Sinden Lightgun for Windows and Linux blasts past funding goal

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Designed for fast response on LCDs, works with PC lightgun games and emulators.

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Read more.

I'm amazed, that looks terrible.

I am interested to know how they were able to achieve it, considering Namco from Japan could not.
Time Crisis games are all PS games. How are we expected to play these on a PC ( emulator ? )
Virtua Cop3 also never made it to the PC or a console. It's on a proprietary arcade system.

£80 is just a bit too steep...seems an over engineered solution to a problem that doesn't *really* exist to me.

Time Crisis 4 on the PS3 worked really well by using two IR sensors placed on opposite edge of your TV. Sure it involved a bit of setup, but it was cheap and ultimately worked just as well as the original lightgun systems from the PSX era. No lag/latency issues, very accurate and still works to this day. We have fairly regular "shoot outs" in our games room at work on TC4 :) It's the one with the Orange Gun, not the pretty awful "move" system version.

There is an opportunity here though...once this is off the ground and running, they should look to licence the games referenced and release a mini-console along the lines of the Snes mini etc, but purely for light gun games. Heck probably even better to licence the tech to Capcom/Sega/namco and get them to do the hard work.

I'd buy that and £80-£100 wouldn't be an unreasonable cost, its just a bit much for the hardware alone.

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Originally Posted by Spud1

£80 is just a bit too steep...seems an over engineered solution to a problem that doesn't *really* exist to me. <---snip

snip--->I'd buy that and £80-£100 wouldn't be an unreasonable cost, its just a bit much for the hardware alone.

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I thought how reasonable that was, given that a 60 fps camera is around the £60 mark - but this also contains the processor to decode the image, calculate angles etc and determine the point of aim. It looks as if it contains some rotational information as well.

Having watched the video, I though it would be upwards of £150. It isn't "just" hardware, there is the software that goes o the PC and of course the firmware as well.

I get it from a production/hardware cost - but from a market positioning perspective its very expensive imo. Especially when there are open source drivers for Guncon 3 that work with a bunch of MAME emulators (and ofc the officially supported time crisis titles)

https://github.com/beardypig/guncon3

As I say, over engineered for the problem it's trying to solve I think, albeit still a pretty cool solution. Bundled with officially licenced games it would be excellent..but stand alone, its a tough sell.

edit: interesting (for techies :) ) article on how the above driver was reverse engineered - https://www.beardypig.com/2016/01/06/guncon3/

Saw this a few days ago, looks good for retro gaming purposes.

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Originally Posted by Spud1

As I say, over engineered for the problem it's trying to solve I think, albeit still a pretty cool solution. Bundled with officially licenced games it would be excellent..but stand alone, its a tough sell.

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Hit the nail on the head there. I hope this works (on a technical level), I hope the project succeeds, and I really hope that he licenses the tech out to someone who has the capacity to make a real go of it - A manufacturer/studio with the capacity for cheaper production and has licenses to distribute the games too - I love the idea of this as a SNES-mini style system but for gun games, but without that I don't think I can justify the cost for that sort of peripheral.

Watch the retromancave video it shows how it works, pretty neat.

Kickstarter is the only way something like this gets made, no-one is making light game guns or games any more, the magic in what makes this work is modifying emulators (or games) to add a white border around the screen, this allows the camera in the gun to track.

What no Platoon?
C64 version was the best

Price problem is negated by how much of a niche product this is. Enough people buy it market forces will dictate the price...

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Originally Posted by Kato-2

Kickstarter is the only way something like this gets made, no-one is making light game guns or games any more

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True to a degree, which is why I really hope that this succeeds. But another factor is that one of the reasons that home (the arcade ones died with the arcades - different story) light-guns tailed off was that when LCD TVs started to appear, they rendered all the old light guns obsolete - and given the choice people preferred having a nice big, flat TV over a gaming peripheral. As there was no (practical) hardware solution software development rapidly stopped.

My hope for this is that it is popular enough at this stage to interest a bigger manufacturer (who can make it cheaper) will pick it up, which could prompt more software development - otherwise, at best, we're stuck with a niche product supporting old/hacked/emulated games from the past. It would probably take one of the big console manufacturers to do that though.

Still have my Guncon kicking about somewhere, along with various games. This doesn't look as tasty as the guncon but does look a lot better than the Dreamcast light gun. It's a genre that didn't deserve to die and I'm glad the tech is there to allow us to at least play existing games. House of the Dead Overkill is brilliant (despite the wii's lag)

For a moment I was thinking that the name seemed familiar, and was thinking of the company behind Second Life - but then a quick search corrected me that I was thinking of Linden Labs.

Point Blank! Spent a fair amount of money on that game in college... best gun game for feel of the gun. Fast, accurate and the punchy fast recoil just made it feel awesome.

This looks really exciting. It is quite an expensive solution but I think that a lot of people are prepared tp pay for something that gives consistent line of site aiming.
There is a write up of the project here:
https://lightgungamer.com/sinden-lightgun/