Blamcon ARC - Advanced Remote Console news & patch notes

Features

1. Introducing the wireless Blamcon Buddy system

The Blamcon Buddy is our latest addition to the Blamcon system, and it's a wireless bluetooth device that can act as an extension to your Blamcon Lightgun. This is incredibly useful for playing games with lightguns that come with the standard 3 button setup but game requires an additional inputs for controlling game functions. The Blamcon Buddy will come in different forms supporting different modes of play. Our wireless Blamcon pedals will be based on Blamcon Buddy. We are also looking at different one handed controllers as well, like pairing the OCP grenade to the Blamcon Autocop. Pairing your Blamcon lightgun will be as simple as putting it into pairing mode while a Blamcon Buddy is active and powered on. Use the embedded system LED on your Blamcon to follow and confirm the pairing process with your Buddy. A Blamcon Lightgun will only support pairing with a single Blamcon Buddy.

2. Adding support for 2-digit ammo counter

Our firmware now supports the use of an embedded 2-digit 7 segment digit counter. We added this feature as part of our Aliens pulse rifle model to keep it on canon and because it's cool as sh&%! The counter works in concert with the trigger and the recoil system. By default, it starts at 95 since it was modelled after the Aliens pulse rifle. On each trigger pull it will count down by 1. If recoil is set to full auto, the counter will count down while it's held and each recoil is fired. If you're using 3-round burst, it will count down by 3 as the system fires each burst. The ammo counter can also be controlled by serial commands that are built into tools like Hook of the Reaper and Total Recoil so it can be controlled by the game play. This functionality is also built into our Unity Plugin so that game developers can easily enhance game play experience with direct integrations with Blamcon. Just check out Blamcon Shooting Gallery and see how fun it is.

3. Configurable Buddy Input Routing

Buddy Input Routing gives you full control over how each Buddy controller input behaves in-game. Instead of being locked to one fixed mapping, you can now assign each Buddy input (Y, X, A, B, RB, Start, Select, and D-Pad directions) to the action you want—like Trigger, A, B, Pedal, Aux, Start/Select, D-Pad actions, or combo actions such as Trigger+A, Trigger+B, and A+B. This makes it much easier to tailor controls for different games, personal preferences, or accessibility needs. In practice, this means faster game-by-game customization without firmware rewrites. You can view current routes, change a single input route, or reset everything back to defaults. The result is a more flexible Buddy experience: cleaner compatibility across titles, easier experimentation with layouts, and quicker recovery if a mapping gets out of sync.

4. More responsive trigger button for NES zapper

In releasing the Zapper conversion, we discovered that it doesn't work well with Emulators. The Zapper has a spring loaded trigger mechanism that fires at about 5-6ms. In reviewing the open source emulator project NEStopia, it mimics the old system by operating at 60hz for NTSC and 50hz for PAL frame rates. The device inputs like the Zapper are sampled one per frame so that provides either 16ms or 20ms frame. The device trigger signal has a press and release signal and if both are performed inside a single frame, the emulator will miss one of those transition states that are potentially used internally by the specific game. Given that Blamcon operates at 1000hz gaming mouse, it can detect and report the associated electrical signals related to press and release of a mechanical trigger like the Zapper in real time. Leaving the game to miss button presses during game play. With a normal trigger that is based on human reaction time (250ms) is not a problem The idea is to provide a virtual waveform trigger such that the press and release create an asymmetrical waveform signal at the right frequency that works much better with Emulators.