Difference between revisions of "Amstrad Magnum Phaser"

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<gallery caption="Magnum Light Phaser">
 
<gallery caption="Magnum Light Phaser">
  
Image:LightPhaser.JPG|The Light Phaser gun from Amstrad
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Image:LightPhaser.JPG|Light Phaser
Image:Amstrad lightgun.jpg|The Light Phaser gun from Amstrad
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Image:Amstrad lightgun.jpg|Light Phaser
 +
File:Magnum-drawing.jpg|Drawing
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File:Magnum-package.jpg|Package
  
 
</gallery>
 
</gallery>

Revision as of 19:59, 8 January 2010

The Light Phaser gun from Amstrad
The Light Phaser gun from Amstrad

The Magnum Phazer was released later on in the Amstrads' life, and retailed for £24.99 in the UK. It came supplied with a cassette and a disk, both containing six games.

The main reason to buy this gun was for the excellent Amstrad conversion of Operation Wolf. Playing this with a light gun on your Arnold was the arcade experience people relished but rarely got back in the 80's. The other supplied games were fun for a while, but by far the high point was Operation Wolf.

Technical

Connects to expansion port 50pin edge connector. Reportedly it uses only 4 pins: VCC, GND, LPEN, D7. Uh, that is, without decoding any address lines or /IORQ lines?

 Trigger Button  ---> Request via output to Port FBFEh, then check CRTC input
 Light Sensor    ---> CRTC Light Pen Input

To read the Trigger button (to be done during vblank):

 Port[BCxxh]=11h  ;select CRTC register 11h
 old=Port[BFxxh]  ;-get old value
 Port[FBFEh]=7Fh  ;\force an edge on the lpen input
 Port[FBFEh]=80h  ;/(depending on whether button is pressed or not)
 new=Port[BFxxh]  ;-get new value
 if old=new then ... else ...

Supported Games

  • Operation Wolf
  • Bullseye
  • Missile Ground Zero
  • Rookie
  • Solar Invasion
  • Robot Attack

Mastertronic released some more games with Magnum phaser support, but they were mostly budget type Spectrum ports. (... which games???)

Pictures