If there is a game that I dedicate my hours to as a child, it is of course ‘Duck Hunt’. At that time, wondering about other things, I did not come to think at all. How did he know that the gun was pointed at the ducks on TV?. But the technology used is very simple and ingenious.

‘Duck Hunt’ was a popular NES game a few decades ago, but now we have the new NES. The aim was to shoot the ducks appearing on the screen. For this, the actor had a gun that he would point at the television screen and shoot as if there was no tomorrow. Now, with such simple technology back then, how would the gun know that it was targeting a duck on TV?

light matter

The weapon inside contained nothing from the other world. It is actually one of the simplest devices we can imagine. owner the button itself for shooting and… a light sensor. That’s all it takes to detect when a duck has been shot or when it’s just the sky.

The process is as follows. When the user plays ‘Duck Hunt’ (or so many duplicates and versions popping up), the idea is to pull the trigger while fully aiming to kill the duck. At that moment, the television screen receives a signal. show a completely black frame. The light sensor uses this black screen as a reference point.

After the first black frame comes a second frame, with almost everything else remaining the same. the screen lights up where the duck should be. So the only thing that appears illuminated on the screen is the duck. From there, if the light sensor detects light as the gun is pointed at the duck, the duck dies. Otherwise, wait for the dog to laugh at you.

and what happened with two ducks on the screen? More or less the same, but there were three squares instead of two. The first frame is all black, the second illuminates the first duck, and the third illuminates the third duck. Since this is a frame thing (there are about 25 per second), the user doesn’t even notice it.

this is really Everything behind the mystery of the NES gun. Light sensors have been with us for almost a century and are by no means the most advanced technology we have created. However, on a console decades ago, and with a bit of ingenuity, an almost sci-fi finish for the time was achieved.

via | Pocket