When did thesuperguns come out on the market?

I have never really heard of superguns until a few years ago. How long have they been available? Are they just a recent development of the past few years or have they been selling these things for quite a while now?

I remember hearing about them back in the early 90's. I think they were selling them in EGM at the time.

Yeah, like the Roker said, they've been around for ages (arcade operators sometimes built them to test out boards going as far back as the 1980's), but the first commercially available ones did trickle out sometime in the early 1990's. I personally remember the ads for JAPAN VIDEO in EGM that claimed you could play SFII and other real arcade games in your own home with the "Super Gun device!" Ah, those were the days!

EGM had them in their offices to run arcade games on their TVs. They have pic of one in one of their issues playing SSFII.

I remember seeing someone from Hong Kong selling them in the classified ads section of C&VG mag around '91/92.. someone asked the mag what they were, and they didn't have a clue, lol.

Had mine since '95

We discussed about this here:

<a href="http://www.neo-geo.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=004035" target="_blank">http://www.neo-geo.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=004035</a>

How did they get the name 'super gun'?

The first time I heard it, I thought it was a kind of gun-controller like Operation Wolf!

tsukaesugi:
How did they get the name 'super gun'?

The first time I heard it, I thought it was a kind of gun-controller like Operation Wolf!

Click to expand...

In the picture of the auction I posted, there was a carton box with the word "supergun" in it, so that's where it came from.

AFAIK, there were always ppl with enough technical know how who bought arcade pcb's and built a MAK to play them at home, but IMO the whole supergun thing really started a few years after the Japanese arcade ops and companies came up with the Jamma standard in the mid 80s. Before that, ppl had to re-wire their custom setups for every new game/game company, now they could switch to a new game in no time due to unified pin layouts.

Here's a pic of the system and box that started the widespread usage of the term "SuperGun"
<img src="http://home.earthlink.net/~adrianmr/_uimages/supergun.jpg" alt=" - " />

My personal opinion as to why these devices were/are called SuperGuns is due to the fact that the creators are using a sort of play on words in respect to the electron guns in a monitor. A Supergun basically allows you to play arcade games, which are normally intended for display on RGB monitors, on a standard TV set. Therefore, the purpose of the Supergun is to do change the video output for use on a TV's screen's electron gun, thus, the term SUPERGUN was born.

I love the way these older Superguns look. I would love to track one down someday despite their less than stellar video quality and encoder type.

Freelancer:

I love the way these older Superguns look. I would love to track one down someday despite their less than stellar video quality and encoder type.

Click to expand...

As I said Winston Goh uses the same case to construct his own superguns, so if you really want one of those you can ask him. In fact I bought one that looks like that for a friend.

I remeber(in the UK anyway) that there was a number of tacky looking superguns first out on the market in very early ninties, selling for 300 pounds and over.

Then all of a sudden, Datel produced a gorgeous model in die cast steel for 99 pounds!

Whatever happen to those guys?

1993 by some anoying company near arnos grove in london that wont sell arcade stuff to the public