How did Duck Hunt for the NES know where you were pointing the gun?
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So everyone commenting about the gun just being a light detector is right, but they took it a step further in later light gun games.
For example, take something like point blank on the PS1.
You pull the trigger, the screen goes black. The screen then goes fully white, but older screens didn’t light up all at once.
I am not sure specifically but lets just say they lit up one pixel at a time left to right, top to bottom.
The gun would time how long it took between pulling the trigger and detecting a white pixel. It would know, based on a calibration, how long it took to light the screen up to any given point. So it knew where on the screen it was pointing.
That’s why the light guns don’t work on newer screens, because they don’t light up progressively.
It was very effective, I’ve not been able to find anything that works quite as well on modern screens despite all the advancements we’ve made in motion tracking etc.
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