Original Consoles

Modern guns on original hardware: GunCon 2 and 3, Wii, protocol emulation and adapters.

Firearms

Original Consoles · Deep Dive

Original Consoles

Making a new gun speak an old console's language.

Modern guns on original hardware: GunCon 2 and 3, Wii, protocol emulation and adapters.

Photo: The LightGunVerter, an open-source box that makes original-console light-gun games work on flat panels, open, with its universal LED cable by Charlie Cole (charcole/LCDZapper on GitHub)

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 Why the Console Cannot Read a Modern Gun — Two Families of Console, Three Ways Round, and What Has Actually Been Built An original NES, PlayStation or Saturn expects its own gun and nothing else; which consoles want numbers and which want a pulse timed to their own picture; the translators, the timing boxes and the LED in the barrel; and a register of every project and product that makes a modern gun play on real hardware
    2. Vol 2 The PlayStations — Imitating the GunCon and the GunCon 2, Byte by Byte Why the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 are the easy consoles; what an adapter must answer on the controller port and the USB port; the calibration trick Time Crisis plays on a GunCon 2 and how an imitation fakes it; per-game scales; two players and regions; and the four things that do it today: SindenPS, Light Gun Commando, a SAMCO fork and the Time Breaker gun
    3. Vol 3 The Latch Consoles — Timing Boxes That Fake a Cathode-Ray Tube for the NES, Master System, Mega Drive, Saturn, the Konami Guns and the Dreamcast How a box that reads the console's own video can pull the gun line at the instant the beam would have reached the aim point; the LightGunVerter and Light Gun Commando read in detail; the white-level gate that lets an NES play Duck Hunt on a flat panel; the LED in the barrel; console by console what has been done; and the timing budget
    4. Vol 4 Xbox, PlayStation 3, Wii and the Modern Consoles — Three Data Guns, Three Locks, and the Adapters That Do Not Help The original Xbox's light guns imitated on a real Xbox; the GunCon 3's encryption and why its open description has not yet become hardware; the Wii, where the remote already is the gun; why the Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 and 5 and Switch have nothing to plug a light gun into; and what Brook, Mayflash, Reflex Adapt and RetroZord adapters actually convert
    5. Vol 5 The Project's Gun on Original Hardware — A Console Box, a Console Mode, the Licences and a Bench Plan Why the project's OpenFIRE gun is a better input for a console translator than a Sinden; a proposed RP2040 console box that reads the gun over USB and answers a PlayStation, a PlayStation 2 and later the latch consoles; the in-gun GunCon 2 mode and why it stays on the bench; calibrating without a cursor; which open code can and cannot go into a kit; and the order of work
    6. Vol 6 Where It Runs — Original Consoles, Route by Route and Game by Game One table for every original console and every route a modern gun can take to it; what each console needs plugged in; the per-game quirks the sources record; and what to test first with the project's gun