Articles tagged “Sega Mega Drive”

As the previous entries on this site might indicate, I do enjoy a good light gun game. Unfortunately, when it comes to playing them on home consoles you usually need to use a CRT television for the gun controllers to work. I have a CRT or two at my disposal but I'm well aware they won't last forever and they're not really the most convenient devices even when they are working at their best. Bearing this in mind I decided to try to find a way to get light guns working on LCD TVs. My experiments back in early 2015 – called DC-LiGuE, the "Dreamcast Light Gun Emulator" – never amounted to much.

Electronics Light Gun Commando Light guns Sega Sega Dreamcast Sega Mega Drive Sega Mega-CD Sega Saturn Sony PlayStation

Since my previous post I've had a chance to test the Sega Light Phaser to Konami Justifier adaptor circuit with Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters and it seems to work well throughout the game so I thought it was a good time to put the project into a neat box. The Mega Drive uses common DE-9 connectors for its controller ports. You can easily find metal connectors with lugs for panel mounting however I wanted to use plastic connectors similar to the ones on the original console – not just for a consistent look, but to also protect the plastic connectors on the Sega Light Phasers from being scratched by the sharp edges of metal connectors.

Electronics Konami Justifier Light guns Mega Drive light gun adaptor Sega Sega Light Phaser Sega Master System Sega Mega Drive

Here's a quick update to the two Mega Drive light gun adaptor circuits, all to a few extra resistors in and around the adaptor and the console. The real Sega Menacer receiver drives the TH line (used to indicate when the gun has seen light) directly from the output of a NOR gate with a 470Ω resistor in series. My circuit uses a transistor in the open-collector configuration with a 10KΩ resistor on the base input and a 1KΩ pull-up resistor, which is the same as the circuit used in the original Sega Light Phaser.

Electronics Konami Justifier Light guns Mega Drive light gun adaptor Sega Sega Light Phaser Sega Master System Sega Mega Drive Sega Menacer

In the previous post I mentioned I was dissatisfied with the optimisation of the Light Phaser to Justifier adaptor circuit. This was because I was using two quad two-input multiplexer chips (eight multiplexers total) but only using three multiplexers on each chip but also needed two inverter gates and so had to add a third chip to accommodate that requirement. It seemed like there must be a better solution, and after pondering this in the shower I think I found it. One of the inverters is required for the transistor used to drive the TH line from the circuit.

Electronics Konami Justifier Light guns Mega Drive light gun adaptor Sega Sega Light Phaser Sega Master System Sega Mega Drive

Following my adventures with building an adaptor that lets me use Sega Light Phaser guns in Sega Menacer games it seemed sensible to turn my attention to the other type of light gun for the Sega Mega Drive – the Konami Justifier. The two Justifier guns in a photo from Wikipedia These guns are unsurprisingly incompatible with the Sega Menacer and Sega Light Phaser and supported in even fewer games on the stock Mega Drive (only Lethal Enforcers and Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters). However, these games are more in line with the type of light gun game that I like to play than what you'd find in the Menacer's library (even though the digitised sprites haven't aged particularly gracefully) and the guns are eye-wateringly expensive if you want to get a set of both for two-player games which makes the idea of a cheap adaptor to use the Master System's Light Phaser more appealing.

Electronics Konami Justifier Light guns Mega Drive light gun adaptor Sega Sega Light Phaser Sega Master System Sega Mega Drive

In the last post I was having difficulty with the overall logic for handling the light sensor signal from the Sega Light Phaser and passing that along to the Mega Drive as if it was coming from the Menacer receiver. This involves latching the signal (instead of passing it along directly) and allowing the console to reset it once handled via the TR line. The signal needs to be delayed as well to simulate the delay from the overhead of the Menacer's wireless communications; without this delay the aiming is offset to the left.

Electronics Light guns Mega Drive light gun adaptor Sega Sega Light Phaser Sega Master System Sega Mega Drive Sega Menacer

Since the last post about my experiments with using a Sega Light Phaser to play Mega Drive games I've had some good results and some disappointing ones that I'm still trying to work through. The easy problem to solve was the handling of the buttons and making sure that the gun continued to be detected as a Menacer whenever a button was pressed. The previous circuit used active-high buttons (including an inverter to convert the active-low trigger from the Light Phaser into active-high signal) gated using the console's TH line via an AND gate.

Electronics Light guns Mega Drive light gun adaptor Sega Sega Light Phaser Sega Master System Sega Mega Drive Sega Menacer

I'm a big fan of light gun games and have guns and games for most of the Sega systems – the Master System's Light Phaser, the Saturn's Virtua Gun and the Dreamcast's gun all get plenty of use. One notable omission is the Sega Mega Drive and its Menacer light gun. This is a wireless gun with a range of bulky plastic accoutrements that represented Sega's efforts in the 16-bit generation; unfortunately only three games were released for it on the Mega Drive – a six-in-one collection of minigames that came bundled with the gun, a port of T2: The Arcade Game and the ferociously-expensive Body Count.

Electronics Light guns Mega Drive light gun adaptor Sega Sega Light Phaser Sega Master System Sega Mega Drive Sega Menacer

It's not uncommon for parts of old electronic devices to have damaged plastic pegs, like the one in this photo:
If you still have the snapped off plastic peg you may be able to glue it back on, but this can leave a weakened part that doesn't hold up very well. In other cases you might have lost the part entirely. This happened to me recently with the purchase of a six-button Mega Drive control pad. I ordered it from CeX's website and so couldn't see what condition it would be in until it arrived in the post.

Repairs Sega Sega Mega Drive

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