from zerosign.net
I’ve always wanted to use my old-school NES Zapper with my computer and have often thought of the best way to go about this. The original functionality of the Zapper used light detecting technology. When the trigger of the light gun was pressed, the Nintendo console would detect this signal and send a corresponding signal to the TV to blackout the entire screen. Then a white square would be drawn around the target that the gun was to be aiming at (in the case of Duck Hunt, a small white square would be drawn around the duck). If the gun detected the white light coming from the TV, then that meant that you had hit your target and the Nintendo would react accordingly. All this happened with a very fast flash of the screen and was often undetectable if you weren’t looking for it. This method worked fine for a TV but for a CRT computer monitor, or even worse an LCD monitor, it would be nearly impossible to recreate the flashes that the gun is able to detect. So, in order to recreate the functionality of a gun that can control the motion of a computer cursor, a workaround had to be used.

Based on the Powerglove Mouse project previously posted, I decided to use a gyration mouse to translate the motion of the gun into cursor movement on the computer. I found that others had this same idea and were going to great lengths to create their own gyrometer sensor circuit for just such a purpose. However, I thought that since the gyration mouse currently does all the hard work for me, why not just hack it and wire the left click of the mouse straight to the trigger of the gun? This would provide all the functionality that I would need in a NES Mouse Gun and it would be extremely easy albeit terribly ugly. So, for this simple mod, I wired the mouse to the NES Zapper, allowing for both free range motion sensing and trigger happy left-click action. This is a very easy hack, as long as you are comfortable soldering on a $30 gyration mouse, and will give you a fully functional (yet ugly) motion sensing mouse gun fashioned out of the old-school NES Zapper - a must have for any hipster kid from the 80’s.