The Atari XG-1 light gun is a video game controller which was released in 1987. Atari's only light gun , it is compatible with the Atari 8-bit computers , Atari 7800 , and Atari 2600 . It was bundled with the Atari XEGS Deluxe home computer and video game console combination system, and with the light gun game Bug Hunt for the 7800 as model XES2001 for US$ 34.95 (equivalent to about $ 90 in 2023). Atari eventually released five light gun games on the 7800 ( Alien Brigade , Barnyard Blaster , Crossbow , Meltdown , and Sentinel ) and one on the 2600 ( Sentinel ).
10-529: The XG-1 is a specialized light pen . Generic light pen support was built into the Atari 8-bit home computers since its 1979 launch. The Atari 400/800 Hardware Technical Reference recommends a calibration procedure each time a light pen is used, so that the software can compensate for this offset for maximal accuracy. Bug Hunt and Barnyard Blaster for the XEGS each have unique hard-coded values. A reddish-orange version of
20-588: A front page feature on programming the XG-1 in users' custom software, including his program allowing the light gun to be used to make menu selections. He gave the XG-1 a positive review, calling it an "exciting alternative to joysticks". He said it "has much more 'noise' in the horizontal direction than vertical" due to hardware limitations. The 2014 book Vintage Game Consoles also criticized its accuracy compared to Nintendo and Sega, but says it became collectible as Atari's only light gun. Light pen A light pen
30-553: A light pen, as did early Tandy 1000 computers, the Thomson MO5 computer family, the Amiga , Atari 8-bit , Commodore 8-bit , some MSX computers and Amstrad PCW home computers. For the MSX computers, Sanyo produced a light pen interface cartridge. Because the user was required to hold their arm in front of the screen for long periods of time (potentially causing " gorilla arm ") or to use
40-520: A light pen, where operator clicked symbols superimposed on edited footage. Light pen usage was expanded in the early 1980s to music workstations such as the Fairlight CMI and personal computers such as the BBC Micro and Holborn 9100 . IBM PC -compatible MDA (only early versions), CGA , HGC (including HGC+ and InColor ) and some EGA graphics cards also featured a connector compatible with
50-469: A similar idea at the "Display 2006" show in Japan ). A light pen detects changes in brightness of nearby screen pixels when scanned by cathode-ray tube electron beam and communicates the timing of this event to the computer. Since a CRT scans the entire screen one pixel at a time, the computer can keep track of the expected time of scanning various locations on screen by the beam and infer the pen's position from
60-426: Is a computer input device in the form of a light-sensitive wand used in conjunction with a computer's cathode-ray tube (CRT) display. It allows the user to point to displayed objects or draw on the screen in a similar way to a touchscreen but with greater positional accuracy. A light pen can work with any CRT-based display, but its ability to be used with LCDs was unclear (though Toshiba and Hitachi displayed
70-594: The AN/FSQ-7 for military airspace surveillance. This is not very surprising, given its relationship with the Whirlwind projects. See Semi-Automatic Ground Environment for more details. During the 1960s, light pens were common on graphics terminals such as the IBM 2250 and were also available for the IBM 3270 text-only terminal. The first nonlinear editor, the CMX 600 was controlled by
80-645: The gun was planned for the 2600 and 7800 but was never released. Sentinel is the only game released for the gun on the 2600 console, and Shooting Arcade was planned but never released. For Antic magazine in August 1988, Matthew Ratcliff criticized the poor horizontal accuracy of the XG-1 light gun compared to the NES Zapper or the Sega Light Phaser . In December 1988, he said that, to switch between light gun and joystick games, active XEGS gamers are frustrated by
90-583: The latest time stamps. The first light pen, at this time still called "light gun", was created around 1951–1955 as part of the Whirlwind I project at MIT , where it was used to select discrete symbols on the screen, and later at the SAGE project, where it was used for tactical real-time-control of a radar-networked airspace. One of the first more widely deployed uses was in the Situation Display consoles of
100-445: The need to continually re-plug their devices and power cycle the system, due to the system's lack of autodetection, which is complicated by its awkwardly downward slanting ports. He said " Barnyard Blaster and Bug Hunt could have been just a bit smarter" by including the simple routine that the magazine was forced to write and publish as a workaround. In the August 1989 issue of A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing magazine, Matthew Ratcliff wrote
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