Since the demise of CRTs, the few light-gun games that have made it into the home have mostly done so via the Nintendo Wii. The console can then work out how long it took from the start of the screen flash to the moment when the gun sensed white, and that timing reveals where the gun was pointing.īut none of this works with modern TVs, which use thousands of tiny, constantly lit LEDs. The console will then check the light sensor in the gun to read when it goes from perceiving black to sensing white as the beam reaches the part of the screen the gun is pointing at. Typically, a light-gun game will make the screen flash white when you pull the trigger. My dad was like, ‘Look, if you’re going to do it, you might as well go big' But the beam sweeps across so quickly, multiple times per second, that we perceive it as a continuous image. A beam sweeps across from left to right and top to bottom, only ever projecting one pixel at a time. The way light guns such as the Zapper work is intimately tied how to old-fashioned cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs “paint” images on to the screen. Long-held dream … Andrew Sinden aged eight playing Duck Hunt with the NES Zapper. “It was a real disappointment, because I thought Duck Hunt on a 50-inch TV would be amazing. “I completely forgot that light guns didn’t work on modern TVs,” he admits. “And what I really wanted to do was play Duck Hunt with my kids.” But after hooking up the console to his television, he was dismayed to find that nothing happened when he pulled the Zapper’s trigger. “Of course, the answer was yes,” recalls Sinden. They came across his old NES, and asked him whether he still wanted it.

It all began around four years ago, when Sinden’s parents were cleaning out their loft. “I’d consider the project has failed if I don’t manage to do that,” he says. Andrew Sinden aims to change that: he’s on a crusade to make light-gun games mainstream again.

Whether you were shooting ducks with the NES Zapper or downing baddies in Time Crisis on the PlayStation, they were ubiquitous – yet now they are all but extinct. Almost every console and computer, from the Sega Dreamcast to the humble Amstrad CPC, once had its very own light gun.

Original xbox emulator raspberry pi