Light guns

A light gun is not a pointing device with a cursor. It is a thing you aim at a television, and RetroXR treats it that way: the gun casts a ray from its barrel at the screen every frame and reports where it lands.

Duck Hunt on the NES, played with the ray gun. Recorded in-headset on a Quest 3 — the green arcs on the floor are the Guardian boundary, and the row of icons on the set is the TV's own control panel.

The gun

The ray gun. Spawn it, plug it into a controller port, and point it at the set.

Setting one up

1. Spawn a Ray Gun from SPAWN → Controllers.

2. Plug its lead into one of the machine’s controller ports — the same cable and plug a controller uses.

3. Pick it up and aim at the television.

It only reports while it is held and plugged in. A gun lying on the desk is not aiming at anything.

The controls

Your VR controller	Light gun
Trigger	Fire
A / X button	Aux A
B / Y button	Aux B
Thumbstick click	Start
Thumbstick	The gun’s d-pad
Grip	Unassigned by default

All of these are rebindable — see setting up your controls.

Aiming, and shooting off-screen

Because the gun raycasts at the actual screen, aiming works the way it did: point at the thing, pull the trigger. There is no cursor to chase and no sensitivity to tune.

Games that used a light gun almost always need you to shoot off-screen as well — reloading in Duck Hunt’s successors, for instance. Point away from the television and fire; RetroXR reports that as an off-screen shot, which is exactly what the game expects.

The gun needs to see a screen

Aiming is resolved against the screen of the TV the machine is connected to. If the machine has no display, or the gun is plugged into a machine whose picture is going somewhere you are not pointing, there is nothing to hit. See plugging things in.

The laser dot

There is an optional aim indicator — a dot on the screen showing where the barrel is pointing. Real light guns had no such thing, so it is there as an aid rather than as authenticity, and it can be turned off.

On desktop

Without a headset the gun snaps to the lower-right of the screen like an FPS weapon, and aiming uses the camera’s centre ray, so the crosshair always matches where the gun is pointing.

• Left-click — fire.
• Ctrl + Left-click — drop it. A plain click fires instead, which is why the FPS-snapped objects need the modifier.

See desktop controls.

Which systems

Any system whose core supports the libretro light gun device. The NES is the obvious one, and its Zapper exists as a port device option.

Partly checked in-headset

The clip at the top of this page is a real headset capture, so aiming at the set and firing are confirmed working. The bindings and the raycast model come from the source and are accurate. How the off-screen reload feels in practice, and which games work well, have not been checked against a running build.