Using Master System Light Phasers to play Konami Justifier games on the Mega Drive
Saturday, 18th April 2020
Following my adventures with building an adaptor that lets me use Sega Light Phaser guns in Sega Menacer games it seemed sensible to turn my attention to the other type of light gun for the Sega Mega Drive – the Konami Justifier.
These guns are unsurprisingly incompatible with the Sega Menacer and Sega Light Phaser and supported in even fewer games on the stock Mega Drive (only Lethal Enforcers and Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters). However, these games are more in line with the type of light gun game that I like to play than what you'd find in the Menacer's library (even though the digitised sprites haven't aged particularly gracefully) and the guns are eye-wateringly expensive if you want to get a set of both for two-player games which makes the idea of a cheap adaptor to use the Master System's Light Phaser more appealing. And, of course, it's a fun challenge!
You may have noticed that the two guns in the photo at the top of the post are different colours, and unfortunately this is not purely cosmetic. The Justifier comes in distinct "player 1" and "player 2" variants, with the first gun plugging into the console and the second gun plugging into the bottom of the first gun using a modular connector in a daisy-chain configuration. This allowed Komani to sell console-specific blue player 1 guns and a generic pink player 2 gun that would work with the blue player 1 gun from any system. If you invited a friend over to play with you then you'd need to go out of your way to buy the specific player 2 gun (your friend's blue player 1 gun won't work), and as the blue gun was not sold separately you couldn't buy a game and "upgrade" to a light gun controller later, you'd need to buy one that came with a game and as a result both guns are now somewhat difficult to find and fairly expensive, especially the player 2 gun.
However, this arrangement should allow for a pretty neat solution where we can build a single adaptor that plugs into a controller port on the Mega Drive and provides two controller ports for the two Light Phaser guns rather than having to build two separator adaptors. Like the Menacer, the Justifier does have an extra button when compared to the Light Phaser however it's only one button this time (rather than three) and it's used as a Start button so both of these could be put on the adaptor unit itself between the two players.
A Point Blank arcade machine with two Start buttons on the control panel between the two guns.
Without buying a pair of Justifier guns, how can it be studied so an adaptor can be built? In the case of the Menacer the receiver units can be bought cheaply and studied to figure out how they interface with the console and the patent document covers how it should work in high-level detail too. I have been unable to find such information for the Justifier. Fortunately Eke-Eke, the author of the Genesis Plus GX emulator, came to the rescue with the document gen_lightgun.pdf which goes into some detail about how the Justifier interfaces with the Mega Drive.
The key information to take into account here is that DATA0 is mapped to the trigger, DATA1 is mapped to the start button, TH is used for the light sensor, TR is used to select which of the two guns to query and TL is used as a general gun enable/disable line. As both guns share the same data lines for their triggers, start buttons and light sensors we can use multiplexers to select between the two guns.
The Mega Drive also needs to be able to detect when the Justifier is plugged in, and it does this by checking the state of the four DATA lines, once when TH is high and once when TH is low, then combining the bit values read in both states to form a single four-bit peripheral ID. The process was explained in more detail in an earlier post, however for the sake of simplicity to correctly return the device ID of %0001 we need to make sure that when TH is high all four data lines are low and when TH is low DATA2 and DATA3 should still be low and one or both of DATA0 and DATA1 should be high.
As DATA2 and DATA3 are always low and aren't used anywhere else they can just be tied low at all times and that should work. DATA0 and DATA1 should pass through the trigger/start button status (active low signals, so normally high) when the game is reading the button state but it looks like they should be forced low when TH is high. According to Eke-Eke's documentation: "I'm not sure why Justifier returns such values, maybe setting TH=1 will force input lines to 0".
My first attempt, therefore, was to use a NOR gate outputting to each of the two data lines with one input to each coming from the TH line and the other input coming from the inverted trigger/start button status. This way if TH was high both data lines would be forced low, otherwise it would output the inverted form of the input (and as the input to the NOR gate was already inverted, the final signal would be corrected – two wrongs do make a right in electronics!) This would not work if both trigger and start button were pressed, unfortunately, but maybe that wouldn't be a problem?
Happily, this worked in the menu for Lethal Enforcers, with the adaptor plugged in I was able to select the option to start a one- or two-player gun game! However, the game was completely unresponsive to the buttons. When writing an emulator you can make certain assumptions about how the hardware works, as long as the right values are in the right places when the software reads them. You also have the advantage of being privy to the internal state of the hardware that external devices might not be able to see! One important note in Eke-Eke's documentation is "this means the Justifier should return the following byte values when TH is set as output" – we can't directly tell whether a pin is set to an output or an input from outside the console, we can only see what its current signal level is. During normal gameplay TH is an active-low signal from the light gun's light sensor, and as a result TH is normally high which blocks the buttons from working. I had thought that maybe the game software would drive the TH pin low during its button-reading routine to allow the data to pass through but evidently the gun doesn't work this way.
Another issue is that whilst I can use a logic analyser to see what state the pins are in over a period of time, I can't tell at what point the console is reading those pins itself and making decisions based on what it sees. I could disassemble the game code to try to see how that's working, but I couldn't figure out any meaningful output from the disassembly tools I tried and couldn't find an appropriate debugging emulator so went back to trial and error.
The solution, I think, is in the TL pin being used to enable or disable the guns. I think that we should only mess around with forcing DATA0 and DATA1 high or low (based on the state of TH) when the guns are disabled, otherwise we let the button and light sensor state pass through. We can achieve this with two stages of multiplexers, one to select between the two guns (selected by TR) and another to globally enable/disable the guns (selected by TL). If we invert TH we can use this to drive the DATA0 and DATA1 lines when the guns are disabled, meaning that we also fix the problem where the gun wouldn't be detected if both buttons were held.
The above diagram shows the circuit I'm currently using to test with and it appears to work fairly well with Lethal Enforcers, being detected as a valid gun during startup and working in-game with both guns seemingly being handled correctly.
The first column of three multiplexers selects between the blue (player 1) and pink (player 2) gun inputs via the TR input. The top multiplexer handles the trigger (TL), the middle multiplexer handles the two Start buttons and the bottom multiplexer handles the light sensor inputs (TH). The second column of three multiplexers selects between the guns being enabled and guns being disabled via the TL input. When the guns are disabled (TL is high) DATA0 and DATA1 are driven by the inverse of TH to help provide the valid %0001 peripheral ID, allowing the adaptor to be detected as a Justifier.
The TH pin is a bit more challenging as it needs to be both an input and an output. At the moment when the guns are disabled it is driven high by tying the other input to the multiplexer high. The TH output is driven by a transistor; when the transistor is switched on it connects TH to ground (making it low) and when it is switched off it is left to float (normally floating high, but otherwise under the control of the console). As the transistor is switched on by a positive voltage this effectively acts as an inverter, hence the signal from the multiplexer to the transistor also needs to be inverted.
The prototype adaptor assembled on a solderless breadboard.
I'm not entirely happy with the way the circuit has been implemented, in particular the use of two multiplexer chips where only three of the four multiplexers are used and the need for an additional chip for the inverter gates. Multiplexer chips normally have a global enable/disable pin in addition to their data selector, which makes me wonder if such a pin could be useful. The 74HCT157 chips I'm using drive the outputs low when disabled which would not be very useful in this particular use case, however other chips are available that make the outputs high-impedence when disabled which may be more useful and allow for a circuit design that uses fewer parts.
There is also a slight issue of reliability and accuracy. When playing the game shots are generally fairly accurate and always register however they sometimes are offset horizontally. Eke-Eke's document points out that Lethal Enforcers does not use the console's horizontal counter latch so the inaccuracy may be a software issue – interestingly it seems Lethal Enforcers II does use the horizontal counter latch so when I can test with this cartridge it will be interesting to see whether accuracy is affected. More weirdly, the game does provide a "gun adjust" menu option where you can calibrate the game to compensate for any horizontal or vertical offset in the gun hardware however this does not seem to detect all shots and sometimes the accuracy is miles out! This also seems to be affected quite heavily by proximity to the screen, normally bringing the gun closer to the screen yields more accurate results however here it seems to make things worse. I'm not sure why this is and will continue to test the circuit to see if performance can be improved.