Nintendo Super Scope on Modern Television

Back in the NES/SNES era, light gun games – where you point a Zapper or other implement at a target – were fairly common. These devices relied on the way a CRT’s pixels scanned through the display for timing, which lit up only a tiny portion of the screen at once. It’s a clever setup, but one that doesn’t work with modern LCD signals. To bridge new and old, Andy West has come up with a unique Raspberry Pi and Arduino-based solution for the SNES Super Scope.

The project works by tracking four IR LED emitters arranged on the corners of a TV with a Raspberry Pi NoIR camera and filter. This info is sent to a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB model, which then uses OpenCV to calculate where the scope is aiming. Control info is passed along to the Arduino Uno base station via Bluetooth. This translates the signals into SNES-usable outputs that are supplied to the second controller port.

This new rig allows West to play Super Scope games to his heart’s content on a modern TV. Unfortunately, the Scope is actually quite uncomfortable to use for very long, which is perhaps why they weren’t more popular in the first place!