MiSTer FPGA Now Supports The Sinden Lightgun 1
Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension

The brilliant Sinden Light Gun is now supported by the MiSTer FPGA platform.

In case you weren't aware, the Sinden is a modern-day light gun which is compatible with non-CRT televisions and displays, and uses a video camera in the barrel of the gun to 'watch' the screen, avoiding the need for external IR emitters or sensors around the screen.

Because the Sinden expects the platform it is running on to crunch the numbers, this adds to the processing workload – and, for this reason, it was assumed that MiSTer wouldn't ever gain compatibility with the lightgun.

However, the creator of the Sinden has spent "a lot of time developing a low resource driver that can comfortably run on the MiSTer and also removed many required components so it can run on the streamlined Linux OS."

The end result is full Sinden support on MiSTer, which means you can now play lightgun games like Duck Hunt, Time Crisis and Battle Clash the way they were meant to be played.

There's a full setup guide here, but to cut a long story short, you'll need to make sure your Sinden is running the latest v1.09 firmware before you do anything.

Core support is currently limited to NES, PS1, Mega Drive / Genesis and SNES, and this is by no means the finished article, so don't expect 100% compatibility across all of those cores.

However, development work continues on the core and the driver, and it is expected that Master System, Sega CD and Saturn support will be added in the future.

[source x.com]