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bobbydilley

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Hi,

I was wondering if anyone knew much about the different types of Arcade light gun. As I am aware there are 3 main types (not including analogue joystick type guns):

CRT guns (Like used on HOTD1 and Time Crisis 1)
IR LEDS on screen and camera in gun (Used on things like Confidential Mission, and most modern games)
IR Laser in gun, and camera pointing at screen (Used on Crisis Zone, and I think others possibly Vampire Night? unsure if this is what the RAYS pcb is for)

I'm really interested in the final type, the 'IR Laser in gun, and camera pointing at screen', as it would be super easy to implement using a Wii Remote for tracking and a cheep IR Laser module to put into a gun.

The only issue I'm having, is the slight worry of using an IR laser, and was wondering if anyone owned a Crisis Zone, or another game that worked in this way and knew what power of IR laser was used in the guns, or if it was simply an IR LED with some lens to focus it? I'd be very surprised if Sega actually included a laser in the gun that could damage eyes, but I've yet to find one online thats less than 30mw.

For those interested the benefits of this project would be:

- Gun could easily be wireless with only the laser, a switch and a battery in the gun
- The accuracy would be better, and processing quicker as it would only have to track 1 dot, instead of tracking either 2/4/6/8 dots and computing some position using complex calculations.
- Could be done with a Wii Remote and cheep parts.
- Would fit in well with my JVSEmulator project, and allow accurate light gun play on real arcade hardware with projectors etc. ;)

Cheers in advance for any advice / help,

Bobby
 
Hey @bobbydilley I have looked into the gun set up for a Vampire Night Deluxe, if you want any kind of information about it please feel free to ask.
 
I thought crisis Zone used a normal LED in the gun and then the camera tracked the position based on the position of the dot across the monitor mirror.

I've never looked too deep into this setup so I could be wrong.

If that is correct though you'd need to setup a similar mirror setup and even using a Wii remote camera you'd still need to write the software necessary to interpret the position and convert it to data suitable for whatever game you're running. Wouldn't be too bad to adapt this to games that use mounted guns or the Sega IR gun setup, would be quite a challenge to adapt this to classic CRT gun games though since you'd need to process the RGB Sync signal and get the timing right.
 
@LuKa Perfect - I'll send a PM your way!

@twistedsymphony I think your right about the SD version of crisis zone, but crisis zone DX looks like this and has no mirror. The camera is directed out the back of the 'pedestal' section and points to the large screen, which is why i'm assuming it must be a laser. Would love to try and make an RGB gun to JVS board, but can't find a processor quick enough to read the signal that I'm capable of programming :/
 
I think your right about the SD version of crisis zone, but crisis zone DX looks like this and has no mirror. The camera is directed out the back of the 'pedestal' section and points to the large screen, which is why i'm assuming it must be a laser.
looking at the manual for the DX version the gun is identical and only lists using a normal IR LED.

The DX version seems to use a different gun IO board calls a "rays board" and has an additional sensor called an "obstruction detector" maybe there to detect if something is between the screen and the camera?

Ultimately this looks like it works the same as the mirror cab except it uses the surface of the screen to detect the dot as opposed to the surface of the mirror. It might use a special screen surface to allow the dot to be picked up by the camera more easily (for instance if has a filter to block IR light from the projector and the camera has an IR only filter).

The key here is that the camera is in a fixed position pointed at the surface in which the IR dot will appear.

the IR LED is also quite recessed from the tip of the gun, which is probably intentional to help focus the light to a single point.
 
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