Arcade Light Guns

Optical, positional and infrared arcade guns, and how arcade cabinets made them kick.

Firearms

Arcade Light Guns · Deep Dive

Arcade Light Guns

Operation Wolf's gun is not a light gun at all.

Optical, positional and infrared arcade guns, and how arcade cabinets made them kick.

Photo: Terminator Salvation arcade cabinets with their mounted guns by FR · CC BY-SA 4.0

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 Reading the Arcade Gun — Four Ways a Cabinet Finds the Aim, and Thirty Cabinets on One Page Optical, positional, infrared-marker and camera guns sorted by what the service manuals actually show inside them; a dated catalogue with gun-assembly part numbers; how to read a parts list; and why Operation Wolf's Uzi is a light gun after all
    2. Vol 2 Optical Guns — The CRT Cabinets, 1983 to 2003 A lens, a photodiode board and a cable: what the manuals show inside the optical guns of Exidy, Taito, Konami, Namco, Sega, Atari Games and Midway, the board in the cabinet that times them, the screen flash, and the lighting every one of them hated
    3. Vol 3 Positional Guns — Potentiometers on a Mount, 1988 to 2014 Taito's Operation Thunderbolt and Space Gun, SNK's Beast Busters, Sega's Line of Fire and Alien3, Midway's Terminator 2 and Revolution X, and the fixed-gun cabinets still sold for flat panels: the gears, the 5 kΩ pots, and the three-point calibration that makes them work
    4. Vol 4 Infrared Guns — LED Boards, Sensor Units and Cameras, 2002 to 2014 Sega's gun-sense system from The House of the Dead III to The House of the Dead 4, Namco's Time Crisis 4 mask of twenty filters, and Raw Thrills' camera rifles: what moved off the CRT, what the operator has to clean, and why two cabinets side by side need different frequencies
    5. Vol 5 Arcade Recoil — Cranks, Solenoids, Coils, Motors and Knockers Every way the cabinets in this dive made a gun kick, from Operation Wolf's geared motor and crank to Raw Thrills' brass knocker, as the parts lists and test menus show it; the Namco blowback slide is left to Solenoid Recoil
    6. Vol 6 Keeping One Running — Maintenance, Repair, Calibration and the CRT Problem What the makers told operators to clean, test and replace, the faults their troubleshooting tables expected, where the parts come from now, and what a dead picture tube means for each family of gun