Playchoice light gun not registering hits

Pulseman

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Title says it all. Just got a duck hunt cart and a gun holster for my PC10, hooked everything up, went to play and nothing. Game sees that the triggers been pulled, but maybe 1 out of every 4 or so hits will actually hit. I also got a flashlight and shined it into the barrel of the gun to test if it actually sees the light and still only 1 out of 4 or so shots go through.

I figure either:
A) the guns borked
B) I suck so bad at duck hunt I can't even cheat to win

Is there anything I can do to test the gun further?

Last thing I noticed is kind of hard to explain. You know how the screen flashes black and puts a white square where the duck is so the gun can register a hit/miss? I only see that square once every couple shots. And while doing the flashlight trick, I noticed the shots only register when I can see that white square. Do yall think this has anything to do with my problem?
 
Title says it all. Just got a duck hunt cart and a gun holster for my PC10, hooked everything up, went to play and nothing. Game sees that the triggers been pulled, but maybe 1 out of every 4 or so hits will actually hit. I also got a flashlight and shined it into the barrel of the gun to test if it actually sees the light and still only 1 out of 4 or so shots go through.

I figure either:
A) the guns borked
B) I suck so bad at duck hunt I can't even cheat to win

Is there anything I can do to test the gun further?

Last thing I noticed is kind of hard to explain. You know how the screen flashes black and puts a white square where the duck is so the gun can register a hit/miss? I only see that square once every couple shots. And while doing the flashlight trick, I noticed the shots only register when I can see that white square. Do yall think this has anything to do with my problem?


Adjust the screen brightness, and removed the smoked bezel.
 
I just got mine working and it took a while before it was solid. After messing around with a PC10 gun for a while I was only able to get hits intermittently. Ended up converting an NES Zapper and it works great now even with the smoked bezel and a pretty normal brightness.

Cleaning the lense is good. Also, if you haven't, check the continuity all the way from the start of the blue wire at least to where the gun connects to the harness. If you don't get anything you'll never get any hits.

In my case, the seldom used zapper, just seemed to have seen less action than the gnarly gun I had. It also has less moving parts without the security cable and rotary at the bottom of the handle. I'll eventually drop the board from the zapper into the pc gun.

I also picked up a couple more guns this weekend at the warehouse sale in Ohio this weekend. One is a dedicated PC or VS and the other looks like a simple, bright blue konami gun. Guy had a box of them.
 
One more thing I noticed as it consumed my weekend. Some spots on the screen, like in the tree or near the bottom registered hits more offer when I was going through all of it with the PC gun. Not sure what that all means.
 
I'll give that a shot later tonight, but shouldn't every shot register a hit if I'm shining a light into the gun?

No, there's something like a bandpass filter so it won't detect light that's outside of the 15khz horizontal refresh rate of the monitor.

Besides, it's unpredictable what a game would do if it was constantly detecting a hit. Especially if there's more than 1 target.

If anyone wants to test their Zapper optics, I could dig out a test program I wrote (if you have a ROM burner). It simple puts on an all white screen and beeps as long as the Zapper is detecting it. Maybe not terribly useful, but it's something.
 
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