Light Gun Games

If you’re like me and grew up in the nineties and got to go check out different arcades, you may have seen the various light gun games that came out. You might also remember the Nintendo Zapper which came out in the mid eighties. I have quite a few memories of playing games like Duck Hunt on the NES with my friends.

In 1995 Atari released one of my favorite light gun games in the arcade, Area 51. The game revolves around a special team heading to the Nevada military installation Area 51 to fight off an alien invasion. The game contains six large areas to shoot human-alien hybrids, aliens, exploding barrels, windows, lights, and other environmental stuff. There are power-ups, as well including giving the player a machine gun (I believe it’s an M-16), a regular shotgun, and an automatic shotgun. Sega also joined in on the light gun game craze with games like Virtua Cop and Virtua Cop 2.

While playing these games in the arcade was always a blast, Sega decided to release something amazing for the Sega Saturn, Light Guns. Suddenly you could play Virtua Cop at home using the Sega Stunner on your Sega Saturn. Since I had a Saturn in the late nineties, I started looking for the light guns and light gun games and was even able to get them. I still have my Saturn, both the Sega Stunners (One Orange and One Blue for two player), as well as my copies of Virtua Cop 1 and 2, as well as Area 51. Now I could shoot bad guys or aliens at home! Below you can see a few screenshots from my games.

While it was awesome to be able to play these games at home, one of the things that happened as technology advanced is the replacement of CRT or Tube TV’s with LCD and LED technology. Although this allows for nicer looking video, thinner displays, and higher resolutions, it also breaks light guns due to the way that light guns work with CRT displays. So while people like me still had our hardware, we were no longer able to use it. However that has all changed.

At some point people decided that it was a good idea to develop new light guns for LCD and LED displays. Some of this was showcased in newer arcade machines, like Time Crisis 4, which also came out on the PlayStation 3 and utilized the PlayStation Move to give light gun style controls. However, what if you wanted to play your old games? How about playing Virtua Cop on your LCD TV? While newer games can be played on home consoles like the PlayStation 4/5 using the PlayStation Move controllers or the Wii/Wii U using the WiiMote or the Nintendo Switch using the Joycon, are there solutions that will allow you to play older games that use light guns? Yes there are.

While researching building my arcade machine I decided that I wanted to be able to play my old light gun games on it. Part of this is for nostalgia but also so my family might be able to enjoy some of the old school light gun games that I played. As I researched I found that there were a few options out there. Many of them use infrared technology to track where a gun is pointing which works fairly well but requires additional hardware to track the IR signals properly. While this isn’t bad, old school light guns only required a light gun and the console or arcade machine.

I came across a company called Sinden Technology who developed a light gun in 2020. The amazing thing with the Sinden Light Gun is that it doesn’t need any additional hardware. You can use it on a computer with driver software and nothing else. I decided that this would be the best option for me since I didn’t really want to setup IR hardware and try to figure out how to mount it in an arcade cabinet. I ordered a black Sinden Light Gun which took about a week to arrive. Below you can see a picture of it when it arrived.

It was packed very well, arriving in a well packed box which contained a black box complete with foam to keep the hardware packed safely. The gun connects to a computer via a USB port. The driver installation is quick and pretty easy and the online guide that’s on the Sinden Wiki is easy to follow for Windows. I used Windows 10 to test out how well the hardware works and found that for what I want it is perfect. The driver software sets up a white border around the screen which a camera in the light gun uses to detect the location of the where the gun is aiming (this is the simple explanation.)

I found overall that the Sinden Light Gun works very well for what I want. You do have to take the time to read and follow the instructions otherwise the light gun doesn’t work well. I also found that ensuring you’re at least the minimum recommended distance from the screen helps massively. I tested using a 32 inch View Sonic display and found that being about 50 inches or more away from the screen worked best. Sinden recommends that you keep their light gun a minimum of 1.5 times the size of your screen away from the screen so, for example, using a 32 inch display means you want to be a minimum of 48 inches away. I found that little farther helps it work even better.

I did do some initial testing on my iMac (running Windows 10) which has a 50 inch 4K display. I did have a few issues until I turned off the display scaling, which is a setting that Sinden does recommend you turn off. Once it was off it worked pretty well with a few minor accuracy issues. I think this was due to the resolution combined with the installed graphics hardware. On a small mini computer running Windows 10 at 1080p, the tracking is perfect and running my Light Gun games is epic. At some point I’ll post a video of some of my Saturn Light Gun games utilizing the Sinden Light Gun.

-J