Agreed.

And can the gun ONLY detect white?

Yep, it's a 1 or a 0 thing.

Then have you could have 8 different colors and switch the pallet so that all the pallets are black except 1, And you read the gun, and if it is not a hit, Change that blocks color to black and nother to white, And keep doing this.....But would it be fast enough?

Bunny's method is a more efficient tree since you're cutting the screen in half everytime rather than having to go through every square individually. Even that is slow, but I think you could make it contextually acceptable to certain types of games.

Ok, Cool.

And I have to put this in here.....Power Pad homebrew?

if you can read both peripherals at once, do a powerpad/zapper homebrew. Where your stance on the pad translates into leaning or ducking in the game.

That's an amazing idea! We should consider that....

You'd need a four-score or Satellite to do this though, since PP takes up two slots.

I remember that cop game from the arcade where you lean and the sensors change your perspective on the screen, cool stuff. My only problem with the power pad is it takes some exact stepping to get where you're going, and I have big manfeet

Maybe keeping it simple, treating it kind of like the footpedal in Die Hard or Time Crisis. Any one of the front row of sensors brings you out into the action and the back row does nothing. Maybe the back row cycles through weapons if you want to get that complex (maybe just switch between grenades and your main gun.)

Two players could still play, just plug another zapper into the last slot and you each get a side of your mat.

Yeah, emulating a foot pedal makes more sense than leaning.

Two player shooter...yes! You could use "split screen", then Bunny's shot timing only blanks half the screen and could count twice as fast.

I was thinking more 2-player simul since there won't be any 3D stuff. Your two characters would be in the center-bottm, just background tiles. They're behind something, and when you push the footpedal they jump out. Then everything that's attacking you would be firing bullets down towards your "area" and if you don't let up you see yourself getting hit. No scrolling necessary.

I don't think it would be twice the time would it? Starting with half the screen just eliminates the first binary check.

I was thinking more of a 2-player coop with shared screen though so you could play one-player-two-fisted

Another way to cut down on the time needed is to only have enemies show up in specific spots. If there are only 16 places an enemy could appear in on each screen, that only takes 4 checks to complete, and then you wouldn't have the entire screen turning white/black for that fraction of a second (which I still think would be very jarring) and would get no tunnel effect.

We could simulate the 3D "ducking and hiding" if we just have the whole scene scroll up really fast when you duck, and the background below the screen is of barrels or whatever. Might be kind of dippy though. Also I'm trying to keep this concept simple, and scrolling simply isn't.

I'm an idiot you don't even need to do that. All you do is black the backgroud and switch the palettes for the sprites to all values white in that same binary search fashion. So it only takes as long as a factor of the number of sprites on-screen. If there's only two, it turns one of them to all-values-white, and the other to all-black. If there's four, well you get the idea. Why bother with the whole screen.

Also this would give a cool effect too, less jarring than the tunnel thing. If there's a lot of enemies and it's perceivable to the eye, it will just look like they're shining in the burst of your gunfire temporarily This would be much quicker than drawing a square and removing it, and redisplaying the sprites in terms of processor time.

Yeah, having set enemy positions seems to make sense. That would dramatically improve hit detection timing.

How about a game kind of like the "fortress" levels of Contra? You could either be standing or ducking behind barrels or something, like you suggested. Then after you clear a screen you "run" to the next one. Hell, you could do the Eliminator from American Gladiators!

Power Pad only needs one controller port, but like the Zapper it does not work with the Four Score.  Its possible the Power Pad would work with the Satellite with the switch in the gun position, will have to test it once I can find some batteries....  Likely only one of the ports would work.

Too bad...would have been an awesome concept.

Concept of Zapper + Power Pad would still as a 1 player game, much like Gotcha with the Zapper + controller. Just can't use Four Score or Satellite to do 2 players at the same time.

just curious, why don't the peripherals work through the four score?

Both those use 2 pins of the controller plug that just aren't wired in the Four Score. Would have to be modded with a few extra chips to handle switching those signals between the ports.

What are they? Ground or Voltages?

 That's sort of my idea

ah.

Hey, What pins are not there in the 4 Score, Satelite, Etc....?