Has anyone heard of a reliable way to make a pc light gun out of a guncon? the hardware is there it just doesn't have a driver.
Or maybe, Has anyone heard about something about a pc light gun that I can purchase like this that isn't ACT Labs?
How about making a positional gun? like for silent scope? that would be cool. Too bad I don't know how to mod things for mame...
How about a cheap pc lightugun?
Re: How about a cheap pc lightugun?
What do you mean the hardware is there? Simply because it has a USB connector?
There's no drivers for the pure fact that light guns for PC don't work. CRT monitors have too high a refresh rate for it to work. It would need more than a driver work around to get it to work. You would need to take a video sync from your VGA (I don't even think DVI would work) somehow, and then the screen need to refresh at the rate the lightgun is expecting.
It's a lot more work than just simply bashing a driver together. A lot more physical work than most average computer users (even the fairly experienced ones) are willing to do.
There's no drivers for the pure fact that light guns for PC don't work. CRT monitors have too high a refresh rate for it to work. It would need more than a driver work around to get it to work. You would need to take a video sync from your VGA (I don't even think DVI would work) somehow, and then the screen need to refresh at the rate the lightgun is expecting.
It's a lot more work than just simply bashing a driver together. A lot more physical work than most average computer users (even the fairly experienced ones) are willing to do.
Marurun wrote:Don’t mind-shart your pants, guys
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Re: How about a cheap pc lightugun?
sorry for my ignorance I can understand what ur saying now though thnx for responding
Re: How about a cheap pc lightugun?
I'm not saying it's impossible. You'd need a specific monitor with specific specifications to get the vertical sync right into the gun. You would only be able to do it over VGA (a digital connection like DVI won't work).
To understand why this is very hard to do on a CRT monitor we need to see how Light guns work.
Light guns use the vertical and horizontal trace signals on the display. On a normal SDTV (IE 480 or 572i depending on PAL or NTSC signals) there is an electron beam 'scanning' the screen updating the phosphors ('pixels' if you wish) at a certain rate. Since that rate can be easily traced from the video driver (AKA the console) It's almost always 50Hz/60Hz (or cycles a second). So that beam will update all the phosphors on that screen 50 or 60 times every second. When you pull the trigger on the light gun it flashes the screen white (unnoticeable to the human eye as we can only 'see' 24 frames per second and anything that refreshes faster than that we don't see at all) and depending on the software and hit detection will place a black dot as the target on screen. The software then reads where the light gun is pointing at the screen in reference to whether or not the light gun's photodetector 'sees' the black dot. If it sees the black dot in relation to where the current coordinates of the screen (determined from the H/Vsync of the display) it registers a hit.
Now this is not a problem for CRT monitors. As you can still get the horizontal and vertical sync from it because it still refreshes the phosphors in the same old way. The problem arrises from the fact that with modern graphics cards (we're talking post VGA cards which is decades ago) you don't have access to the pixel clock without additional hardware. The way that they send the signal to the screen is different. It is possible to get a light gun to work with a graphics card but it would need some serious electronic engineering, and to be honest, with the advent of LCD compatible light guns, and the fact that people simply aren't buying CRT monitors on a large scale makes retrofitting a graphics card with the ability to get the pixel clock and the video sync directly out of it before it gets to the screen, completely redundant.
It's easier to get a light gun that works with 2 infrared transmitters and get the coordinates from that instead. It's easier and cheaper in the long run.
Hope that helps to explain why it's not really viable to get a traditional light gun to work on a PC.
To understand why this is very hard to do on a CRT monitor we need to see how Light guns work.
Light guns use the vertical and horizontal trace signals on the display. On a normal SDTV (IE 480 or 572i depending on PAL or NTSC signals) there is an electron beam 'scanning' the screen updating the phosphors ('pixels' if you wish) at a certain rate. Since that rate can be easily traced from the video driver (AKA the console) It's almost always 50Hz/60Hz (or cycles a second). So that beam will update all the phosphors on that screen 50 or 60 times every second. When you pull the trigger on the light gun it flashes the screen white (unnoticeable to the human eye as we can only 'see' 24 frames per second and anything that refreshes faster than that we don't see at all) and depending on the software and hit detection will place a black dot as the target on screen. The software then reads where the light gun is pointing at the screen in reference to whether or not the light gun's photodetector 'sees' the black dot. If it sees the black dot in relation to where the current coordinates of the screen (determined from the H/Vsync of the display) it registers a hit.
Now this is not a problem for CRT monitors. As you can still get the horizontal and vertical sync from it because it still refreshes the phosphors in the same old way. The problem arrises from the fact that with modern graphics cards (we're talking post VGA cards which is decades ago) you don't have access to the pixel clock without additional hardware. The way that they send the signal to the screen is different. It is possible to get a light gun to work with a graphics card but it would need some serious electronic engineering, and to be honest, with the advent of LCD compatible light guns, and the fact that people simply aren't buying CRT monitors on a large scale makes retrofitting a graphics card with the ability to get the pixel clock and the video sync directly out of it before it gets to the screen, completely redundant.
It's easier to get a light gun that works with 2 infrared transmitters and get the coordinates from that instead. It's easier and cheaper in the long run.
Hope that helps to explain why it's not really viable to get a traditional light gun to work on a PC.
Marurun wrote:Don’t mind-shart your pants, guys