Light Gun Musings

[BassGuitari]

Given the proliferation of light gun games in the late '70s, both in arcades and home video game units, and also given Atari's predilection for specialty controllers, it's surprising that Atari didn't release a light gun peripheral* for the Video Computer System in the early days of the console. The perfunctory Target and Skeet games found on various Telstars, TV Scoreboards, and other consoles bearing some permutation of the name "Video Sports" were practically industry standard by the end of the decade. It's interesting and unfortunate that Atari didn't come out with their own light gun and release cartridges with not only their own takes on those primitive shoot-the-block games, but also ports of their own arcade games like Qwak! and Outlaw**.

 

(*Yeah, there was the XE gun many years later, but that wasn't even designed for the 2600, and it is classified as a 2600 peripheral essentially by virtue of the existence of Sentinel.)

(**Ironic that the VCS cartridge called Outlaw was a port of Taito's Gunfight. ?)

 

Given the relative rarity of XE guns and 2600 players who own them, it makes sense that no light gun homebrews exist (to my knowledge). Are there any light gun adapters (such as Sega>Atari) in development? I've heard of people rigging up their own, but nothing readily available from the likes of Edladdin or AtariAge. It seems like both light gun adapters and light gun games would need to happen simultaneously for either to exist. (A game+adapter would be an epic homebrew package!)

[MrTrust]

6 hours ago, BassGuitari said:

Given the proliferation of light gun games in the late '70s, both in arcades and home video game units, and also given Atari's predilection for specialty controllers

 

Did they actually have such a predilection?  I guess, strictly speaking, there were a bunch of different controllers for the 2600 produced by Atari, but really they're all variations on 2-3 main designs; joysticks, paddles, keypads.  Either a bunch of switches on a board with a resistor, or one or two pots with a switch.  I know I'm simplifying it, but still.

 

Now, I'm not that knowledgable, but wouldn't a light gun for thr 2600 be much more parts heavy than any of the controllers they produced for the system (other than the trackball, which is kind of a mystery unto itself)?  I mean, I imagine you could build a really primative light gun out of a cheap phototransistor and not much else, but that would likely only work on a black and white display (and probably not very accurately at that), and wasn't color one of Atari's claims to fame at the time?

 

Just a hunch, but my guess is a light gun would be more parts-heavy and complicated to engineer and service than the sorts of brutally simple input devices they were making, and they figured "why bother?".  Also, in the early days of the 2600 especially, there was a lot of emphasis on 2-player head-to-head games, which I imagine would be a nightmare to try and make work on the 2600, if indeed it would be possible at all.  So, maybe it just didn't fit their product line at the time.

 

Whatever the reason, can you blame them, really?  I'm a big fan of light gun games, but it took a looooooong time for the tech that was avaiable on home consoles to catch up the with coin-ops.  I shudder to think what stable of 2600 gun games might turn out like.  In the 80s, anyway.

[edladdin]

1 hour ago, MrTrust said:

 

 

Just a hunch, but my guess is a light gun would be more parts-heavy and complicated to engineer and service than the sorts of brutally simple input devices they were making, and they figured "why bother?".   

 

 

There’s very little in a light gun.

 

My Coleco Telstar Ranger had one.  I’m sure Atari could have pulled it off.

 

[Swami]

9 hours ago, BassGuitari said:

Given the proliferation of light gun games in the late '70s, both in arcades and home video game units, and also given Atari's predilection for specialty controllers, it's surprising that Atari didn't release a light gun peripheral* for the Video Computer System in the early days of the console. The perfunctory Target and Skeet games found on various Telstars, TV Scoreboards, and other consoles bearing some permutation of the name "Video Sports" were practically industry standard by the end of the decade. It's interesting and unfortunate that Atari didn't come out with their own light gun and release cartridges with not only their own takes on those primitive shoot-the-block games, but also ports of their own arcade games like Qwak! and Outlaw**.

 

(*Yeah, there was the XE gun many years later, but that wasn't even designed for the 2600, and it is classified as a 2600 peripheral essentially by virtue of the existence of Sentinel.)

(**Ironic that the VCS cartridge called Outlaw was a port of Taito's Gunfight. ?)

 

Given the relative rarity of XE guns and 2600 players who own them, it makes sense that no light gun homebrews exist (to my knowledge). Are there any light gun adapters (such as Sega>Atari) in development? I've heard of people rigging up their own, but nothing readily available from the likes of Edladdin or AtariAge. It seems like both light gun adapters and light gun games would need to happen simultaneously for either to exist. (A game+adapter would be an epic homebrew package!)

There is a 2600 lightgun homebrew. It's called Bobby Needs Food. It was originally a PAL game, but an NTSC conversion was made some time ago. A few people have asked for lightgun games, from time to time; Mostly, Duck Hunt. However, homebrewers are mostly creative artists, they make what they want when they want.

[MrTrust]

6 hours ago, edladdin said:

There’s very little in a light gun.

 

My Coleco Telstar Ranger had one.  I’m sure Atari could have pulled it off.

 

Sure.  The technology itself wasn't even new at the time, right?  The question is only over why they would choose not to.

 

I've never played the Telstar or Odyssey or whatever other gun games existed at the time.  From what I've seen they were all pretty much the same.  A single bouncing white block on a black background, maybe the 2nd player can steer it with a dial or something.  Again, this is just my assumption and I can't find much detail on the actual designs of those guns, but I would bet they can't do any other kind of game.  Like I said, a cheap phototransistor gets hit with light from the target, you get current on the pin, and click, you get a point.  If that's indeed how they worked, I imagine they'd be very unreliable unless you were playing in a dark room with the contrast on the TV adjusted properly.

 

To do something with multiple targets and a color display, you'd have to do what the NES gun did and black out the screen and flash the different target areas to encode what the gun's actually pointed at when the trigger is depressed.  Of, course, yeah, still a fairly simple device, but more complicated than, say, a paddle controller, no?

 

 

[Swami]

3 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

Sure.  The technology itself wasn't even new at the time, right?  The question is only over why they would choose not to.

 

I've never played the Telstar or Odyssey or whatever other gun games existed at the time.  From what I've seen they were all pretty much the same.  A single bouncing white block on a black background, maybe the 2nd player can steer it with a dial or something.  Again, this is just my assumption and I can't find much detail on the actual designs of those guns, but I would bet they can't do any other kind of game.  Like I said, a cheap phototransistor gets hit with light from the target, you get current on the pin, and click, you get a point.  If that's indeed how they worked, I imagine they'd be very unreliable unless you were playing in a dark room with the contrast on the TV adjusted properly.

 

To do something with multiple targets and a color display, you'd have to do what the NES gun did and black out the screen and flash the different target areas to encode what the gun's actually pointed at when the trigger is depressed.  Of, course, yeah, still a fairly simple device, but more complicated than, say, a paddle controller, no?

 

 

My thoughts would be that early on 77-80, there was always several arcade games doing better than any lightgun game in popularity so it was never a priority.  Then they seemed to be veering away from specialty controllers as evidenced by Pole Position using only the joystick. I think the keypad controllers were probably an attempt to compete with Intellivision and possibly the computer market. I think that was probably a wild goose chase, as games used the keypads to an ever decreasing level and then the NES, of course, abandoned it for all practical purposes.

 

 

[MrTrust]

1 hour ago, Swami said:

My thoughts would be that early on 77-80, there was always several arcade games doing better than any lightgun game in popularity so it was never a priority.

 

That, and more often than not, the arcade gun games at the time didn't use light guns, but big joysticks disguised as a gun (or crossbow, of course).

 

Of course, now that I say that, you could theoretically make a faux light gun out of a set of paddles.  Put a gun on a rocker that turns one pot for your x coordinate and one for the y.  You could even have a secondary fire button.  You have big enough carts now that you could have room for a calibration program.  Play it on any TV and from any distance from the screen.

 

I wonder if Crossbow could be hacked to do such a thing.

[BassGuitari]

7 hours ago, MrTrust said:

From what I've seen they were all pretty much the same.  A single bouncing white block on a black background, maybe the 2nd player can steer it with a dial or something.  Again, this is just my assumption and I can't find much detail on the actual designs of those guns, but I would bet they can't do any other kind of game. 

The kinds of games available were dictated by the self-contained game chip used (typically the AY-3-8500 or some variant), not necessarily a limitation of the gun itself. The Telstar Arcade's/Gemini's gun games used color sprites, for instance, albeit on a black background. And the colored score digits on the Telstar Marksman can be shot, as well. But as I understand it, you're correct about how those old guns worked and the conditions they required, and to your point, even many color consoles like Telstar Marksman displayed their gun games in B/W.

 

15 hours ago, MrTrust said:

[1.] Did they actually have such a predilection?  I guess, strictly speaking, there were a bunch of different controllers for the 2600 produced by Atari, but really they're all variations on 2-3 main designs; joysticks, paddles, keypads.  Either a bunch of switches on a board with a resistor, or one or two pots with a switch.  I know I'm simplifying it, but still.

 

[2.] Whatever the reason, can you blame them, really?  I'm a big fan of light gun games, but it took a looooooong time for the tech that was avaiable on home consoles to catch up the with coin-ops.  I shudder to think what stable of 2600 gun games might turn out like.  In the 80s, anyway.

1. Yes. ? At first, anyway, which is really what I was originally talking about. Just a year into the system's life, Atari had 20 different cartridges available and four different controllers to play them with. Even Magnavox took shots at this to make the Odyssey 2's hardwired joysticks seem like a plus.

 

2. Not blame; it just seems curious to me that in 1977-79 Atari didn't develop some version of what, at the time, was an industry standard. Sure, it would have been primitive--everything was then. Even if the games were just stylized colored blocks doing different things on a dark background, it's not hard to imagine the ways Atari would/could have spiced them up to their standard (explosion sprites, sounds, colorful screen freakouts, etc) or the game types they might have implemented. The standard Target and Skeet, of course, but maybe stuff like whack-a-mole, quick-draw, second player steers/cloaks/manipulates the target with a joystick, a spin on Skeet where different kinds/sizes of targets fly across the screen at different speeds, etc. Maybe set to the classic early Atari 2:16 time limit. Sprites could have been dressed up as cowboys, aliens, robots, ducks, animals, soldiers, combat vehicles, or whatever else as the theme dictated. Heck, take away the background stars and Star Ship could have been a gun game (parts of it, anyway).

 

TLDR; I think interesting--albeit still primitive--things could have been done with the technology available in the late '70s, and the reasons Atari didn't pursue gun games were probably unrelated to technological capability or design/creative limitations.

 

Maybe gun games would have been better off being shoehorned into Ultra Pong or Video Pinball (as Coleco had done with Telstar Gemini), or even their own dedicated console. In any case, it almost certainly wouldn't have been very long-lived or developed past one or two cartridges (which didn't stop Atari from coming up with Indy 500 and the Driving Controller). Still, it's a tantalizing "what if?"

 

4 hours ago, Swami said:

[1.] My thoughts would be that early on 77-80, there was always several arcade games doing better than any lightgun game in popularity so it was never a priority. 

[2.] Then they seemed to be veering away from specialty controllers as evidenced by Pole Position using only the joystick.

[3.] I think the keypad controllers were probably an attempt to compete with Intellivision and possibly the computer market. I think that was probably a wild goose chase, as games used the keypads to an ever decreasing level and then the NES, of course, abandoned it for all practical purposes.

 

1. That's probably true, but it doesn't account for, say, Video Olympics. Pong was hardly an arcade chart-topper anymore, but variants of it still dominated home consoles. It was *the* standard home video game, and consumers expected it. Light gun games were approaching that level. (Pong of course was also Atari's biggest IP and probably the thing they were most known for at that point, but I digress.)

 

2. The joystick was emphasized from the beginning, but it was unequivocally established as the standard by 1980. If Atari was ever going to experiment with a light gun, it would have been in those early years. (Of course Atari Corp. released Sentinel many years later, but that was a completely different company, using a gun controller that was designed for a completely different console.)

 

3. The Keyboard Controllers predate the release of Intellivision and were largely phased out by the time it launched nationally. IIRC the only reason the keyboard controllers happened at all was because Marketing wanted them, and so they were never meaningfully supported. The paltry number of keypad-compatible games released thereafter were marketed with their own gimmicky variations of the controller, and were intended for use specifically with those controllers.

 

Edited May 2, 2021 by BassGuitari

[MrTrust]

Well, I'll be damned.  It looks like at least the Exidy games from that era had optical sensors after all.  I wonder why, since they were all mounted anyway.  I never played with the XEGS gun, but it looks like that's just a light pen inside a gun casing.  So, I guess what that does is, rather than just read whether or not light hits the sensor, or have some sort of encoding, you track what scanline and pixel the beam is on when light hits the sensor and go from there.  If that's the way they did it with the SMS gun, I'm very surprised how accurately that works, and even from a distance.  And you can build that out just a few components.  So, I guess there really were no technical hurdles to doing it at all, even with two players, and Swami's probably right.

 

Though, I believe if you were going to try and resurrect the light gun idea today, some sort of swivel-mounted analog joystick "gun" would be the way to go given how many people no longer play on CRTs.  Granted, you'd have to set it on a coffee table or something, but that would still be pretty cool.  

[Voxel]

From memory I've an XEGS light gun or two boxed away, somewhere...  I can remember opening one up back in the late 80's and was surprised how little electronics it contained and certainly would agree it's a modified light pen (from when I opened my light pen, which would have been around the same time).

 

I've acquired the odd light gun from buying Pong clones and have yet to buy a DB9 joystick extension cable and see if one can be wired up to work on an XEGS, it's somewhere on the back burner.

[+DrVenkman]

If any of you want to see what an SMS Light Phaser looks like on the inside, I bought one a month or so ago to use with my 7800 via an adapter circuit I found online.  I haven't gotten an adapter working correctly for my 7800 yet, but once I tracked down the broken wire in the cable (right inside the grommet where the cable passes through the case into the grip of the gun), it works great on the SMS light gun games. 

 

 

From photos I've seen, the Atari XG-1 is quite similar, but replaces a lot of the discrete components Sega used (ceramic caps and transistors) with an IC of some sort. I don't have one and they are becoming absurdly expensive, which is why I bought the Light Phaser instead.

 

[Voxel]

@DrVenkman That's some great work.  Knowing Sega borrowed from Atari makes some sense.

 

I've also purchased a third party light gun for the C64.  Should pull my fingers out and test it for Atari compatibility as Commodore also borrowed from Atari and those Commodore light guns go for cheap.

 

Link:

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/52968/Defender-64-Light-Gun/

[+DrVenkman]

1 hour ago, Voxel said:

@DrVenkman That's some great work.  Knowing Sega borrowed from Atari makes some sense.

 

Honestly, I'm not sure who borrowed from whom. Certainly Sega borrowed the use of 9-pin controller connectors for the Master System, through the pinouts - at least as used by the light guns - are a bit different. Also, at least from photos I've seen, the XG-1 PCB is a lot neater, with many fewer discrete transistors and ceramic caps as compared to the Light Phaser. So maybe Atari Corp's engineers got hold of a Japanese-market Light Phaser and simplified it for cheaper and faster construction compared to Sega's? Or maybe it was just parallel development. I certainly don't know for sure.

 

But in any case, I got my janky adapter wired up correctly this morning and can now use my "7800 Pro Blaster" with ALIEN BRIGADE and CROSSBOW on my 7800.

 

[+DrVenkman]

So I got the second version of my Sega Light Phaser-to-Atari adapter PCB back from the fab today and it works like a charm. I had it made to use with my 7800 to play cool and unique games like Alien Brigade, Crossbow and Meltdown, but I tried it tonight on 2600 Sentinel and I love it. That game is great!

 

 

[Voxel]

Awesome work!h