Light Guns and the 2600: How do I do this?

[+atari2600land]

I have an idea for a game that involves the gun. I have the gun, I have a CRT TV, I have an Atari 2600. I want to make a game for the Atari 2600 using the gun. My question is: Have any of the coding gurus out there ever find out a way to detect hits with it? I'm looking for some sample code to start from. I searched this forum and all I got was this topic about how they don't work with LCDs. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[+Karl G]

Here's a post that has a bit of sample code:

 

 

[+atari2600land]

I did this.

Fire at the screen to get past the title screen. The red dot indicates where you hit the screen. I should probably have this part in so people can get a feel for it. What say you?

flies3.bin

[Swami]

17 minutes ago, atari2600land said:

I did this.

Fire at the screen to get past the title screen. The red dot indicates where you hit the screen. I should probably have this part in so people can get a feel for it. What say you?

flies3.bin 2 kB · 1 download

Bobby Needs Food is a 2600 homebrew, so there may be source code for that around. If you can, I would suggest a calibration routine at the beginning, i.e., shoot at a spot at three corners 3x each and center 3x and adjust aim for it. Apparently, Atari never bothered with this.

[Swami]

1 hour ago, atari2600land said:

I did this.

Fire at the screen to get past the title screen. The red dot indicates where you hit the screen. I should probably have this part in so people can get a feel for it. What say you?

flies3.bin 2 kB · 1 download

Here you go. asm source inside the folder. I think this may have a small bug, but the gun source code should be good. Lightgun goes in port 2 for this one.

bnf12.zip

[+atari2600land]

Thanks. I added some more stuff to my game. Next time I feel up to it I will start working on putting a fly to shoot in it.

flies4.bin

[Swami]

6 minutes ago, atari2600land said:

Thanks. I added some more stuff to my game. Next time I feel up to it I will start working on putting a fly to shoot in it.

flies4.bin 2 kB · 1 download

Odd. No lightgun emulation options in Stella. Thought they might use the mouse.

[alex_79]

Stella emulates the lightgun just fine using a mouse and autodetects it correctly with the above rom, so you don't have to configure it.

 

Anyway, if using a regular mouse, you need to enable the cursor visibility in the [Mouse] tab of [Input] settings, else you won't see where you're aiming.
You can keep the cursor disabled if you use e.g. a wiimote as a pointing device, so to recreate the lightgun experience more faithfully.

[Swami]

I needed to update my version

[+atari2600land]

I give up. I can't make any sprite appear on the screen.

[+McCallister]

Interesting project. I just tried it out with a light gun and crt and was able to move the square around the tv, depending on where I was aiming the light gun.