From: asklingl@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Andreas Klingler) Subject: Re: TECH: SEGA light guns Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 12:29:07 GMT Organization: CSD., University of Erlangen, Germany Jeremiah.Blatz@dartmouth.edu (Jeremiah Blatz) writes: >In article >bovine@engin.umich.edu (Mitchell Rohde) writes: >> Sega light "phasers" : are they good for anything? >> What is in them? How did they work? >> >> I can buy one surplus here for about $10..... >My thoughts: >I think that the photo-thingie is a photo-resistor. It either acts >differently when exposed to different frequencies or amplitudes of >light. The controlles sends the gun various colors/brightnesses of >light to watch for. When you pull the trigger, the gun opens the circut >that goes through the photo-resistor, and the resistor sends back a >signal to the gun board. If the amprege is the one associated with one >of the colors/brightnesses that the deck requested, the gun sends a >signal to the deck. Well, usually it's much easier (for the gun :-) ). Due to the lens the gun 'sees' only a few pixels from the screen. Whenever the electronbeam in the monitor makes these pixels light up the gun sends a trigger signal to the computer. Since the video controller in the computer knows which position on the screen it was currently writing it knows now also where you are pointing the gun at. Of course the computers hardware must support reading out the beam position to use this (the Amiga does). If it does not, there is still a way: Glue a photo-whatever to the upper left corner of the monitor. You can then measure the time between the corner-trigger and the light-gun trigger to find where you are pointing at. But I doubt this is very accurate. Andreas Klingler asklingl@informatik.uni-erlangen.de I'd love to help you out... Which way did you come in?