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NEC TG-16/TE/TurboDuo => TG-16/TE/TurboDuo Discussion => Topic started by: alexsduo on January 20, 2010, 08:20:28 AM
Title: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: alexsduo on January 20, 2010, 08:20:28 AM
Hey, I was just wondering if anyone knew whey there was no light gun made.. I mean they have one for almost every system, but I do not know of any light gun games for any TG or PCE stuff... Maybe there was some kind of hardware limitation or something like that?
Alex
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Necromancer on January 20, 2010, 08:45:10 AM
No hardware limitations, they simply weren't very popular (especially so in Japan). Considering the small size of the Turbo market in the US (where light guns sell best... 'cause we're all cowboys or something), the sales potential was almost non-existent and hardly worth the risk.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Turbo D on January 20, 2010, 10:57:15 AM
It's funny that us Americans being cowboys and all didn't get that cool cowboy pistol Japan got with the Famicom light gun games (not that I didn't enjoy my zapper back in the day.) But I digress, hahaha. Anyways, I don't think that the PC-Engine got any light gun games for the aforementioned reason: they didn't sell well in Japan. I'm sure that the PC-Engine hardware was more than capable of supporting one. Maybe the homebrewers on this forum will make one, heh.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Joe Redifer on January 20, 2010, 11:39:47 AM
Cowboys are stupid. However people with guns are bad-ass. I like it when people use guns. There should have been a gun. Japan started it with their arcade games that use guns.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Arkhan on January 20, 2010, 12:09:15 PM
The hardware would def. be able to handle a light gun.
I think at the time of the Turbo's release, the light gun fad was crapped out for the time being. Shoot em ups and all of that were more important.
If it was released a few years earlier or a few years later it prolly would have got one.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: alexsduo on January 20, 2010, 04:01:48 PM
It would have been really cool... I mean the zapper brings back so many great memories of capping ducks, and trying to kill that stupid dog. You got the Zapper, the Menacer, justifier, Sega Master light phaser, the Super Scope, the Saturn gun, xbox gun (sucked) Guncon, Guncon 2, Wii gun, ps3 (not sure about xbox360) and there maybe more!
We love our guns especially in America, so it only seems natural to have the light gun and bring it to kids. The turbo grafx is, in my opinion, the most notable video game system without any kind of gun. I don't think it would have been a bad idea, or as risky as you may think... Parents may be the only opposition to light guns, I doubt any kids would have been against it...
I think it could have made the TG more popular here in the states...Imagine how sleek it could have been, with a laser pointer, and it could have clicked (like the point blank arcade guns) and the colors and sprites, mmmm... Gunboat could have been cooler...
I say, lets make it happen....
-Alex
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Joe Redifer on January 20, 2010, 04:23:56 PM
The problem with that is that CRT TVs are going away and they need CRT TVs to work unless you are willing to hang a whole bunch of IR stuff on your TV. Also, you need hardware makers and software designers. Good luck! I suppose a quick way would be to develop a SMS to TG-16 adaptor thingy so you could use the Sega Light Phaser.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: SignOfZeta on January 20, 2010, 05:14:49 PM
This is a valid question. NEC made a simply stupid amount of hardware at least have of it must have sold worse than a light gun would have.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: esteban on January 20, 2010, 07:14:27 PM
I'm going to play Operation Wolf on my PCE, sans light pistol, and I'm going to love it.
That's right: sans light pistol.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Necromancer on January 21, 2010, 03:02:29 AM
NEC made a simply stupid amount of hardware at least have of it must have sold worse than a light gun would have.
True, but there's a big difference between light guns, which had already been unsuccessfully marketed numerous times, and the various low volume peripherals made for the PCE; most of the rare PCE products were intentionally niche items that were priced high to compensate for expected low sales (LT), relatively unique items that hadn't already been tried by others (Illustration and Print Boosters), or variations of existing hardware that didn't cost much to produce (Shuttle). The Menacer and the Super Scope were both expensive and unpopular with only a handful of games ever produced, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that NEC didn't want to toss their hat in the ring.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Arkhan on January 21, 2010, 06:38:08 AM
to be honest, i dont even give a rats ass about the lightgun on NES. duck hunt is boring.
I only use it for Bayou Billy and you have to be high on meth and demented to enjoy that game :-D
the only light gun I ever truly enjoyed was the super scope.
unless you count saturn/PS1 with Time Crisis and stuff, but that is a different story all together. Thats the era where light guns were good.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: MotherGunner on January 21, 2010, 10:03:52 AM
I like guns. But remember. We got the badass super scope six here in the US
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: TheClash603 on January 21, 2010, 10:34:22 AM
PCE with a light gun and arcade perfect version of Chiller would be a dream come true. Maybe the NEC 2010 will come with a light gun and Chiller 2?
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Tatsujin on January 21, 2010, 12:23:46 PM
lol..those old 4bit stand alone consoles from the early 70s could handle a light gun perfectly, why an uber might PCE shouldn't then?
NEC was to much concentrated in advanced and obscure add-ons, that making a simple light gun.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Arkhan on January 24, 2010, 06:02:41 AM
What NES/SMS/Genesis games really made super fun use of the light gun anyways.
Hogans Alley was lame and Duck Hunt is well, duck hunt.
and Lethal Enforcers..... euhhhh. I guess....kind of.
I think maybe Rambo, Bayou Billy, and thats about it as far as great action + gun went.
Maybe they saw the other consoles lack of it being a key factor to the consoles success as a "why bother".
PCE is too cool for parlor games.
...but an anime heavy CD game supporting the light gun that plays like a cartoon'd up version of virtua cop would have been so kick ass.
esp if the characters were all hot top heavy chicks in cop outfits.
kinda like burn up.
yeah! Just like that.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Tatsujin on January 24, 2010, 06:07:58 AM
wild gunman is still the greatest light gun game to date. shortly followed by the gun bullet/point blank games :)
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: alexsduo on January 24, 2010, 07:55:32 AM
I think I am making that game right now, except most of the characters are naked...
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: esteban on January 24, 2010, 11:01:00 AM
What NES/SMS/Genesis games really made super fun use of the light gun anyways.
Hogans Alley was lame and Duck Hunt is well, duck hunt.
and Lethal Enforcers..... euhhhh. I guess....kind of.
I think maybe Rambo, Bayou Billy, and thats about it as far as great action + gun went.
Maybe they saw the other consoles lack of it being a key factor to the consoles success as a "why bother".
PCE is too cool for parlor games.
...but an anime heavy CD game supporting the light gun that plays like a cartoon'd up version of virtua cop would have been so kick ass.
esp if the characters were all hot top heavy chicks in cop outfits.
kinda like burn up.
yeah! Just like that.
I have fond memories of playing Hogan's Alley in the arcade. Totally fun. It was neat on the NES as well. :)
Bayou Billy's light gun stages were intense. I actually preferred to use the controller because I felt it was easier to kill the boss (that helicopter? can't remember, it's been ages). I could hit the fire button on the controller faster than I could squeeze the trigger.
Still, the crosshairs never moved swift enough with the controller, but those are the tradeoffs.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: SignOfZeta on January 24, 2010, 11:34:03 AM
wild gunman is still the greatest light gun game to date. shortly followed by the gun bullet/point blank games :)
I would add Oh! Bakyuun, which is really Point Blank-like, and Police Trainer...which is pretty boring looking but fun to play.
Most disappointing gun game: GunMania, because its almost always broken.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Arkhan on January 25, 2010, 04:03:31 PM
wild gunman was definitely great...
but the NES renditions of that game, hogans alley, etc. all felt kinda lurpy to me.
bayou billy is probably the most intense NES lightgun game. maybe operation wolf.... I still always thought BB had more swiftness.
and Rambo for SMS....
but still when thats about all you got, it doesnt seem too successful as an accessory.... I think it's best use was in the captain n cartoon to be honest... :-D
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: TheClash603 on January 25, 2010, 11:03:08 PM
Gotcha was always my favorite NES light gun game, I played that a lot as a kid.
More odd is that the tg-16 never had a robot that was primarily used to suck batteries, and occasionally would make Gyromite near unplayable.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: sunteam_paul on January 26, 2010, 12:45:13 AM
Hmm, I wonder if anyone could mod the Wii sensor bar to work with the PC Engine, then hack Operation Wolf or Photo Boy to use it.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Sinistron on January 26, 2010, 02:41:38 AM
NES Gumshoe was where it was at.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Tatsujin on January 26, 2010, 02:46:12 AM
was gumshoe US/EURO exclusive?
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: alexsduo on January 26, 2010, 02:48:52 AM
Hmmm, and use the wiimote as a light gun? That may work, and would be awesome... I bet it could be done with MAME or modified software, but that simply is not where it is at... It needs to be the original hardware...
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Sinistron on January 26, 2010, 02:50:09 AM
appears so Tats-
from Wiki- Gumshoe is a video game developed and published by Nintendo for the NES and released on June 6, 1986 in the United States, and on June 15, 1988 in Europe. Gumshoe is played using the NES Zapper.
from Strategywiki- It is one of the first games ever released for the NES outside of Japan that was not released for the Famicom in Japan. The reasons for this are unknown. It was also released in arcades using Nintendo's "Vs." arcade hardware system as Vs. Gumshoe.
this version was made for the movie exclusivelly and as i have read, it is just a drawed cartoon, not actual game graphx outputed by a computer.
watch the much more detailed and higher amount of sprites and animations. that would give a cool remake though.
Ha! That's totally neat. I didn't like the movie too much, but I'm loving the effort they put into that scene with Wild Gunman.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: exile on January 28, 2010, 04:40:59 PM
I may get stoned for this one , but does anyone remember playing Freedom Force I always thought that was a great zapper game. :clap: Gumshoe is one of the greats Sinistron!
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: esteban on January 28, 2010, 05:18:11 PM
Wasn't Freedom Force from SunSoft?
I never got a chance to play it, but I always wanted to. It was listed in one of those early Nintendo game catalog books (I got it as a freebie with a basic NES, IIRC) ... Freedom Force was a "newly released" or "soon to be released" title, IIRC.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Tom on January 29, 2010, 02:55:03 PM
Somewhat related: In my NES hacking to PCE fever, I was gonna hack some lightgun games for NES/Famicom to PCE. Rigging up the NES gun for the PCE controller port is a cinch too. Never got around to it (didn't think there would be much appeal for this either).
On a side note; for the PCE to have a "real" lightgun system and not what the famicom/nes did, you need to have a counter inside the gun (two 8bit ones actually, one for the scanline number and one for the horizontal pixel equiv) and you reset this counter on vblank interrupt. When you gun sees the edge of the horizontal beem like in arcade, genesis, snes setups - the counter value is stored to a register. On vblank interrupt, you read that value from the port (and reset the gun so it's resynced to the TV). Pretty simple stuff (and very cheap to do), but PCE *did* lack this small feature on the internal side. So that small part has to be external. Definitely not a big deal though. And like others, I'm really surprised this wasn't made.
The method I just described allows you to point to the screen (without pulling a trigger) and have a cursor/target/pointer updated in realtime. The famicom/nes method is not like this. When you pull the trigger, it turns everything black and leaves only the target white. If you have more than one target, it has to flash the screen a few times like this and cycle through. So it's really only good for 1-2 objects. The more objects you have, the longer the flashing is. Kinda limiting for some projects.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: alexsduo on January 31, 2010, 06:29:18 AM
Alright, so let's make it happen... Do you need a gun, and some parts, and what do you think it will cost to make 10? :)
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: exile on February 01, 2010, 03:55:14 PM
Esteban if you still have your NES its worth copping. Its not a classic, but for its time, it was a lot of fun. Get it on the cheap.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Tatsujin on February 01, 2010, 05:47:05 PM
Somewhat related: In my NES hacking to PCE fever, I was gonna hack some lightgun games for NES/Famicom to PCE. Rigging up the NES gun for the PCE controller port is a cinch too. Never got around to it (didn't think there would be much appeal for this either).
On a side note; for the PCE to have a "real" lightgun system and not what the famicom/nes did, you need to have a counter inside the gun (two 8bit ones actually, one for the scanline number and one for the horizontal pixel equiv) and you reset this counter on vblank interrupt. When you gun sees the edge of the horizontal beem like in arcade, genesis, snes setups - the counter value is stored to a register. On vblank interrupt, you read that value from the port (and reset the gun so it's resynced to the TV). Pretty simple stuff (and very cheap to do), but PCE *did* lack this small feature on the internal side. So that small part has to be external. Definitely not a big deal though. And like others, I'm really surprised this wasn't made.
The method I just described allows you to point to the screen (without pulling a trigger) and have a cursor/target/pointer updated in realtime. The famicom/nes method is not like this. When you pull the trigger, it turns everything black and leaves only the target white. If you have more than one target, it has to flash the screen a few times like this and cycle through. So it's really only good for 1-2 objects. The more objects you have, the longer the flashing is. Kinda limiting for some projects.
very interessting tom, I didn't knew much about the later method (real time cursor), and how it worked. you can see this very well using the guncon and f.e. point blank/gun bullet. this system kinda bypasses/takeing the screen info (vblank etc.) by a separate external tab. probably to be faster and more precise. and it really is damn precise. remember the leaf-shoot game in gun bullet on hard mode? only few pixels in size and you can hit it by purpose.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: esteban on February 07, 2010, 01:06:44 AM
Esteban if you still have your NES its worth copping. Its not a classic, but for its time, it was a lot of fun. Get it on the cheap.
I still play my NES :) , and I have at least one light gun, if memory serves.
This topic, and FREEDOM FORCE, has inspired me to play some light gun games.
TANGENT: The first light gun game I ever played was in a cousin's basement. A small plastic box displayed 1-3 pinpoint, moving red light(s) on a wall: a wired plastic rifle was used to fire at these targets. All the hardware was brown/black, IIRC.
It was a blast to play, and I always wondered how it worked. Probably similar to the NES method that Tom explicated above.
BUT: I'm not 100% positive, but I think there were two rifles that allowed 2-player simultaneous competitions. I don't recall the game modes, and I don't think the score was ever displayed...
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: guyjin on February 08, 2010, 11:47:29 AM
Rescue Mission for the SMS is one of the better lightgun games I've ever played.
Title: Re: How come they never made a light gun??!
Post by: Arkhan on February 08, 2010, 04:05:30 PM