Crisis zone and other projection TV gun games

[lilshawn]

I ran into an interesting situation a while back that has finally wrapped up today and thought I'd share my experience and findings.

Some time ago...in a galaxy far far away, the company i work for purchased a borked "Crisis Zone" machine from an auction. This particular machine has a 50" projection monitor and, as typical, the convergence was all screwed up on it. figured we'd give it a shot at fixing it. so we bid on it and got it for 80 bucks.

the machine gets shipped to up to us and we take a look and the machine. It actually has a Mitsubishi TV plunked inside the cabinet. great. Parts and manuals should be plentiful. no problem.

Get a manual, we do some tests...figure the convergence amps are toast... order up a pair. no go.

so we are trying to decide what to do with this giant cabinet. so we stack up some crates and throw up a 42 inch plasma TV in front of the broken TV and hook it all up.

here is where things get a little weird...

the gun won't pick up at all. And it's not "kkkkkkkkkkke dumbass, gun games don't work with a plasma stupid bla bla bla"

This particular machine has a camera built into the base that points at the TV. the gun has a high intensity IR LED inside that is on all the time. the computer reads the camera image looking for an intense dot of IR the gun projects on the front of the cabinet. It's not a timing signal derived from the scan of the CRT beam like most gun games.

so for all intents and proposes, if you replaced the TV with a piece of cardboard, it would still work. The problem is, the plasma display emits a HUGE amount of IR light and was washing out the video image (verified by tapping into the camera image and displaying it on a secondary monitor. (camera is standard NTSC composite video))

so we tried an LCD monitor. the image was not washed out like before, but the gun cursor was jumping around all over the place. another problem became apparent... the LCD monitor screen showed a reflection of the gun on the screen. The LED light inside the gun is so powerful, the end of the gun lights up like a christmas tree... the camera was picking up 2 spots of IR in it's field of view (the actual beam spot and a reflection of the end of the gun (also verified with tapping the video image), so the computer was spitting out random coordinates trying to lock onto the beam. I don't know if the way the projection TV is built absorbs the reflection or what.

defeated, we started looking into replacing the projection monitor with another. luckily we found an exact model replacement on the local craigslist...we get it up and running again with the "new used" TV and the machine spends 8 months in a school lobby.

but this is not where the story ends.

fast forward to last week... the TV has crapped out, it's like there is no sync going on...it also appears the convergence is starting to go. we swap out the "new" convergence amps from the old chassis (which we kept for parts just in case.) no go.  do a TOTAL recap of the board....still nothing. voltages are good...no reason for failure

so i'm about ready to tie a chain to this machine and drag it down the street... i go into work on moday this week...trip over all the crap from this game ...again. I decide to drag over an old LCD TV just to make sure the machine it outputting a good video signal... and it's good.  i queue up a game for SnG and the gun seems to be working. 

seems this particular LCD TV has a matte finish on the panel. I guess the other LCD TV I tested with previously had a shiny glossy screen on it.

so, I retrofitted a 42 inch LCD TV (with a matte finish panel) into the hole and fill in the space around the outside with plywood painted matte black.

works perfectly. just got finished with it and delivered back to the school today. I have some photos i'll have to dig them up and post them here.

[Karetaker]

I had one of those and thought about doing the same thing with the TV. But, selling it was just SO much easier.