Articles tagged “Sega Menacer”

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 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

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