Adding some protective resistors to the Light Phaser to Mega Drive gun adaptors

Monday, 20th April 2020

Here's a quick update to the two Mega Drive light gun adaptor circuits, all to a few extra resistors in and around the adaptor and the console.

The real Sega Menacer receiver drives the TH line (used to indicate when the gun has seen light) directly from the output of a NOR gate with a 470Ω resistor in series. My circuit uses a transistor in the open-collector configuration with a 10KΩ resistor on the base input and a 1KΩ pull-up resistor, which is the same as the circuit used in the original Sega Light Phaser.

In a worst-case scenario the console could configure TH as an output, drive it high, and the Menacer adaptor could drive TH low at the same time. This would short the console's TH output to ground via the transistor, and might damage it (I'm not sure how these I/O ports are constructed internally). The TH output from a regular Sega Light Phaser would have the same problem, however that only pulses low briefly when it sees the light from the CRT whereas the TH output from the Menacer adaptor is latched and can stay low for a much longer time, increasing the risk. Resistors are cheap, so assuming the engineers at Sega know their hardware better than I do I thought it safer to add a 470Ω resistor on the TH output. This hasn't affected performance, as far as I can see. I also corrected the diagram to reference the BC548 as this is the transistor I tested with – the BC547 probably works too, however in the interest of accuracy I thought it best to stick with what I know works.

Revised circuit for the Light Phaser to Menacer adaptor
Sega Light Phaser to Sega Menacer adaptor

The Menacer circuit (as well as the original control pad) drives the DATA0~DATA3 lines directly so I haven't included any resistors there. I have, however, applied the same resistor changes to the Justifier adaptor:

Revised circuit for the Light Phaser to Justifier adaptor
Sega Light Phaser to Konami Justifier adaptor

As well as the 470Ω resistor on the TH input/output line I have added the 10KΩ resistors on the TL and TR input lines. I'm still not sure what these are for but as they are there in the Menacer adaptor and as Sega presumably know best I've included them here for completeness. As these are attached to inputs on the logic gates there should be very high impedance anyway, but it could be for protection in case the logic gates are improperly powered. What I do know is that the extra 10KΩ pull-ups on the TH inputs from the Light Phasers should protect against spurious TH outputs when either of the guns are unplugged.

I still haven't been able to test the circuit with any other games, but for now these two circuits seem to be holding up!

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