Difference between revisions of "Amstrad Magnum Phaser"

Revision as of 14:06, 25 October 2011

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

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

Mastertronic released some more games with Magnum phaser support, but they were mostly budget-type Spectrum ports.

• American Turbo King
• Billy the Kid
• Bronx Street Cop
• F-16 Fighting Falcon
• Jungle Warfare

All five releases were also available on the Megaplay 2 compilation.

Pictures

• Magnum Light Phaser
• 

  Light Phaser

• 

  Light Phaser

• 

  Drawing

• 

  Package

• 

  Inside of Interface/Gun showing the Trigger Button logic and Expansion Port pins (are there REALLY only 4 pins connected?)