Is the guncon 3 dead before it started?

[fastbilly1]

As far as I know Niode, the answer is no. How the lightguns work is so different that it would be a massive plugin to make it work with the emulators.

[nickfil]

Does it work with PS2/PS1 games on a BC PS3? If it does that would be awesome, I'd love to play my multitude of lightgun titles again. I need my point blank fix without having to go out of the house.

it is a resounding no. Would've been nice though. I was hoping that namco would realize that no one can play the other time crisis games on an HD set and release a pack of all of them for the ps3. No such luck.

Sony are still working on that "magic wand" motion control device. I'm hoping once that is finalised, we'll see more lightgun style games appear.

oh right- i didn't even think about that. Hopefully we'll see some more light gun games yet. I like the ones that come out on the wii, but it sucks that older games won't see any kind of replayability on an hd set.

I want to kick my old tube tv out- but i keep holding on because i love point blank.

[bladerunner]

Does it work with PS2/PS1 games on a BC PS3? If it does that would be awesome, I'd love to play my multitude of lightgun titles again. I need my point blank fix without having to go out of the house.

I am pretty sure that it doesn't, though don't quote me on it. I love light gun games, but TC4 was meh so I never ponied up for the game.

[Ivo]

The "old" light gun games had to be coded differently, as the method for identifying where you were pointing was associated also with the software (the screen "flashed" at the press of the trigger, filling it in white progressively. The delay between the trigger and the registering of the white flash light in the photo-diode on the tip of the gun gets passed back into the software, which then identifies the region where you are pointing at, if I understand correctly).

Therefore I think it is non-trivial to have a "modern" light gun work with the old games.

[elvis]

The "old" light gun games had to be coded differently

Not quite. The games code has nothing to do with the input code per se.

You can use LED-style light guns on older consoles (PS2 has a number of them). As long as the interface is the same (i.e.: "Guncon" or "Guncon2" compatible), then the game will work.

The game itself is largely ignorant to the hardware. There are input handling layers at the console that translate specific hardware into API-specific analogue input for the game to deal with. And again, this is why you can find yourself an EMS Topgun with LED bar (using teh Guncon 1 and 2 APIs) and play all your PS1 and PS2 lightgun games on an LCD/Plasma.

The problem is more due to a lack of backwards compatibility at the API level. If a game was specifically designed for "Guncon 1", then the Guncon 2/3 won't work. That's a lack of forsight on Namco's (and other developers') behalves more than anything. Had they instead used a more generic API that could have easily been extended, the games would all have used each other's guns without drama.

With that said, there are a notable few games that can use both Guncon 1 and Guncon 2 APIs (and others). Likewise there are a number of lightguns that are multi-API, and cover a wide range of games (again, like the EMS Topgun II).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GunCon#Gam ... the_Guncon

Whether a gun is a CRT scanline reader or an LED reader is a moot point. The API it encodes to is the key problem.

[Niode]

All my PS2 guncon games worth with both the G-con45 (don't ask me why Namco decided to call it that in Europe, it should have just been called the Guncon) and the Guncon2. So I'm pretty sure the software is forwards compatible. The reason the Guncon2 doesn't work on PS1 games is simply because it uses USB instead of the controller port. When a PS2 boots a PS1 game it doesn't have access to the extra features the rest of the system has, like DVD/USB/MagicGate, hence why you can't boot multi-iso discs on DVD, or why you can't save to a PS2 memory card. The PS1 side of the PS2 just can't interface with these peripheral devices, It's just as much an oversight on Sony's part as it is Namco's.