Building on the much-maligned 3A Pandora Box series of convenience-emulation packages, Retro Shooter has built on this legacy and taken it one step further by adding guns, pedals and IR sensors to augment your gaming perfection regardless of your current setup.

Back in the day, you needed a Television set that was as deep as it was wide to play light gun games. CRT TVs were the one thing you held onto into the 2000's because you couldn't play a gun game on a plasma, and if you did you were told that you would leave hideous burn-in laser scorch trails across your parents prized wall-hanging possession.

When Nintendo's Wii came out in 2006, it quickly became my favourite console because it unlocked the potential to have multiplayer gun games once again on my newly purchased flat-screen HDTV. Games like House of the Dead Over Kill, Ghost Squad and Resident Evil The Umbrella Chronicles saw my then 70-year-old Nan head-shotting the undead as well as water skiing and bowling through my living room.

Wii's simplistic setup with just an IR emitter and a remote control meant that anyone could pick up and play over 100 gun games on the system with zero fuss.

A Blast From The Past

Here in 2023, there sadly is not a whole load of mainstream light gun gaming going on. The PS4 had the VR Aim controller which the PS5 didn't bother carrying over, and the Xbox One had the horrendously bad PDP MARRS camera/light gun setup that honestly isn't worth talking about, so I'm glad it died out several years ago.

Enter the Retro Shooter RS-5 bundles that give you the ease of use you always wanted with the variety and freedom you desire for a hassle-free gaming experience. For this review, I was sent the Pro bundle which includes: The Retro Shooter Console, Two Lightguns, Four Infrared Sensors, Two Pedals and over 5000 games ready to play!

Based on the 3A Game Pandora Box 10th anniversary model, the Retro Shooter Pro packs a 2020 Rockchip RK3566 chip, which is similar to those used in mid range Anbernic handhelds, and packs four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A55 cores (clocked at 2.2 GHz), it integrates an ARM Mali-G52 2EE dual-core GPU, and boasts 2GB 2133Mhz ram with which to run an Android based OS.

The output resolution is 1920x1080 or 1280x720 with 16:9 and 4:3 options added, scan lin and smoothing HD effect options!

Features:

• Custom Light Guns that pair perfectly with the console
• Custom retro game board with top-of-the-line updated hardware
• 4-point IR emitters for the most accurate gun gaming experience
• Wifi/ethernet enabled for software updates
• Save your game state at any point in the game
• 60FPS gameplay so there's zero screen tearing
• Edit your games menu and favourite list to quickly find your favourite game
• Your favourite retro game isn't on the list...simply add it to the SD card (non-gun games)
• Zero controller lag so you never miss a move, jump, or shot
• HD output for high-quality image, play it on your big screen HDMI cord included

A Simplified Load Out

Setting up the device you have sensors, the console, and the peripherals so it's all done and dusted in under 20 minutes.

The console has a simple android-box design with no major distinguishing features other than a small black form factor rather than the big orange box JAMMA look most Pandora Box products opt for. On the rear, there is connectivity with a power socket, HDMI output, LAN input, and an SD card slot for the OS and content. The left side is for gun recoil and pedal connectivity, and the right side is for USB connectivity (player 1, player 2 and a third spare socket that you can use your one USB splitter in to connect even more controllers!).

The console doesn't have any buttons on the surface of it, which I think is a large oversight in terms of usability because, how do you turn it on, how do you reset it and how do you turn it off? The workaround is an included optional switch that sits between the power socket and the power cable and adds the ability to cut power to the unit without having to pull the cable out or flip a switch at a socket.

I don't feel that this is the best option, even though I have done this with my Raspberry Pi builds for the last decade, it feels wrong. In addition to this, there is one button on the underside in one of those "you need to use a pin to access it" holes. You also have to use this button to calibrate the guns for first use, and to change some graphic options, but nothing is supplied with the system to help you hit that button, so keep hold of your phone sim ejectors and recycle them for this!

I opted to turn off the "HD Quality Mode" because it forces some weird pixel smoothing that I didn't like particularly, and I chose to add scan lines for authenticity. I also kept the crosshairs on for the most part to verify the accuracy and any offset-lag throughout.

The sensors sit on each corner of your TV, and connect via USB-A (to your TV) and USB-C to each other to form an IR array that the guns can track. Adjusting the sensor's feet to sit atop your TV was a little finicky but it works, using gravity to add stability, the top two sensors perch on the corners with two finger-tightening legs on the aft to keep them positionally level when facing you. The lower two sensors stick-on with double-sided sticky pads that keep them held on the bottom of the screen. You then chain the top right sensor to the bottom right sensor with a provided  USB-C to USB-C cable and the same for the left side. I used the little twizzly cable ties to tidy the cable up as there is plenty of length on those cables to allow a 50-60+ inch screen to work with the given cables with no problems.

I don't see why the top sensors needed to be so different from the bottom ones, and I think personally that you could have just had four stick-on sensors chained together my cables across the top and down the sides, or behind the rear, rather than the perching style ones, it would have made the setting up even quicker and less fiddly. It also wouldn't be possible to use those top sensors on a TV that's perhaps built into a wall or mounted flat on a wall mount.

Once the sensors are in place, you can plug in a pedal and then your next mission is to build the guns. The pedals act as a duck or peek button for games like Time Crisis and they work well. They feel a little light and flimsy but, when used on a carpet or a rug, they stay put and worked perfectly throughout my time testing this device.

Each gun comes in two sections, the trigger and the barrel, and you simply have to connect the internal cable between the two pieces and then screw the entire assembly together using the four included screws and the screwdriver. Again this seems a little undue to push the consumer to build their peripherals, and with human error factoring in it may cause issues for some, but I found it added to the anticipation of setting up ready for a blast-a-thon!

With the guns built, you insert a USB-A into the console and a small barrel-type power connector into the corresponding socket to power the recoil. Each gun has dip switches underneath the barrel so you can see them up as player one or two to your choosing, but they're preconfigured out of the box for those who don't want to mess with them. You also get a fisheye lens each to screw in to make the guns read the sensors better on bigger screens, and I have to say on my 43", which isn't that big, it made a great difference and I felt it was more accurate with these lenses attached.

Triggering Choices, Convoluted Controls

Each gun has 3 main buttons, a trigger and a handy little "Joy-Con" style analogue stick for game selection in the menus. The player button or the foremost left-hand side button is used to bring up the quick selection menu, which filters the games into categories. This means you can play per-console games or categories games with ease, and all the shooting games are bundled into one place for you and a friend to blast through more quickly.

The button on the rear acts as a reload button for games that ask to shoot offscreen, which is handy, and the other button just acts as a back button or a coin button. Holding the main button brings up an in-game menu to quit your game or change settings such as crosshair and controller config for other games if you want to change the default button layout. I had issues here configuring additional arcade sticks because the button layout was honestly quite abnormal.

The setup has a legend onscreen that says buttons 1-4 on the face buttons, but the inputs are marked A-H. I honestly found it problematic attempting to figure out what button corresponds to what, and sometimes the buttons skip one another so if you go to set the Cross button on your pad to button A and the Triangle to B, you can find the Triangle on C and B unconfigured.

All that is required here is a slight re-design for that portion of the UI with the buttons overlaying the legend image so you know what button you press on the pad is going to be what button in-game. I found that aspect frustrating, to say the least, and I have still all but given up trying to configure anything like Tekken 3, within which I was using the command view to verify the button config.

The sockets on the console are marked for each player's connections so you know where to put each piece for each player to work properly. Each player has a gun with recoil and a pedal to stomp on to hide or reload depending on the game. I tested out as many games as possible to gauge the capabilities of this system as I'm a real stickler for good quality emulation and desire to have an AIO solution for not only gun games but also fighting, beat 'em ups, platforming games etc.

Guns Are Fun, But Emulation Misses The Mark

This unit comes pre-packed with games for PlayStation One, SNES, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, FBA, MAME, Atomis Wave, and many more consoles but the catalogue for each is a little hit-and-miss. For example, the N64 selection consists of GoldenEye 007, Killer Instinct Gold and Mario Kart, but the N64 efforts chug, the emulation is clearly not the latest available publicly, and the analogue stick is completely busted with zero way to reconfigure it, and there are also no MAME versions of some PSX games such as Time Crisis which means you're playing an inferior version of those titles.

I asked the devs about the ability to update emulators and add more games but I was told that's not possible to update, and that you can not add any gun games you feel you are missing, because they need pre-configuring or patching before they can run correctly on this system. You can add regular roms though.

On this matter I noticed some games skip forward to certain places on this setup when loaded, for example, PSP games like Tekken 6 and Burnout Legends seem to be configured to load directly to the character select screens rather than the main menus. With Burnout in particular, you can hit Triangle to back out of whatever mode it's preset to and from there go into whatever you want, though both Burnout and Tekken displayed emulation issues including short pauses between rounds, stuttering and Tekkens trademark jittery character feet.

In all honesty, the outcome is a very mixed bag for the newer games. DC emulation is the biggest disappointment here with some horrible visual glitchiness and audio issues on House of the Dead, and Confidential Mission becoming stuttery and jittery in places. It's not game-breaking but it's very off-putting and loses a little of the immersion if you are a gun-game connoisseur.

Retro games and shooters on MAME, FBA, Atari, Megadrive and even SNES run well, as they should, and even PSX games run virtually perfectly throughout, but the lack of PS2 and Wii on this system highlights the upper limits of this system (DC) as needing a much-needed injection of horsepower and newer emulators to be deployed in any updated models going forward.

Don't get me wrong, this system runs the supplied games to a reasonably playable level, but they are far from perfect in many places, especially on the higher-end emulators, which saddens me even more that we cannot tinker with the config given it is supposedly just Android-based. It should be easy to update cores manually like we can on other open-source solutions.

Unfortunately, you also cannot easily add games to this setup, at least: not gun games. Pulling out the SD card and chucking it into a PC you can drag and drop games to the relevant folders, which is great for adding additional titles such as Dolphin Blue to Atomis Wave and more SF2 hacked editions and any missing first-party titles etc.

Similar to the Wii the guns will need recalibrating regularly. Compared to my Sinden guns there is a little lag and a some slight annoyance with the feeling that you're not entirely 100% accurate but considering it uses IR it's 90% of the way there. Luckily the firmware update has added options to recalibrate the guns from the pause menu, load and save your game, and change the aspect ratio mid-game if you prefer the 4:3 ratio with no stretching.

These guns and pedals can be used on PC using the $29 Fire Base accessory add-on, but unfortunately I was not sent one, so I couldn't try this feature out, however, I think it would act very similarly to the Wii remote & Dolphin bar combination many still use for PC based gun gaming.

Doesn't Entirely Shoot Itself In The Foot

The Retro Shooter Pro kit is a very good budget setup, and in comparison to what you would need to spend on the Sindens and the hardware to play the games on, you're getting some great value for money and some very easy consumer-grade ease of use. The game selection is great, though of the 5000+ you only get around 83 games to play with the guns, so much of it would feel like filler if you exclusively bought the lower-end package, or had no desire to add controllers to it to play the rest of the library.

Considering the cost of Sindens/Gun4IR, a suitably powerful PC/Android device to run it all on and the hours of configuration pains associated with getting it all into one fully working build with marquee videos and art etc: the Retro Shooter Pro kit is absolutely a step in the right direction for the cost-conscious, however, if I had a couple of suggestions it would be first of all to upgrade the hardware to something more suited for DC/Wii/PS2 emulation, make the sensors all sticky, and lastly: make the controller configuration less of a nightmare.