Do light guns work with this?
No, because lightguns require the electron gun in a CRT. Its how the gun knows where you are pointing it
The light gun doesn’t need a CRT per-se, but rather the lack of input latency. Games usually flash the targets one per frame, and then it knows based on light level if you were pointing at the target and which one. If it sees light on the third frame then the target must be the third one it flashed. That requires the console to be able to read the light level basically immediately after the console’s done scanning out the image but before the phorphor fades out, so the timing is very tight.
If we made OLEDs with direct scanout/zero latency, the guns would work just fine. But because of scalers and filters there’s usually at least one frame of latency which means at best you’re one target off, or it thinks you’re cheating and registers a miss (games usually do a full frame of black first to see if the gun’s pointed at a light source, which if you have a frame of latency on the screen it’ll register the last frame which will be bright and thus register a cheat/miss).
Add just a frame of latency to a CRT and it’ll stop working there too. Later progressive scan CRTs that buffer two frames to deinterlace the signal also don’t work with the light guns.
Here it is in action: https://youtu.be/V6XnSvB34y8
This is correct. It has nothing to do with the underlying screen tech (it does NOT require an electron gun), but on the refresh timing.
If your emulator can tune the gun read to the screen lag, you theoretically could interrupt emulation during the blackout frames to give the gunna chance to see them, although this would almost certainly reveal the effect to the player.
You can actually do it in hardware. There’s ROM hacks for the NES that let you use the light gun on LCD monitors.
Oh sick I didn’t even think about romhacks, that’s probably a much easier/better way to do it!
