But, lets get to the pictures. The guns showed up in a pretty standard USPS priority mail box. It shipped two day priority from the ArcadeGuns.com folks.
Inside, the guns were wrapped in bubble wrap and surrounded with packing peanuts. As usual, the packing peanuts got everywhere when I opened the box, which was a pain. But, beyond that, everything seemed to be packed snugly in the box.
As you can see, the guns were each wrapped in bubble wrap, as was the IR bar that goes along with them. Because the IR bar will end up going behind the plexi-glass of the cabinet, I saved myself a few bucks and ordered it without the case.
The IR bar itself really doesn't have much to it. It is made up of 6 IR LEDs and a few resistors. One nice feature is that the cable can easily be disconnected from the IR bar. I suspect this will make things a bit easier when it comes time to install this in the cabinet.
The guns themselves are where I had a few questions while looking at the ArcadeGuns.com site. With some digging, I was able to find pictures that lead me to believe that there were two buttons on the guns. One is where the hammer would be on a revolver, the other is in the center of the grip.
I am not sure how much I'll like having the button on the grip. It seems like it would be easy to hit. But, I guess it can always be programmed not to do anything. (Or to reload, which would make accidentally hitting it a bonus!)
The mold of the gun is also interesting :
If you look at the Ultimarc web store, you can find the kit to build your own light gun. It is really small. So, obviously most of the casing of the gun is to make it comfortable in your hands. The really interesting piece to me is the section right in front of the trigger. It seems unlikely that piece holds any kind of circuitry in the gun. Perhaps ArcadeGuns.com is thinking of adding a recoil feature in the future? Or, I guess it could also be just to even out the weight of the gun in your hand.
I have not had a chance yet to try the guns out on a game. But, one other thing I was curious about was how the buttons feel. I remember from my younger days, playing "Operation Wolf" on the 8-bit Nintendo with the zapper. The trigger on the zapper was really loud and and made a snapping sound each time you pulled it. This didn't seem like a big deal for games like Duck Hunt where you only pulled the trigger once in a while, but on games like Operation Wolf, where you pull the trigger rapidly, it was really noisy, and felt as though you were going to break the trigger mechanism in the gun! Fortunately, these guns are nothing like that.
Each of the switches on this gun seem to be fairly soft. They make a rubberized "squishing/clicking" sound when you press them. Very similar to the buttons on remote unlock systems for cars, but probably a little softer. Overall, I expect they will be pretty quiet when in use. And, while I am unsure how much I am going to like having a trigger that soft, there does seem to be enough forward force on the trigger so that you could easily tell when you have pulled the trigger fully. Also, while the trigger looks rather large, it doesn't seem to need to be pulled back very far before you hear the clicking of the switch inside. I am guessing that for rapid fire games like Operation Wolf, these guns will be comfortable, and not feel like they are going to break like the old NES zapper did.
Finally, as you can probably tell from the picture above, there is quite a bit of USB cord on these guns. I am very hopeful that there is enough that I can string it through the cabinet and get to the USB ports on the PC inside. But, I won't know that until the cabinet is complete, which is probably still a couple of months away.
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