dont get too excited im not a programmer. i have noticed that a few games are already made, getting made or atleast ideas are being bounced around but none of them are Zapper games. So my question to all the homebrewers is why? is it the programming?,  is it something in the hardware? or something else? has no-one actually bothered?

Some of us have/are noodling with it, among other peripherals! Don't be shy though, if you want, jump in and start learning how to do this stuff. It's fun to do, you learn things, and you get to see an end result that you can be satisfied with when you get done with a project (which ALWAYS feels good).

We need more 'brewers :'(

I have one It mostly needs graphics (pokes Tusk). It is harder to come up with a good game type for the Zapper, without just making a copy of Duck Hunt or Hogans Alley. If you have any ideas, post them!

Also looking for a ROB game idea, that one is even harder than Zapper...

how bout a zapper game like whack-a-mole where you shoot the mole. you know kinda like in bugs bunny birthday blowout, but with a zapper.

i did have an idea a bit like sierras "the incredible machine" but the obstacles are already in place. the levels are random but can be selected in easy, medium or hard. the game screen is frozen at the start for say 10 seconds to examine the puzzle and when the ball drops you have to shoot things out of the way, shoot conveyer belts left or right, shoot a cannon up to 4 times up, down, left or right to face the correct direction. even shoot a character that comes in every few levels to steal the ball and if you dont get him you lose a life. all with a timer say 40 seconds per level and even a "par" ranking for the crackshots and time rankings for beating it in 20 seconds and so on. for the ramps you could have a tetris setup where you have to knock the blocks the right way depending on which side you hit. so once you know how the particular levels work you can try to beat the par system and with all the levels random you would have to master all the levels because you wont know what comes next. theres heaps more ideas that could be used but because im not a programmer i dont know whats feasable. as for a ROB game that would involve making brand new peices?? otherwise im guessing that if you were to use Gyro or stackup peices alot more people have the Gyro parts than stackup.

I would think that since homebrews already have a very limited buying audience, that designing a new game for peripherals that many people can't use anymore would be bad from a business standpoint. It would certianly be good for "street cred", but I wouldn't anticipate many buyers.

^ I dunno. Many homebrews are sold right here...and I think most of us have a zapper Later on down the road when the repros start to hit eBay that's a different story, but I like the idea.

Can't say that I do any of it for a buying audience, to be honest. It's just good fun to do the stuff : )

Well, you at least want to make a game that people play, right? Moving forward the vast majority of people won't be able to use a zapper due to the demise of the CRT.

^ more and more people DO have LCD or plasma, but that's usually their one main TV. I'm certain everyone with their own home or more than a 1-bedroom apartment has that old CRT hooked up to an old NES somewhere in the place Can't play on the computer though if you're emulating and using a retroUSB port for your zapper

haha arch, I know you like to debate things alot... and I mean alot, but I just don't see how people not having the kind of TV for a zapper to work properly on an NES collecting forum, is even debatable.

Well we have seen demos of games like doom, so we know that type of game play is possible. I can imagine a game similar to House of the Dead based on the doom demo concept. Maybe something like that would be way too hard to code i dunno.

Haha. Well I probably won't within a year, or so. Once I get a widescreen I won't have anywhere to put the old clunker.

I'm sure that anybody living in an apartment isn't toting multiple TV's around either, granted most renters probably just have a plain old CRT.

Obviously the more serious collectors will have keep a CRT around for posterity, but "ordinary" collectors probably won't. Anyway, you're right, it's not worth debating this, I'm just saying, if you want to make a zapper game do it while somebody can still play it. Otherwise it's just a shelf ornament.

Wait, what? The Zapper only works on a CRT television set? o.O Why doesn't it work with LCD screens? >.>

i'm thinking on-rails shooter here for a zapper game (thats what house of the dead is right?)

Zapper needs the correct refresh frequency of the TV CRT to work.  Projector/LCD/plasma have no refresh frequency so they will not work.  A computer CRT has a higher refresh, so it will only work after modifying the Zapper to match.  It would take a completely different (and expensive) design to work with new TVs.  Everyone should have the Sharp TV with built in NES anyways!

If I had that money bunny, I`d have more games.....

Ahhh, okay, I see now. Thanks!

^^^ Kizul - just so you know, essentially ALL light guns prior to the Wii-remote require a CRT of the correct frequency to operate.

I thought LCD's didn't refresh at all.....And projection TV's....And Plasmas.....!

???

I'm still not 100% sure how to code related to zapper games work. In a simple game, you blank the screen and put a white square, so if the zapper indicates it sees white, you know it hit your only target.
With multiple targets, I think after it detects white, it needs to time the number of CPU cycles before the screen finishes drawing, then based on that time, you know which of the targets you hit.

Does that sound right?

I remember reading about Memblers doing a sound manipulation demo using the zapper. It would emit a higher pitched sound if you shot high on the screen, and lower if you fired toward the bottom of the screen.


Al

One way is to do a timer from the top of the screen until you register a hit. Using the result you can figure out which target was hit. That will have problems if targets are really close or overlapping.

The other way which I used is to do a binary search tree, cutting the number of white targets in half each frame. First all targets (1,2,3,4) are white, if there was a hit then the next frame only half (1,2) are white. If there was a hit then its half (1) again, but if no hit then it was in the other half (3,4). Locating the hit out of 4 items will take 3 frames, 8 items will be 4 frames, etc. The light sensor is continuously running and independent from the trigger so you can take as many frames as you want. The binary tree could also be used over the entire screen instead of just sprites. Make the while screen white, then just left side, then just top quarter, and down as small as you want. It would be ~7 frames to get to the 8x8 tile level.

that's brilliant. If you're doing the whole screen to zero in on one tile I'd imagine it would be pretty jarring though.

It might look cool because it would be doing kind of a white zooming tunnel down to where you are aiming. It still would be a pretty long time at over 1/10 sec.

^^^ You might be able to make a game where thematically it made sense to have the zooming tunnel "effect" Might work for an assassin-type or space-type shooter.