let us go out this evening for pleasure, the night is still young.


davidrobots
@davidrobots

I picked up a cheap(-ish, for what prices go for these days) Time Crisis 4 bundle off eBay which included the GunCon 3 and sensors. The reason it was cheap? The USB plug was ripped off the end (see image).

Now, light guns are normally built to use the special timing of CRT televisions, which is why you can't just hook up a PS1 to your HDTV, plug in a light gun and play Point Blank. The GunCon 3 was special, as it requires you to place one infrared sensor on each corner of your HDTV, which the light gun reads to provide directional data back to the PS3. Because the gun doesn't work without the sensor, and because the sensors were both small (easy to lose) and fragile (super thin cord), working ones for nearly $100 on eBay on their own (and that's not including the actual gun and the game). So if I can get these working that'd be super cool haha.

I haven't done a USB-ectomy before but stripping the wires down, it looks like it's just a positive and negative wire here (makes sense, like the Wii Sensor Bar, these things just need USB for power, the actual processing is done via the GunCon). I ordered some replacement USB-A plugs since I didn't feel like destroying one of my working cables, so I'll see if I can't get these up and running by the weekend. If I can't, apparently there are a couple of homebrew sensor projects in the works from people looking to give MiSTer owners some extra options for HDTVs, so it won't be a total loss.


davidrobots
@davidrobots

i finally sat down to fix this sensor thingie. i soldered the frayed wires to a new usb plug, hooked it up to my ps3 and it works. i know it's all basic electronics and it's a relatively simple fix (basically just solder one wire to the positive and one to ground, then put a plastic shell around it to keep the connection clean) but it still feels like i'm conjuring some mad sorcery whenever i end up fixing something like this. a lifetime of conditioning to think that once something is broken it should be discarded and replaced with a Shiny New Thing will do that i guess


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in reply to @davidrobots's post:

i... didn't actually know that.

that said, i don't have any move controllers (they jacked up the prices on them ever since psvr came out lmao), and as far as i know they don't work on mister like the guncon does. i just hooked it up there today and have been dinking around in battle clash and point blank all day. it's a far nicer solution for playing old light gun games than syncing up a wii remote or breaking out the crt i'm finding

guncon 2 and 3

But yeah, support is just built in now to the main update script, you need to hook up a keyboard and press f10 on a core menu to calibrate the gun but once it’s set up it works great.

Here’s the video I used to set it up, you can skip the bit about making your own but all the necessary steps in mister are there: https://youtu.be/IjO9UONZL5o