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The Nintendo Super Scope (without its sight)

The Super Scope (Japanese: スーパースコープ, romanized: Sūpā Sukōpu), known as the Nintendo Scope in Europe and Australia,^[1]^[2] is a first party light gun peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The successor to the NES Zapper, the Super Scope was released in North America and the PAL region in 1992, followed by a limited release in Japan in 1993 due to a lack of consumer demand. The peripheral consists of two devices: the wireless light gun itself, called the "Transmitter", and a "Receiver" that connects to the second controller port of the Super NES console. The Transmitter has two action buttons, a pause button, a power switch and is powered by six AA batteries.^[3]

Design

The Transmitter is a bazooka-shaped device, just under 2 ft (61 cm) long. Located about midway on top of the barrel are two buttons, the purple "Fire" button (colored orange in Japanese and European models) and the gray "Pause" button, and a switch used to turn the Super Scope off or select regular or turbo fire. In the middle on either side are two clips for attaching the sight. On the far end of the gun, on the bottom, is a six-inch (15-cm) grip with another button labeled "Cursor".

On the end is the infrared receiver lens, approximately 1 inch (25 mm) in diameter, which picks up the light from a TV. The sight mount is shaped like a wide, very shallow "U", about five inches long. The end that faces toward the shoulder mount end of the Super Scope has a round open cylinder holder, where the eyepiece goes. The other end has a short, narrow tube, which forms the sight when one looks through the eyepiece that is in-line across from it. The end of the eyepiece is very simple: it is a cylinder with the diameter of a quarter, with a removable rubber piece through which the shooter looks. The sight is designed so that the aim will be correct at a distance of 3 metres (10 ft). The Receiver is a small box, 2.5 in × 2.5 in × 1 in (6.4 cm × 6.4 cm × 2.5 cm), with a standard Super NES controller cord attached. On the front is an oval-shaped black area, receding back from the two sides to an infra-red transmitter about the size of a dime.

All of the Super Scope games made by Nintendo have a soft-reset to the game's main title. This is accomplished by pausing the game, then, while holding CURSOR, the FIRE button must be pressed twice.

Hit detection

The receiver box that plugs into controller port, meant to sit on top of the TV

The Super Scope makes use of the scanning process used in cathode-ray-tube monitors, as CRTs were the only widely used TV monitors until the early 2000s. In short, the screen is drawn by a scanning electron beam that travels horizontally across each line of the screen from top to bottom. A fast photodiode will see any particular area of the screen illuminated only briefly as that point is scanned, while the human eye will see a consistent image due to persistence of vision.

The Super Scope takes advantage of this in a fairly simple manner: it simply outputs a 0 signal when it sees the television raster scan and a 1 signal when it does not. Inside the console, this signal is delivered to the PPU, which notes which screen pixel it is outputting at the moment the signal transitions from 1 to 0. At the end of the frame, the game software can retrieve this stored position to determine where on the screen the gun was aimed. Most licensed Super Scope games include a calibration mode to account for both electrical delays and maladjustment of the gunsight.^[4]

The Super Scope ignores red light, as do many guns of this type because red phosphors have a much slower rate of decay than green or blue phosphors.^[4] Since the Super Scope depends on the short persistence and scan pattern of CRT pixels, it will not function with modern displays (such as plasma screens or LCDs) that continuously light each pixel.

Compatible games

Per GamePro:^[5]

Battle Clash
Bazooka Blitzkrieg
The Hunt for Red October (used for bonus games)
Lamborghini American Challenge (features a Super Scope-exclusive mode)
Lemmings 2: The Tribes (secret easter egg allowing the super scope to destroy lemmings)
Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge
Operation Thunderbolt
Super Scope 6 (bundled with the hardware)
T2: The Arcade Game
Tin Star
X-Zone
Yoshi's Safari (required for play)

Legacy

The Super Scope is a recurring item in the Super Smash Bros. series, appearing in every game since Super Smash Bros. Melee. When picked up, it acts as a projectile weapon that fires a continuous stream of small shots when the attack button is tapped repeatedly, or fires one large shot if the attack button is held down.

The S-BLAST '92 and S-BLAST '91 weapons in the Nintendo Switch game Splatoon 3 have designs heavily based on the Super Scope. The S-BLAST '92 uses the original's gray and orange color scheme, while the S-BLAST '91 uses gray and purple colors based on the North American Super Nintendo console.