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The tech inside Nintendo’s Duck Hunt Zapper gun is easily some of the coolest to come out of 80’s gaming. The way this device worked with the NES to determine whether or not you’d shot those poor innocent pixel ducks is truly some ingeniously innovative stuff. Unfortunately, with modern technology we don’t really have a lot of space for something designed to work with CRT TVs.
The next logical step is to see what else we can do with these cool light reading guns. In a true homage to 80’s nostalgia one enthusiast has turned the Zapper into a working telephone.
Novelty household phones were huge in the 80’s and 90’s. Once folks realised those plastic outer shells could be shaped like basically anything, well they took that as a challenge. According to Hackaday, Nick has taken that challenge to the next level by developing this wonderfully impractical Zapper phone.
Instead of reading a CRT screen for the perfect input of light patterns, Nick uses the light sensing capability of the Zapper to receive phone calls and transmit audio. It does this by reading the patterns in the laser light transmitted from the phones base station and translating these waves into audio.It’s actually based off of the first phone invented back in 1880 which used light to transmit sound. What’s old is new and old again.
He figured out the device could be used this way after doing a complete tear down on the Zapper, which you can also check out on his channel. In this he got a good understanding of how the gun worked, and also figured out how to bypass Nintendo’s anticheat technology included in the Zapper.
By Nick’s own admission, there is one real downside to the incredible Zapper Phone. It has to be pointed perfectly to receive the laser, which isn’t very useful for a wireless device..
“It’s actually quite bad as a phone.” Says Nick, adding “The sound quality is quite good, but you have to have line of sight with a laser, and it has to be lined up almost perfectly.” Fortunately, the tech here is so cool, I really don’t care how useful the device is.
As these guns didn’t come with microphones, for some reason, Nick has also added one for this project. The resulting setup is this kind of magical laser communication device that transmits audio between the base station and the gun-reciever. Also you get to talk into a NES Zapper gun, what more could you want?
You can get a better look at Nick’s creation in the video above, including an explainer on how it works, and a demo video of the final result. As I’ve said, it’s not exactly pretty, nor practical, but it is really freaking cool.
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