Will DC light guns work on tinted glass?

[nickbuol]

I just started the adding of my old Dreamcast to my in progress cabinet (about 1 week left of a few hours here and there) and it just hit me.  If I get nice, dark tinted glass for my arcade experience (was looking for Graylite 14 originally) will the DC look terrible, and more importantly, will the light guns even work?

I am using a 27" TV with S-Video for the arcade, and (unless I can find some automatic video signal switch, and use my RCA to SVideo adapter) RCA composite for the Dreamcast.  The TV is pretty nice, and is a lot better than the one we have in our living room for watching TV everyday.

I have found a place in my area that can get the glass, but it is special order.  My goal with the tint is two-fold.  1) hide my TV so that I don't need a bezel, 2) make arcade games look better.  I could possibly drop to Graylite 31, but that is a lot more light.  No samples are available from the glass company so I can't do any testing either.

Please help!

[Goz]

It should work, but you'd likely have to crank the contrast up or futz with brightness. Unfortunately I don't think anyone can tell you for sure since other factors would be hard to compare. Angle of Monitor, Gun, and tint are all factors.

[Level42]

Your DC won't look bad. Human eyes (or more the brains) adjust to the colors after a short while. And you're not even going to use a color, so the only thing happening is a little loss in brightness. My arcade cab came with a brownish tinted glass. I only noticed that at the moment when I took it off....so

Think the lightgun will be ok too...

[Marky_1979]

i need to buy some tinted glass for my cab but not sure what to order?? is there a set standard everyone uses?

[nickbuol]

Well, I searched and searched and the best I could find was that there is a group that likes tinted glass, and of that, only a few have actually reported what level of tint they are using.

With that little bit of information, I decided to just buy glass today and see what happens, so I called a couple of glass companies and got a 26" x 25.75" piece of Graylite #14 (pretty dark stuff) since I saw it referenced here on several occations.  It ran me $34 for it cut with the ended sanded and polished so that I don't cut my hands on it like I did with my old cabinet's 1/8" thick clear glass.  It is NOT tempered, but neither was my last cabinet, and it never broke.  The old one did chip in one spot, but I was holding it up mainly on 2 screws only.  This time around I am going more professional and using a full 26" wide bracket to hold it up, so it shouldn't chip.  As for safety, my 1/8" clear stuff didn't break after being moved twice, and after over 7 years of use, this stuff is 1/4" thick, so it should be more durable as well.  If I wanted tempered, it would have been about 3 weeks to get it in, and I would have ended up paying over $90 (best price in town) for it.  If I would have stopped by the glass shop this morning instead of over lunch, I would have been able to pick it up yet today, but I will end up with it tomorrow (Tuesday).  I will take it home and get it installed tomorrow night and try out the DC Light Guns myself and report back to the forums with my findings.

[digitalpackrat]

I am currently building my own arcade and have now gotten up to building the top half and am having a hard time making up my mind on what type of material to put in front of my TV, be it glass, plexi or leaving it open.  I too was considering gray lite temered glass (a 1/4" sheet 20" x 32" would cost me btwn $50-60 depending if i went with lite or 14 the darker grey).  But now i'm considering going with clear tempered glass or possibly plexi but i'm afraid of it scratching.  Its hard to find fighting game arcade cabinets anymore to do a comparision to.  Since I havn't made up my mind i'm leaving a 1/4" slotted frame for whatever I choose to place in front of the monitor but any suggestions would be appreciated for the advantages and disadvantages of glass vs plexi and clear vs tinted

[PhoneGuy]

I have dark tinted plexi on my cabinet. I have to remove it to make the DC guns work with my WG D9200 monitor. In general the guns seem to work better with my TV's rather than my monitors. I did not try putting the dark plexi in front of a tv to see if the guns still worked.

[nickbuol]

I installed Graylite #14 glass tonight, but it is getting late, so I will try the DC guns in a couple of days (I am busy tomorrow night)....

I'll report back what I come up with.

[Minwah]

Not exactly answering the question but my Xbox gun works fine through tinted glass with no monitor adjustment.