The OpenFIRE story for me began the way many questionable life decisions do: “Oh yeah, I reckon I can make that myself.”

So 6 years ago I set out to build my own DIY light gun system armed with nothing but open-source libraries, blind optimism, and an inherent stubbornness that I can only assume I got from my Dad. Somehow, the first Samco light gun crawled into existence.

Because the project would never have seen the light of day without the open source community, I released it as open source too, partly out of gratitude, partly so other tinkerers could have a go, and partly because misery loves company. The Samco was pretty basic, but it was the first DIY light-gun project ever released, and I like to think it cracked the door open for others to develop their own unique adaptations.

Of course, new systems popped up quickly and my old code started to look a bit underwhelming. But, I kept tinkering, adding four-point tracking and other upgrades, but I was still struggling to keep up with the big boys.

Then one day I got invited into a tiny Discord group of fellow light-gun obsessives who wanted to build the ultimate DIY solution. A coder named Prow had already taken my project, cleaned up my amateur coding, and adapted it for the RP2040 (a microcontroller with more horsepower and actual room for features). So we had a pretty solid foundation to work on.

With newfound vigour, I jumped back into coding and added perspective correction and increased accuracy. Enhancements that I had wanted to do for ages, but hadn’t quite found the right motivation. It felt so great to be coding again, and I was super happy with the results.

But fate wasn’t done yet. Another fork was also floating around by ThatOneSeong, and it was incredible. He’d already added half the features we were dreaming about. Naturally, we dragged him into our little group, and that’s when things really kicked into gear. Seong continued adding feature after feature solenoid support, rumble, OLEDs, MameHooker integration, MiSTer FPGA integration, a beautifully designed GUI as well as creating and maintaining the GitHub account, which he still does today.

Now OpenFIRE has its own growing community on Discord. I’m genuinely blown away every day by how many legends jump on to help, troubleshoot, argue about sensors, and generally geek out over light guns. It’s wild, and I’m massively grateful.

From the humble beginnings of Samco to the far more polished beast that OpenFIRE is today, the one thing that’s stayed solid is this: everything remains fully open-source and free for anyone to poke, prod, break, fix, and improve.

At the end of the day, OpenFIRE is still powered by the same thing it started with, a bunch of tinkerers who love making stuff light up, shake, go bang, but who also love firing up Virtua Cop to get our retro arcade fix. If you’re keen to dive in, build your own, or just hang out with people who are way into old light gun games, come join us.

Remember to support the developers!

Open-source maintainers like Seong run almost entirely on coffee, determination, and the occasional crumb of recognition. If you’re in a position to back him, his Ko-fi is a great way to show him a bit of love.