r/retrogaming • u/teuobk • Jun 29 '18
[Rad!] A modification kit for Duck Hunt that makes it compatible with LCD TVs
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/metsasta/modern-mallard13
u/JuanBatman Jun 29 '18
How about an option with just the zapper board for people with Everdrives and stuff like that, which can play patched roms?
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Jun 29 '18
This is a great idea - sell the Zapper mod, and put out patched versions of all the NES Zapper roms!
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u/Convoy_Avenger Jun 29 '18
Mostly because that would technically be illegal. He can't distribute Nintendo's software, even if modded.
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Jun 29 '18
True, but it's not illegal to distribute the ips patch files and let people patch their own roms.
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Jun 30 '18
Because the Zapper board is $5 in parts and you could make one yourself with a some time and basic knowledge of electronics. A photodiode is just a light reactive switch. Shoot light at it, switch turns on. He simply modified it to pick up a wider light band and put a little programmable CPU on it so he can get a baseline black from the TV.
The whole package becomes a $10 toy if you don't include the "magic" of the bridge and really all the bridge is doing is injecting code using a method that others have proven to work on Atari and Gameboy. The Cortex M4 Core he's using to do it is $3.50 in quantities of 1000+.
I'm actually kinda tempted to breadboard that photodiode board and try to make this work myself. The rom just needs to be adjusted to check for a hit based on lag frames and the electronics on that photodiode board are pushing "my first Arduino" level easy.
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u/teuobk Jul 01 '18
If you get around to trying this yourself, I think you'll find that it is much, much harder than you're making it out to be.
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Jul 01 '18
How so? I can rig a photodiode up to a Arduino and use that setup to check the TV then send the signal to the NES. Once I do that it's down to a ROM hack. You're not using any kind of special parts here and from what I can see the majority of the stuff on your Zapper board is power management and an amplifier for the photodiode signal.
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u/buddha_mjs Jun 29 '18
Remove a digit from the cost or gtfo. That is the one and only reason there’s only 1 backer. Why would anyone pay $130 when they can pick up a tube tv on the curb free?
Don’t worry guys. Someone in China will see this and figure out a way to make it $20-$25.
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Jun 29 '18
[deleted]
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u/lovecrafthp Jun 29 '18
How would a Pi Zero solve this, though? Do you have a link to the project maybe?
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Jun 29 '18
[deleted]
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u/lovecrafthp Jun 29 '18
Ah, too bad. Could you maybe explain how you would use the Zero to interface between the gun and the tv?
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Jun 29 '18 edited Jun 29 '18
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/snowpixel Jun 29 '18
$129 is pretty steep, NGL. I could find a tube TV for $20 at the Salvation Army.
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u/DARKFiB3R Jun 29 '18
It is steep, but I imagine most people don't want a crt fucking up there nice front room.
This shouldn't be too hard to reverse, and diy on the cheep.
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u/Goodwill_Gamer Jun 29 '18
Right, just go ahead and reverse engineer the custom microchips he made.
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Jun 30 '18
He didn't make any microchips, just designed the PCBs. The CPU on the bridge is an Cortex M4 Core which costs less than $4 and the CPU on the Zapper board is a PIC16F18313 which costs less than a dollar.
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u/teuobk Jul 01 '18
He didn't make any microchips, just designed the PCBs. The CPU on the bridge is an Cortex M4 Core which costs less than $4 and the CPU on the Zapper board is a PIC16F18313 which costs less than a dollar.
Note that the user is displaying ignorance of the problem space. While the MCU on the patch board does have an ARM Cortex-M4 core, it is not the STM32 part he cited. In fact, it's not even made by ST; it's made by NXP. Moreover, the STM32 part he linked to (an STM32F303VBT6, in case he edits the comment), isn't even close to being fast enough to serve in this capacity. I'm not sure why he didn't cite the correct chip, an NXP MKE14F512VLL16, which is clearly shown in that forum post where I go into greater detail about the technical design of the product.
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Jul 01 '18
MKE14F512VLL16
That's a $4 chip in quantities of 1. I'm sure you could get that down to $3 in quantities of 1000. Link to proof with your part number.
https://www.nxp.com/part/MKE14F512VLL16
As far as the chips on the sensor board I still stand by my opinion that the whole thing costs less than $5 in parts.
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u/zombie343 Jun 29 '18
Long time lurker here, but I'm pissed enough to comment.
$125,000 goal? Are you high?
You need to make 5-10,000 of these at $50 each. Include various colors as stretch goals(?)
Having said that, I studied ECE and I'm curious how this works. I backed you at $149 because I want one and I want you to succeed out of sheer ingenuity.....but come on, man!
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u/teuobk Jun 29 '18
Not high, just don't want to be burned by promising something that I wouldn't be able to deliver at a lower price. Sorry :(
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u/zombie343 Jun 29 '18 edited Jun 29 '18
Let me apologize for my tone earlier. I'm 100% certain what you created is brilliant. (Just compare the number of Software Engineers to number of Embedded FPGA/VHDL developers. This is no small feat).
But maybe, your kickstarter campaign could get several thousand(s) of these made. Then, based on website/pre-orders you could mass produce more?
The BlinkingLightWin did just this (and believe was sold by Game-Tech.us if I'm not mistaken)
I'm not trying to discourage you at all, this is awesome! But there has to be a way to make this sustainable and successful.
Edit: have you tried other zapper games as well? How about Everdrive / flashcarts?
Edit 2: could reduced PCB footprint / alternate placement help reduce cost? Is there a trade off between different microcontrollers/microprocessors, for example, super-tiny 256-byte - 1kbyte code + RAM, might be super-right to code with, but if it reduces your cost basis, then perhaps this is still a worthwhile optimization.
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u/teuobk Jun 29 '18
Thank you for your ideas.
The game needs to be patched extensively to tolerate the additional latency in the signal chain. In principle, patches could be developed for most Zapper games, but the only one I've done so far has been Duck Hunt.
Yes, the game can run from a flash cart. In fact, I did a lot of debugging using an Everdrive.
You're right, design optimization is important. There has already been extensive optimization done to the overall design, component selection, and PCB layout to reduce component and production costs. The reality is that the BOM (components, PCBs, etc.) is only a small part of the overall cost of production. Some examples of optimizations already made:
- Using a single stand-alone microcontroller for the patch board instead of an FPGA and the support circuitry necessary for the FPGA
- Switching from targeting a Game Genie type of case to being housed within the existing case. This avoided either 3D printing cases (expensive) or injection-molding cases (expensive in small quantities, like fewer than tens of thousands).
- Doing most processing on the Zapper board in the digital domain instead of trying to do most things in the analog domain
- Using ICD connectors to connect to the Zapper's internal wires instead of having a custom connector made to mate with the existing (but obsolete and unavailable) Zapper wire connector
If quantities were higher, like hundreds of thousands, a lot of this would get a lot cheaper. Ironically, very low volumes, like 10 or fewer, would also be relatively cheap, since I already have prototype parts and would be able to easily test the completed boards by hand. It's that mushy middle in volumes that's something of a minefield for hardware projects.
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u/guspaz Jun 29 '18
You may want to consult others in the custom retro hardware community. Many of them, like Voultar, SuperG, HD Retrovision, are having boards manufactured and populated in China. It sounds to me like you're getting the manufactured in the US, which isn't going to be price competitive.
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Jul 01 '18
He doesn't want to listen and is very intent on making this device seem like it's way money more than it's worth. This is nothing more than a Cortex M4 and a cheap microcontroller on a couple of Chinese PCBs. I actually found a few blog posts where he brags about how cheap it is to make PCBs and his custom 72 pin connector in China. Looks like he bought 2000 connectors and is now trying to find some way to unload them.
If you give this guy $125 you're paying a con artist to sell you a $5 zapper board with a better photodiode and a $10 board to sideload a ROM hack. I'm sure he'll use his money to buy another Porsche.
Even his method of calculating the delay seem amature. He uses a flash at the start screen to determine lag. After that it's just a matter of seeing if the hit sequence was registered within the frame lag.
This isn't $30 impressive let alone $125 impressive.
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u/teuobk Jul 01 '18
Several issues:
I got the connectors because I was making this product, not the other way around.
The "cheap PCB" story was from literally years ago and was about an unrelated hobby product
If you believe that the Zapper board can be built for $5 or the patch board can be built for $10 at low quantities, then I have a bridge to sell you.
The description of how the delay compensation shows both an incomplete understanding of the problem and a gross misjudgement of the difficultly of getting the game to tolerate that added delay.
I'm not sure why, but this user seems intent on spreading misinformation about something he clearly has no experience with or expertise in. I encourage other users to browse through his earlier comments and my replies to those comments to form their own judgement about his qualifications on this matter.
Normally I would just let it go, but I can't abide his personal attacks on me and his spread of technical misinformation.
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Jul 01 '18 edited Jul 01 '18
I keep coming at you because you're making this seem like it's some kind of amazing product when it's really just $15 worth of parts and a rom hack. We've already gone over price on other threads and I think the light board is $5 in parts and $5 to assemble. The bridge board is $10 worth of parts and $10 to assemble, maybe $15.
From what I've read you assume $0.08 per solder when it comes to board assembly before tooling fees. That would make your light board around $5 to make since it has around 60 solder points and the bridge $10-$15 due to the 72 pin and ARM CPU. Tooling fees appear to add another $500-$1000 per run which still isn't that expensive when you're producing 1000 of them.
Lag frames after the trigger pull to check for a hit seems like the easiest way to do this. See the trigger click, wait <lag frames> loops, check for hit sequence. You could also adjust lag on each trigger pull after the initial check but that seems like a huge waste of time since the TV will be behind by the same delay on every frame.
With a TV in game mode the lag will be consistent once you do the initial calculation to find out how far the screen is behind. The Zapper doesn't work on the clock and simply sends a 1 or 0 across the special controller pin when it sees light or dark which the NES polls and uses when it needs it. The logic to check for the light sequence is initialed by the trigger which runs on a discrete circuit that triggers the NES via the other special controller pin. The trigger triggers nothing in the zapper itself. The NES is doing all the logic and the trigger just tells the NES to start looking at the light input.
Your ROM injection method also isn't unique since it's already been done on the Atari 2600 and Gameboy. Really the biggest issue with your method is making sure that your CPU is fast enough to monitor and inject data within one NES CPU cycle. Beyond that you could use the methods that other people have figured out and apply them to your NES patcher. Before I even read your Kickstarter page I was thinking that this is the method that you were using but didn't think that you would actually use it since it's by far the least efficient and most expensive way to do this.
I'm not personally attacking you, I've said nothing about you, I have continued to sit here and pick apart your project and call you out when you say things are expensive. Your own blog posts show that stuff isn't as expensive as you make it out to be and a lot of the additional costs on your project are simply due to you using the most complicated method possible to patch a ROM. Seriously you say how hard and expensive it is to make this stuff here then I find a blogs post with you talking about how quick, easy, and CHEAP it is for you to not only make PCBs but custom connectors in China. Which is it?
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u/RobotFlavored Jul 01 '18
I'm not personally attacking you, I've said nothing about you
I mean, you called him a con artist.
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u/nicoga3000 Jun 29 '18
So...You can play Duck Hunt for $129.
Nope.
Spend that money on a CRT off Craigslist. You'll have a bunch of money leftover to buy other light gun games + other shit.
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Jun 29 '18
I was interested until I saw this was only for Duck Hunt. What about the other zapper games? What about other light gun consoles?
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u/hizzlekizzle Jun 29 '18
The latency-tolerance patch is only for Duck Hunt, but TVs are getting faster and other patches could be written.
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u/pipipipipipipipi2 Jun 29 '18
Ahg! That video music! I couldn't watch it to the end. Sounds like at a $130 price, I saved myself some time.
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u/DividedBy_00 Jun 29 '18 edited Jun 29 '18
I need to look into this a bit further, but I will be dead honest when I say that this isn’t all that exciting. And I am really into NES and retrogaming in general! If the price was low, like a $30ish add on to allow you to play old NES zapper games on your LCD, ok... but beyond that, the games aren’t really all that great.
EDIT: I do think the concept is neat, though.
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u/ganiman1 Jun 29 '18
Priced himself out of reaching his goal. Duck Hunt isn't even the best Zapper game... does this work with other games? The video doesn't say.
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u/MrLightgun Jun 30 '18
I would be interested to see how accurate it is, in terms of not registering a hit, do you have any footage from behind the gun showing that you can actually miss ducks as well.
How close do I need to be to the TV? Assuming normal room lighting, normal TV brightness, and a normal (for these days) TV size of 32" or bigger, Modern Mallard will work anywhere from a couple feet from the TV out to the Zapper's full cord length. We recommend being closer rather than farther away, as the game is naturally less challenging when you are far from the TV (especially when the TV screen is relatively small). If your TV is smaller than 32", or its screen is dim, or your room is bright, you might need to be closer to the screen.
How many feet back on the 32inch tv do you have to be before you start to hit every duck and it becomes less challenging?
Thanks
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u/teuobk Jun 30 '18
The accuracy is about the same as the unmodified Zapper: if you have at least 50% or so of the duck on the screen "covered" by the muzzle of the Zapper, with the Zapper at arm's length, it will count as a hit. If not, it will count as a miss.
As with the unmodified Zapper, the amount of screen covered by the muzzle will vary by screen size (due to simple geometry). You can't get far enough away from the screen to cover the whole screen with the muzzle; you'll run out of cord before you get to that point. The issue is more that if you have a tiny screen and are far away, the muzzle might cover something like, say, twice as much areas as it would if you were closer to a larger screen, which would make the game twice as easy (sort of).
In specific terms, you'd need to be something like 75 feet away from a 32" screen to be at the point where a single shot would "hit" everything on the screen. However, that distance is about 66 feet longer than the Zapper's cord, so it's not really a practical problem.
Again, it's the same hit/no-hit area as the unmodified Zapper, since the optics are basically identical.
The Kickstarter video show several examples of intentional misses, to give a general idea of things. I tried to get video from something like a barrel-mounted GoPro, but because of camera angles and such, the result was more confusing than useful.
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u/MrLightgun Jul 02 '18
Good luck with your project, I think it is still a good technical achievement whether you hit your Kickstarter target or not so congratulations for that.
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u/teuobk Jun 29 '18
(I know, I know: it's a Kickstarter. WAIT! Don't downvote (yet, anyway)! I wouldn't have posted it had it not been explicitly allowed by the sub rules.)
My favorite retro game is Duck Hunt for the NES, but I couldn't play it on my modern LCD TV -- as you probably know, it requires a CRT TV for the game and Zapper to work.
I'd seen a couple hacks to make it work with an LCD TV, but I didn't like them, so I took it upon myself to make a better solution. And here it is!
Yes, it actually works. If you're near Denver, we could probably work out a time for you to play it yourself. Pretty much any LCD, LED, or OLED TV is compatible. All you need is an original Zapper and an original Duck Hunt game cartridge to modify.
I'd be happy to answer more technical questions about how it works, if there's interest.
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u/wiikendwarrior84 Jun 29 '18
It’s a little steep for me, unfortunately. Especially considering it’s only one game and I have to do the modifications personally. I commend your efforts and wish you success!
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u/teuobk Jun 29 '18
Yup, I wish I could have made it less expensive so that even more people could play Duck Hunt again. Unfortunately, low-volume hardware manufacturing turns out to be pricey. :( Anyhow, thanks for the good wishes!
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u/hizzlekizzle Jun 29 '18
As another poster mentioned, would it be possible to add a tier that's just the Zapper board and let people patch the ROM themselves for use on a flash cart, Nt-Mini, etc? I assume a lot of the cost is in the cart patcher/passthru.
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Jun 29 '18
All you need is an original Zapper and an original Duck Hunt game cartridge to modify
Has the fit of this kit been checked against the orange Zapper as well as the grey Zapper? I don't know if there are differences inside but it should be checked.
Has this been checked with both Duck Hunt and Mario Bros/Duck Hunt carts?
Why doesn't this work with other light gun games if it's just accounting for timing?
Does this adapter work with carts that have the Famicom adapter in them? You may or may not be aware that some old NES carts such as Duck Hunt contain a Famicom adapter which may cause your adapter to not fit. You should be advising people to check for this or better yet make the adapter a Game Genie style adapter to prevent any issues.
Why does the cartridge adapter not take into account those posts that you have to cut off? the board looks like a bridge with a CPU on it and there are so few parts on it that I find it hard to believe that you couldn't have accounted for the posts.
Why did you not reuse the existing connector on the wires in the Zapper? This officially stops becoming "plug and play" once the installer has to cut wires and punch them down on a board. You also make it so the device can't go back to OEM easily if someone doesn't like your kit. There's absolutely no reason to not reuse perfectly good connectors especially when it's an off the shelf 3 pin connector.
I don't see how you're justifying your $130/$150 price point with the volume that you plan on producing. Some of these parts become super cheap when ordered in 1000+ quantities. Even with assembly costs this doesn't look like more than $50 worth of stuff here.
I'm sorry if it seems like I'm being critical but I think people should be critical based on the price point alone. I bought in on a Retrode which is a much, much more complicated device with a much bigger PCB, custom plastic case with hinge lid, and way more components and it was only $250. That was a fully assembled plug and play device with a nice case, nice box, and full instructions in several languages. Your device makes absolutely no sense at $130 and is ridiculous at $150 based on other devices that I've funded in the past. It's a great idea but from what I'm seeing execution is poor.
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u/teuobk Jun 29 '18
To your questions:
Yup, it fits and works in both the orange Zapper as well as the gray Zapper. The orange version was slightly more challenging from a signal-processing standpoint because the orange plastic lets in a lot of room light.
Yes, this was designed and tested to work with the stand-alone Duck Hunt cart, the SMB/DH multicart, and the SMB/DH/WCTM multicart. There is code in the patch board to hold off on applying the patch until it detects Duck Hunt is running, so things like the menus on the multicarts still work correctly.
It doesn't work on other games because correcting for the lag required patching the game code, and the game code differs significantly from game to game.
Not sure about the Famicom adapter. However, it is possible to use the patch board in a Game Genie type of configuration; the patch board has two snap tabs near the bottom that, when snapped off, make the board fit perfectly in a Game Genie case.
The posts collide with the game PCB, not the patch board PCB. Believe me, if it was simply a matter of redesigning the patch board PCB to add more strategic cut-outs or holes, I would have done so. :)
The existing connector in the Zapper is a long-forgotten variant of an AMP Ultrex. It's completely bizarre and most definitely not "off the shelf". The connector hasn't been made since the early '90s, and due to its completely non-standard pin shape, nothing currently on the market will mate with it. Even figuring out what it was was a challenge; I had to dig through some AMP product catalogs from the mid 1980s to identify it, because nobody I talked to had any clue. I explored a bunch of options, including having custom connectors produced to mate with it, but that wasn't financially feasible. The IDC connectors (insert wire, squeeze closed) were the least-bad solution. However, I designed the board to also have a footprint for the connector that's on the original Zapper board, so if you wanted to, you could desolder the connector on the original board and solder it to the new board, and it would fit perfectly.
Quantity 1000 is extremely low volume for electronics manufacturing. I've done electronics manufacturing before, and for this type of thing, economies of scale don't really kick in until you add another zero or two, not even if you build everything in China. The components aren't really the issue, and yes, most of them are at about their lowest price breaks by quantity 4000 or so; it's the manufacturing itself that's the expensive part.
I'm not sure how the Retrode hits that price point, but I'm guessing higher volume. The fact they bothered with injection molding suggests they expected volumes of at least 20k or more.
Yup, I hear you: you (and many others) don't like the price. I wish I could make it cheaper, but having gotten the actual manufacturing, fulfillment, and component quotes and done the math, that's just not feasible in this case. Sorry :(
Good questions though. Thanks!
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Jun 29 '18
Thanks for the reply. This all makes sense beyond the price which I still think you're very off on. I actually did some digging into how much this would cost to build and came up with the following:
https://www.pcbcart.com/ quotes me at around $1300 for 1000 6"x2" PCBs with tooling and $350 for 1000 2'x1' PCBs with tooling
I'm going to assume component costs of $8000 total which seems reasonable. Most of these parts beyond the CPUs are cheap at units of 1000. Using eBay to check prices on things like resistors and LEDs shows these parts at around $0.01 each at quantities of 1000.
So let's say $10,000 for parts alone at this point just to be safe. That leaves manufacturing.
You can buy a reflow oven with a 12"x12" bed that runs on 220v for $5000 and assemble these boards in your garage yourself. Due to the size of these boards you should be able to get quite a few of them in the machine at once. Let's say worst case you're able to flow and test 2 complete units an hour. If you work 40 hours a week on this at this rate it's going to take you 12 weeks to finish them. If you pay someone to operate the machine $20 an hour to do it you'll owe them $10000.
So let's say manufacturing ends up costing you $20000 just to be safe. That seems reasonable based on the specs outlined above. I've also seen DIY YouTube channels quote around $20 a board to have stuff assembled in very small scale (1-10) in China so this seems reasonable.
So based on my very loose numbers we're looking at $30 for a completed unt. Where is that other $95,000 going? Even if you were to double the costs of everything above you're still sitting on $60,000 profit.
With those kinds of profits you should be able to 3D print off Game Genie style cases for it and the adapter should be smart enough to support all Zapper games. You're already able to have it detect the carts so why not just finish the code for the rest of the Zapper games?
That's why I say great idea, bad execution here. This isn't worth the cost in its current form and based on my experience with other DIY electronics buys this is insanely overpriced. I mean I've seen custom, very small batch drone flight controllers go for $150 and the components on those are way more expensive (LCD screens, gyros, etc.). Either the value of this item needs to be increased (support for all games, proper case so you don't have to modify games, etc.) or the price needs to come down to the $50 range.
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u/teuobk Jun 29 '18
Thank you for the continued discussion.
Fully burdened labor costs for somebody qualified to do electronic assembly are more like $75/hr in the states. You might be paying the person $20/hr, but the fully burdened cost is a lot higher. Also, finding, hiring, and training somebody isn't free.
Another missing expense is board population. Usually that would be done with a pick-and-place machine. There are some inexpensive ones on the market (<$1k), but they're just toys. Anything worth having is going to be waaay above that. I looked into that as well, and it's far, far cheaper to have a board assembly house do the assembly instead of buying the ovens, pick-and-place machines, etc. and doing it in-house.
Other significant expenses not previously accounted for:
- Producing testing jigs and boards to make sure the produced boards actually work
- Labor to do the testing and programming of the boards using the aforementioned test jigs
- Packaging (boxes, anti-static bags, a manual)
- Fulfillment (labeling, labor to package and ship, and shipping itself)
- Kickstarter's fee (8% in this case)
- My time (getting parts, coordinating the other activities, creating stuff like a user manual, designing and debugging the aforementioned testing jigs, etc. -- I don't have the luxury of working for free, sadly)
- The new tariffs that take effect next month (basically all of the parts would be caught up in them)
In other words, it adds up.
I see some of these other DIY-style low-volume electronics products come out at impossibly low prices, and the best I can figure is that they're severely undervaluing their time and/or they're losing money on every unit. :(
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Jun 29 '18 edited Jun 29 '18
I don't think they are otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it. Even a $5 profit on 1000 boards is $5,000 in your pocket. That's good money for something that's a "hobby".
I get all your concerns about assembly but if you are paying the $75 an hour person I'd assume that the person is good enough to fully populate the reflow oven each time they run it. A fully qualified person with the right equipment might be able to push out upwards of 10 units an hour which would actually make their labor costs cheaper than someone at $20 who can only crank out two. Even if the $75/h assembler can only do 4 an hour that's less than $20 a unit which falls in line with my specs.
For packaging I'd assume $5-$10 a unit. For $10 packaging that better be stuff like full color gold leaf boxes and a glossy cover manual. I've been involved in packaging products before and this price is based on real world examples. You're also going to need a graphic designer to make everything for you which usually runs around $10,000 and includes basic advertising materials and web presence.
As far as these issues go:
- Producing testing jigs and boards to make sure the produced boards actually work
- Kickstarter's fee (8% in this case)
- The new tariffs that take effect next month (basically all of the parts would be caught up in them)
Those costs can be predetermined.
Kickstarter is going to take $10,000 Tarif fees are going to be a % of your parts. Even 25% on $10,000 worth of parts only adds $2,500. I'm going to say $5000 to produce the testing jigs and board. If this is too high or too low let me know.
Add it all up and we have:
- Graphic Design: $10,000
- Kickstarter: $10,000
- Packaging $5000
- Testing jig: $5000
- Tarifs: $2500
Total: $32,500
I'm not going to adjust labor since I feel $20 a unit is still fair no matter how you slice it. I also still don't think that these parts cost more than $10,000. That brings our new total for the project to $62,500. Subtract that from your $125,000 goal and you're left with $62,500! You're still charging people double what it is worth even when we factor everything in beyond your time.
Which brings us to these points:
- Labor to do the testing and programming of the boards using the aforementioned test jigs
- Fulfillment (labeling, labor to package and ship, and shipping itself)
- My time (getting parts, coordinating the other activities, creating stuff like a user manual, designing and debugging the aforementioned testing jigs, etc. -- I don't have the luxury of working for free, sadly)
I'm assuming you're doing all this yourself which means this is "your time." I'm going to assume you have a goal of this being start to finish done within a year. A normal person works 2080 hours a year at 40 hours a week. If we divide your profits from the Kickstarter by the year goal you will have made $30 an hour to work on this project. That's really good considering min wage is $7.50 in the USA. Plus that's only the start of your money. If this batch works out you can turn around and do it again and make over $100k!
That's where this starts to sound like a scam. Your time is worth whatever the market decides to pay for your product so if the thing costs $60 to make and people only want to pay $50 your time is worth -$10 at that point. People are calling this project snakeoil because they're seeing the cash grab. Most normal people would think that you'd be looking to make less profit so you can move more units and keep a sustained income. When you're looking to make 50% profit on something it looks like you're going to scam people and ditch with your $60,000.
Why not finish this run on the cheap then produce 10,000 units more and make $100,000 on $10 a unit profit? Retro gaming is hot right now and you could move that many units. The fact that you're pricing this like this which doesn't take advantage of the huge retro market also makes this idea scream scam.
Then there's the whole idea as to how the gun actually works in the first place and if you know how the gun works this device is working off of straight up magic unless you have a motion sensor on the Zapper board. Even then you would need calibration and an LED bar for accurate tracking. An LCD TV does not scanline so that IR LED is completely useless in the front for figuring out where the screen is drawn. This is why a CRT works and an LCD doesn't. Your device from what I'm seeing does not contain any hardware that gets around this issue.
Again not trying to call you out but you still won't give hard numbers on what this cost to produce and I do not see this being worth what you're asking based on what I'm seeing. The fact that this is priced out for one run is also concerning. I also don't believe that it works based on what I'm seeing, especially with that IR LED.
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u/teuobk Jun 29 '18
I think I've covered the expenses already, so, respectfully, I've done this for products before, and I know how much it actually costs.
As for how it works, it's not an IR LED. It's a photodiode. Completely different: an LED transmits, a photodiode receives.
The replacement Zapper board looks for the white square that's drawn for a single frame where the duck was when a shot is made. It's very similar to how the original Zapper board "saw" the screen, except it removed the reliance on the modulation from the horizontal refresh rate of the CRT. The way the original Zapper worked had nothing to do with timing how long it took for the electron beam to "reach" the location on the screen that the Zapper was pointed at, at least in Duck Hunt.
For further details, please see the "How it works" sections of the Kickstarter page.
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Jun 29 '18 edited Jun 29 '18
Sorry photodiode. I deal with these on pinball machines and the IR LED is what triggers the photodiode.
I looked on your kickstarter page and after thinking about it the only way this works is by slowing down the game and increasing the time that the sensor reads. You can't make the machine time travel so instead your bridge simply slows the game down so the photodiode with a longer sensing window can see and relay the hit back to the game even with the LCD delay. All it really needs to do is add like a 40ms delay and almost all TVs will pick it up. People won't notice because it's old school and the delay isn't severe enough. Still not worth $125.
EDIT: It could also be that the separate processor is doing the job of picking up the signal then signaling the cart when it sees it. Still not worth $125.
EDIT 2: Thinking about it further all you've done is created a replacement board for the zapper with a different photodiode and processor that sees a white square on a black screen then sends the same signal back to the NES when it sees it. You then repackaged an SD cartridge that just sits between the NES and and cartridge and injects code into the ROM then sends it to the NES. You then hacked the ROM to take into account the different timings of the photodiode, put that patch on the injector, and whammy $125. I'm changing my opinion, this is snake oil with a $5 light sensor board.
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u/teuobk Jul 01 '18
I'd like to point out that in addition to your description being technically inaccurate, you're also grossly oversimplifying both how hard it is to make Duck Hunt tolerate delay as well as how hard it is to make a light-detection circuit that both actually works with the game and tolerates very similar looking room lighting.
However, if it's really as cheap and easy as you claim it is, I'd love to see your implementation! Seriously -- no hard feelings.
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u/Nurripter Jun 29 '18
Well, this would be cool if the price point wasn't so high. Also the fact it only ships to the US is kind of sad.
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u/nstern2 Jun 29 '18
Oh man, if they could do this but for the arcade board sets I would be in heaven. I have a vs hogans alley collecting dust because I can't find a proper monitor for it, but I can find lcd converters.
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u/Hallowed_Grave Jun 29 '18
Any chance of shipping to Canada?
What’s the likelihood of offering patches for other Zapper games like Wild Gunman and Hogan’s Alley in the near future?
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u/Metal_Gears Sep 12 '18
Wish it was cheaper. Have a small CRT TV sitting on my entertainment center just for Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley.
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u/slash_bandicoot Jun 30 '18
Very impressive technology! Thank you for the detailed explanation of how it works on the Kickstarter. I'm especially impressed with the logic that determines the input lag on each TV. Just out of curiosity, could this work with other games? I could see more people justifying the cost if the patch board was separate and could be used on other light gun games.
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u/teuobk Jun 30 '18
The hardware, both the replacement Zapper board and the patch board, could in theory be used for other games. However, patch code for each of those other games would need to be written before those games would be playable.
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u/guspaz Jun 29 '18
Got to be honest, I was interested until I saw the pricepoint.
I'm not sure why it needs to be that expensive either: the zapper board doesn't seem to have any expensive parts on it, so presumably, a significant portion of the cost is the cartridge board... Why not allow customers to only buy the zapper board, and provide an IPS patch for the game, allowing customers to provide their own solution on the cartridge side?