yet there's evidence - anectdotal- that the zapper DOES work with a select few LCDs/plasmas. It doesn't seem to be purely dependent on response time, it's basically a total crap shoot which ones will work and which won't, and it's very rare. I'll see if I can dig up the thread later.

Well, getting the Zapper to work on a Plasma or LED display (LCD likely wouldn't be bright enough or need an extremely high contrast ratio) would involve removing the 15kHz filter and adjusting the sensitivity of the photo transistor so that it can detect the low level brightness of a constantly on display rather than the orders of magnitude brighter strobe of a CRT electron gun. You would have to play in a completely dark room with no ambient lighting because the zapper would be too sensitive.

Secondly, after modding the zapper to work with low level non-strobing outputs of the HDTV, NES games would need to be reprogrammed to wait a handful of frames in order to determine hit or miss detection. The pause would be significantly longer, you can only have one target onscreen (multiple targets would require lighting each target for several frames to ensure the detection doesn't timeout before the target shows onscreen. Games could use a calibration test prior to startup which instructs the user to point the gun at the top, middle, and bottom of the screen, and calculate the amout of lag for each region.

So you've got several things going against it here:

Lightgun games aren't that popular to begin with.
Fans of lightgun games and purists likely already own a CRT to play on.
Lightgun needs extensive mods.
Original games won't work with the new system, mandating homebrew efforts.
Homebrew games employing the new system won't work on emulators, nor will they work with a non-modified Zapper, unless legacy mode is built in.
Due to lag, the game has to pause momentarily and wait for whiteout of the target. Screens with multiple targets will take so long to respond that the gameplay will suffer.
Because timing is arbitrary, any light source will do. Feel free to cheat with a light bulb. In fact, the lightgun will have to be so extremely sensitve to work, the game must be played in a completely dark room.

Extremely much effort, little reward and no backwards compatability with period games.

How about modding the NES zapper into a functioning laser gun? Why hasn't that happened yet?

It has.

LOL, awesome!! I had no idea this was even possible. Childhood fantasy realized.

The filter is an RC circuit, which I have seen people change to get 31KHz CRTs working. I doubt you could get it down to the 100Hz range, so the whole thing would have to be replaced. Someone should open up some Famicom light gun clones which might be more simple.

There's no evidence that the Zapper works with anything but CRTs, just some rumors. Actual evidence would be a model number of one that works on camera. As far as I know that has never happened.

Something like this that looks like an NES zapper would be cool for emulators. Don't steal my idea if it hasn't been done already.

http://www.ultimarc.com/aimtrak.h...

I have seen wiimote guts put in zappers for a few years, but pretty much any guns that have a sensor bar will be good for emulators.

A Wiimote by any other name is still a Wiimote.

Probably the single best way to enjoy zapper games on a non-CRT is to use a soft-modded Wii with homebrew emulators. I never modded my Wii but lots of people do. You'll need to use some sort of crosshair cheat because the Wiimote can't know exactly where on the screen it is pointing.

It has.Ultimarc is one of the main suppliers for mame cab parts, and that guns been around for years.  I'm pretty sure they've been stuffed into everything from toy riffles to small cats.

Wait, ultimarc didn't make the old school light guns I thought.  http://www.act-labs.com/products/gun1.htm  was the gun I was thinking of.  They didn't use sensor bars, they user the horziontal scanline timing like SMS and SNES light guns, or light pens used.

Side note, http://www.ultimarc.com/ultrastik_info.html is an awsome joystick.  It's analog, but can be mapped as digital.  I use it for all sorts of neat tricks on my arcade cab a normal 8 way couldn't do, like using it as gas\brakes in racing games, or remapping it so q-bert plays the correct directions,  Also comes with restrictors for shorter throws if you want, and can physically restrict it to 4 or 8 way.  It also works like a mini i-pac if you want, controlling up to 8 buttons.

Kind of unrelated, question, but since you bring up the Ultrastik, it seems to be the only joystick capable of true analog inputs. I have built controller boxes on occasion using arcade parts, replicating the layouts of oversized vintage controllers. I nearly completed a degree in electronics engineering technology (couldn't pass the last damned math class). I would like to build a pad hack controller build based on a clone controller that uses a pot-based thumbstick. I have this dream of playing Mario Kart 64 with a real analog joystick. I'm well aware official N64 controllers use an optical encoder but most knockoff clones use pots. Happ sells a pot-based joystick but it is well over $100, and I'm leery of buying one of those because the throw and useful range would likely be smaller since pots are standard 300 degrees and thumbsticks have longer throw than upright joysticks. Shortening the range could easily be done with trim pots but increasing it would require low voltage OpAmps to do the job. Doable but the Happ analog with pots is expensive as hell and recalibrating the range of input so the controller would respond properly would be a PITA.

Well, back to Ultimarc, Ultrastik comes with a harness that connects to a digital encoder that's only good for USB/MAME and I believe it can also be reprogrammed to run as wired Xbox360 / PS3. There is zero support for legacy consoles. Somehow I would have to convert the signal to an analog voltage level the clone controller could read like a potentiometer / voltage divider. Further complicating the matter is the fact that starting with N64/PSX, many modern consoles used a 3.3V bus, which would require an external 5V supply for the UltraStik controller. Fine for emulation/MAME, useless for pad hacks on original hardware.

Sorry for the thread jack.

That was actually one reason why I almost didn't buy this stick.  Before this, I was using a normal happ stick with an encoder from X-Arcade, since they had great console support at the time.  Since I had a dreamcast box and VGA output, it was simple to run my dreamcast on the arcade machine.  I ended up scrapping that and just using emulated DC, since there wasn't much DC I played on the cab anyways.

And why worry about threadjacking?  I've never seen a thread on NA stay on the same topic for more than 3 pages.

I'm not interested in building a MAME / Emulator cab. I just wanna build an arcade controller enclosure that I can plug and play with vintage consoles. While certainly not ideal, if anybody has a source for those Pea-shooter analogs they used on the X-Arcade cabinets, I'd love to know about it. Quite frankly the layout is obtouse although ftr it was never targeted directly at arcade gamers but designed to accomodate people who cannot operate a traditional game controller with their thumbs due to disability, and I'm not about to spend hundreds of dollars on one just to gut it out and rewire it.

Besides the $170+ offerings from Suzo-Happ, there are industrial analog joysticks for marginally cheaper which are normally used for industrial equipment and power wheel chairs, but they appar to use oversized rubber grommets to stabilize the joystick rather than a spring, and may very well be complete junk for fast twitchy movement. Think 5200 controller.

The only way to have "true analog" cheaply is to use potentiometers and then you end up needing to filter the noise and dealing with pot drift that requires regular recalibration.

The expensive way to have true analog is to go full military grade with a load cell like what is used in modern fighter cockpits, but the downside is the stick doesn't really move much, you just push on it harder and it keeps increasing input up to around 32 lbs of force.

If you can use an optical encoder with a tight enough resolution on the optical wheel you are technically digital, but at a very high number of discrete digital signals that emulate "true analog" but without any drift or noise.

Pretty sure that is what is going on in Thrustmaster's high end flight sticks.

The stick I listed uses a magnet and detechs posistion based of that. Every now and then someone says it's optical, but I've never heard any proof and sure doesn't look optical in there.

Optical encoders are the best option if you can find them I expensively, but they discretize the wheel so it isn't truly analog.

Permanent magnets sound like they could give true analog without drift, though, if used correctly.

Not quite what I had in mind, but cool. Looks like these require a crt. 

I want something like the gun in the link I posted. It uses a sensor bar and emulates a mouse so you can use it with emulators. It plugs in via USB. 

I want to know if something similar has been made that resembles the nes zapper. 

How hard would it be to mod a zapper by taking the parts out of the PC light gun and putting them inside the zapper? I already have the retro link cable so adding USB isn't an issue. 

One of the links you posted earlier was a zapper modded with wii remote guts and doing exactly what describe.

I know, I'd prefer not to use the wiimote as an intermediary though. I want to plug the sensor bar directly into the computer via USB and plug the zapper directly into the computer via USB.

What the guy does in the video works, but it's kind of awkward.

Model numbers:

Sony W705B and Sony W653





No actual video evidence though.

That's a really cool Duck Hunt mod, Patrick.

Read the description. Wiimote guts stuffed into a Zapper.

Now if someone can mod the Zapper Wiimote mod to work with a real NES, that would be amazing.

I understood perfectly what the video was about, cheers.

One youtube comment with no source and no other google matches fits the "rumor" category

doesn't matter. He's using a Wiimote and an emulator. Not the same tech.