But this brings a big question for Nintendo, although they can't re-release the Black Boxed light gun games like Duck Hunt and Wild Gunman and have it play like the original NES release. But Nintendo can actually re-release the NES Zapper as a modern Switch controller version. The way I can see it working for the Switch is by taking advantage of the IR sensor.
Lots of people used to say the Zapper didn't work because of lag alone, but all you have to do is point out ROB to prove that wrong. ROB isn't connected to the NES in any way so you can have all the lag in the world and it shouldn't matter, but ROB still doesn't work with LCD.
So 5yrs later does it change with LED and Oled Tvs or does the same issue persist and what about plasma tvs?
That solves Duck Hunt. But I don't see anything but the LightGunVerter working with Operation Wolf.
At least that one has a d-pad alternative mode. TBH I find its convoluted range-finding process extremely hard on the eyes. I think your Zap Ping game has a much better claim to worthwhile non-compatible use here.
I agree in principle. But in practice, I mention Operation Wolf to avoid "that's unlicensed/homebrew; it ought not count" objection.
I discovered, that at least my TV showing white background from top to down, so there is noticeable delay from top to bottom part of the screen. Check my last video.
@@DamianYerrick o
I'm so lucky I still have my CRT TV
This is a much nicer comment than all the people below saying "just get a CRT", or "CRTs grow on trees". I am glad someone appreciates that owning a CRT isn't a simple undertaking for everyone. :)
Me too CRT's are getting harder too find. My other one is broken and CRT's are unfixable
@@CrescentZelda Most can be bought for fairly cheap at thrift stores though so at least there's that.
@@CrescentZelda unfixable? Wrong. It's not so hard to fix a CRT, only problem is it can be extremely dangerous if you're doing so while they're plugged in or have been unplugged recently (when i had to fix mine i waited a week before working on it). Also, a very important thing if you're repairing one, you gotta discharge it before touching anything inside. There are tutorials on youtube if you don't know how to do it.
It's alittle controversial but a other way you can get duck hunt to work on a flatscreen tv is if you have a Wii with emulators download the duck hunt Rom and use the Wii remote as a zapper it feels weird but it works
A custom light gun can be made using Gravity IR sensor in junction with the Xbox IR bar thingy. It was demonstrated on a channel called Samco. I couldn't buy the sensor in my location, so I tried using a gyro but it needed to be reset for every run to compensate for drifting. I was thinking of using a wiimote, but that wouldn't be as satisfying as something DIY.
Interesting. I haven't had luck getting my Sega menacer to work on my flat screen. Same thing with lethal enforcers 1 and 2. And a terminator game to. Even my Xbox silent scope game with the big green rifle. As well as house of the dead. I loved light gun games. They were quick and easy to use. Now I see why I was getting so frustrated trying to set them up. I thank you, and I would like to learn more on this.
I have a 36" CRT TV with 6 Video Inputs that I tend to use for Classic Systems. The last time I had it serviced was 2010 about 2 months before the shop closed (my uncle was the manager and I knew about the closing ahead of time). When it finally dies I will be a Sad Panda!
People tend to forget the Wii U VC version of Duck Hunt as an option to play the game. It uses the Wii Mote and a modified ROM for shot recognition. While it plays slightly differently and it's fairly easy due to the displayed reticle, you can still hide the reticle for a more authentic experience.
Now On AFM but you don’t get the satisfying click-clang of the trigger of the original
Joshtamis prime yeah of course it's not perfect. But it's acceptable.
Now On AFM sure I think the easiest way is to just get a crt lol
I picked up a nice CRT yesterday for 5 bucks, busted out my modded original XBOX, and fell asleep watching Braveheart on DVD. Next I'm going to replay Doom 3.
Your voice is basically ASMR. Lived the video, though.
I've seen modern TVs that still go line by line without any buffer
the slow mo guys showed that wit ha modern 4k OLED TV, with thed slow mo camera you were able to see how it was drawn
Yes, most TVs do in fact have a rolling update (or some other update pattern), but it is not at all equivalent to the CRT's progressive scan for this purpose.
"Without buffer" is very unlikely, though. A rolling update does not indicate a lack of buffer. The slow-mo-guys video isn't comparing for latency.
You can get low latency "gaming" TVs, but unfortunately there's just no reason to make a TV with the kind of immediate response a CRT has. Humans can't see/use that speed, it's only necessary for machine-to-machine communication like this, and for every kind of TV except CRT it's much cheaper/practical for it not to be as instant as that.
Loved the video, you have a good voice and a good choice in music. Keep it up.
This is what I got for 2020 chrismas
I did not know about the filter in the zapper! Good video.
This music makes me feel like I'm strapped down in a chair and listening to am evil villains speech about how he's gonna take over the world with ducks and televisions
I wonder if AMOLED TV's would work since they are self lighting pixels like a CRT and do not have a backlight like a LCD.
probably not because I have heard that Plasma TVs also have had issues with light guns. OLED works similar to Plasma with regards to the fact that each pixel is its own emission source.
Sinden, Gun4ir and Aimtrack guns are all good alternatives to play lightgun games on modern display for pc however if you’re not playing on an emulator and got the og nes you gotta get a crt 😎
Subscribed! I was on the fence until I saw your dinosaur hat. They sealed the deal
Well that was a lot easier and cheaper than I'd expected it to be. Okay, I'll give it a shot. I'm on front projection, so I might not have enough brightness, but it only costs me a few bucks to find out.
Holy jeez, my gun arrived today and sure enough, it worked that easily! Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding an extension that works with my light gun, so I have to stand way in back, but wow, duck hunt in 2019, on a big ol' front-projection setup--today feels very special. Thank you for this video. I know what I'm doing all weekend.
Loved duck hunt!! Oh yeah, and world class track meet!
Great video. Weird music choice😂
Part of the problem may be lack of understanding how the light gun works. You can’t just point it at a white screen. When you pull the trigger, the gun reads 2 or 3 separate frames, not just one, depending on game mode. The first frame, the screen goes completely black and the game checks for that so you can’t cheat. The second frame places the white square. If the gun reads black for 1 frame and white the next, you get a hit. If it doesn’t detect the black first, then it’s a miss. When you play 2 ducks it reads 3 frames. First is black, then the second frame, 1 duck lights up and the other is dark. The third frame then blacks out the first duck and the 2nd duck turns white. When the gun reads black then white and on the specific frame, it can determine which duck is hit. If you watch your video when running in slow motion, you can see the screen go black first, then the duck turn to a white box, then back to a normal screen.
Duck Hunt does use a full frame of black, but it's not really inherently required. On a normal CRT the Zapper will read "black" during most parts of a frame except when the beam is actually going past the point where you're pointing. It's important for this specific game to see the right sequence of black and white on subsequent frames, but it's not really an additional special problem on top of the existing latency + visibility problem I've outlined in the video, so I don't think I mentioned it explicitly here.
There are other games that rely on more complicated sub-frame timing like that, such as Operation Wolf. Even Duck Hunt could be modified to skip that black frame on a CRT and use the black during the vertical retrace part of a partial frame to be just as reliable at rejecting "cheating".
This is why the commonly-cited "lightbulb trick" doesn't actually work. It's a great little shibboleth to spot people who didn't actually grow up with the NES and are just repeating bullshit internet rumors and framing them as something they actually tried.
I wonder if this would work with all light gun games or just Duck Hunt because even though Duck Hunt is a great game but actually my 2 favourite light gun games (in no particular order) are Wild Gunman and Hogan’s Ally
I would just point out that this takes advantage of the fact the NES used an uncommon technique for a light gun. At the time light guns generally worked on the principle that a CRT TV is really only showing 1 pixel at any given time. It's just doing it so fast it looks like moving images. If you had a fast enough still camera you could capture this.
It also sequentially sends out the white boxes so that it knows which target you hit.
That’s the reason why hyperkin will come with a hyperblaster gun HD along with a patch software cart to make duckhunt work on lcd screens, however it does not work with duckhunt on multi rom carts and it will also not work with other games, but if i was hyperkin, they should add an update feature on the patch cart sothat it can work with other games in the future.
The music indeed is duck hunt, but man am I going to have nightmares.
The sample-and-hold infographic is not very accurate. It would not make sense to wait and write the whole image at once. So that does not happen, it would demand very weird display panel wiring to instantly feed 6 MB of pixel data into all those cells while the rest of the 16 milliseconds it can take a nap. The pixels memory does follow the scanlines, but it keeps each pixel active till it gets an update. The delay comes from another problem with LCD cells: overshoot. Compare it to an elevator. If you want an elevator to go from floor 0 to 255 in a cycle, it is no problem, it just hits the ceiling and stops immediately. But if you want it to go from floor 100 to 105, it needs way more precise control. It is the reason why you get horrible ghosting with grey-on-grey moving objects, but not with white on black staff rolls or such.
You should try to do the same type of thing to genesis light gun games, I would pay legit money for a patch for those and master system games, specifically missle defense 3-D
Ahhh... so no wonder you dont see the CRT TV through an old video camera (with the static lines going down the TV in a rapid pace)... The screen flickering on a CRT is too fast for that camera to keep up.
That, and a few other things. It's not just the rate at which it refreshes I believe. I can't remember what else factors in that you need to sync up with a crt refresh rate.
Set your camera to 15 or 30 frames per second and you will see an almost flawless video of the tv screen
@@grandinosour right. Modern vintage gamer did a video on it. If your default camera can't do it, then he recommended an app that can.
CRTs display an interlaced image, meaning the odd number lines of the images are shown (drawn out line by line), then the even numbered lines are drawned out. This happens at 60 frames a second. Video cameras will be out of sync with the CRT.
@@conchobar right. Despite the fact that it's running at the same frame rate. That's what I was forgetting. Thanks
Mystery of the universe background music. I like it.
It's the duckhunt title theme slowed down by roughly 16 times
The reason the original light gun for the NES nor the ones released for the 16-bit systems don't work is because modern TVs display at full 60 frames, and not scanline fields like old TVs from the past.
It being a LCD and not a CRT is not the defining factor. Because CRT HDTVs are affected by this too. I found this out a while back when I bought my first HDTV, it was a Samsung TXR3075WH 30" 1080i tube HDTV, it cost $899 back in 2005 but it did not work with my Zapper gun nor Menacer gun for the Genesis.
Zapper works just fine on a Sansui 27" non-HDTV tube I bought the previous year.
Yes, incorrectly interlacing 240p60 into 480i30 is another issue, but it takes a backseat to the two main factors I explained in the video.
For example, the TV I show it working on the end is still doing the 480i30 thing, but the software lag compensation deals with that problem in the same way as the rest of the lag.
@@Sakanakao that's because your HDTV already unconverted the analog signal 480i to 480p when you connected it. The early HDTV CRTs did the same thing.
wow and to think i was considering buying a CRTV. now i will just get this hyperkin thing and emulate it off my switch or steamdeck
I replaced the photodiode in my original Zapper and had a repro made so I could have a legit looking duck hunt setup at home that works with my LCD TV :)
Tommy zap gun is the replacement for the Nintendo zapper I've haven't played duck hunt since I had the power games console and before that the NES Console when my father had one
I remember when I found out that the 2nd player can control the ducks. I used that to get them until I figured out you could just shoot a white piece of paper.
That was before I realized the point was to be challenged by the game and now it's more fun.
That trick never actually worked with the NES zapper. It checks for a frame of no light followed by a frame of light specifically to prevent that kind of cheating. Older light guns were susceptible to it though, which is probably where this rumor comes from.
@@Oneiroclast I don't have the setup to test it anymore but I remember doing it. could be the mandela effect though.
I wish there was more information on creating light gun games. Sadly NESmaker does not support it, and there is little to no information on light gun programming.
(sigh)
Brook Wingman SNES and the Cabela Dangerous Hunts 2011 gun.
I miss gun games
Awesome! Now... what about the SNES Super Scope?
I’m loving this erry slowed down version music of Duck Hunt.
Well that background music is a streeeetch
Duck Hunt is one game that would benefit from the larger area of our modern flat screens.
Recently people tried to use it but the mode doesn't work on original nes because of the pin headers being to short, maybe just work with theirs products only.
Factual errors here: the CRT does not draw a line but a single dot (or 3 if color) at any given time; while the LCD (or any modern screen) CAN'T show the entire screen at once (it would need too much wires and even power) but a whole line (or worst case column) and while it can buffer for sure (if transposes from lines to columns certainly), it can also be almost as fast a CRT or even faster -- 144-240Hz displays aren't rarity anymore -- well, depending the input format.
There is however a fundamental difference in the structure of the picture: the CRT draws interlaced images (only odd lines then only even numbered lines), while most if not all LCD screen uses some sort of deinterlacing and only after that displays the screen line by line, so you don't see jagged edges. The scaling to panel-resolution could also takes time.
1. Yes it's also dot by dot, but from the point of view of the light gun, "line by line" is sufficiently instant (15kHz). I didn't want to split unnecessarily fine differences for the purpose of this video.
2. 250Hz is nowhere near 15000Hz. Modern TVs are just not fast enough. There might theoretically be non-CRT technology that could simulate the CRT's immediate and progressive response, but I doubt a TV like this will ever be built.
3. Maybe this will sound surprising but the NES picture is actually progressive, not interlaced, when correctly interpreted by a CRT. Most modern TVs will incorrectly interpret 240p as 480i, but there is explicit alignment of the fields in the NES signal that makes it progressive. (Also produces the well known gaps between scanlines that some people like to simulate.)
There is a lot of variation in TVs that I had to gloss over. This video isn't really about all the types of modern TV, but my goal was to describe the general issues that more or less universally apply to the problem of playing light gun games on the NES.
Where is the modded room ? I have a Tommy gun..but as figured it didn't work but it looks like I have 1/2 of what I need to get it to work..
neslcdmod.com/ (a simple google search for LCDMOD NES came up very quickly)
What about using the active shutter eyeglasses of 3d tvs as an added filter "create" faster "flickering"?
more work done to kill a virtual dock than a real one
The game industry needs to get on this and make light gun games again. WHERE IS MY VIRTUA COP?
Makes more sense to just do vr.