Blamcon Light Guns

Written by John Yan on 10/1/2025 for MOB   PC  

Lightguns seem to have made a resurgence on the PC side of things recently with a few options available. It wasn’t too long ago when I was looking to add a lightgun to my gaming cabinet and the options were limited. Nowadays, a few projects are out that are really solid and today we’re going to look at one from a company called Blamcon.

I can’t remember how I even stumbled upon Blamcon, but two years ago I saw a video on their gun props that let people 3D print replicas of famous movie guns. Having just bought a 3D printer, I was anxious to turn one of these into a lightgun using Gun4IR. To my surprise, they were working on their own lightgun solution that seemed really solid.

Fast forward a year and a half and they finally made available their lightgun option. There’s a few ways you can go about getting one for your own use. You can order a complete gun from them, just get the internal parts needed, or something in between. I opted to buy all the internal parts and 3D print my own.

As of this writing, they have a few designs available. One is a SMG model called a Vyper and the other is Robocop’s Auto 9 or, as they call it, the AutoCop. Yes, Robocop’s famous gun is available for you to play lightgun games with. I bought a kit for both and then sent my 3D printers working on getting the shells produced.

Blamcon does a great job at producing 3D files that are pre-sliced for a specific printer. They also provide the files to be opened up in Orcaslicer or a slicer of your choice. I recommend going with the Orcaslicer files and then modify the settings as needed for your printer and filament of choice.

The nice thing about printing out your own shells is that you can print them in the colors of your choice. If you have a multi-material system like the Bambu Labs AMS, you can mix and match filament colors. For my Vyper, I made the body white with black grips and trigger. I had some gold filament laying around and decided to use that for some accent pieces and the foregrip. For the AutoCop, I just went with the classic all-black look, but I’ve seen some other color combinations that look nice.

With my recent purchase of a Bambu Lab H2D, I was anxious to try out the dual nozzle system with multi materials. I edited the handle to have a TPU area where the hand grasped the gun and the rest was PLA+. The H2D printed these like a champ and I was very happy to be able to have the files there from Blamcon for me to edit to my liking. You won’t get this level of customization with other light guns and having the ability to modify it to your needs is one thing that helps sets Blamcon apart from other providers.

You’ll need to do some cleanup on the prints in order to fit the internal components inside and have everything fit together well. Most of the pieces will need supports to print, but the settings in the pre-sliced files had some nice settings to make the removal of the supports with little effort. And if you need to do things such as file the inside in order to fit some components better, that’s fine as no one’s going to see it. For the most part, the parts printed out really well with good outside surface quality. Blamcon positions them in what they feel is the best orientation possible to print, but you’re more than welcome to adjust it if you feel your printer will do it better in another way. I did a little tinkering like merging the two gas tube files on the Vyper into one and printing it one go in an angled orientation.

As I said, I decided to purchase all the electronic parts from Blamcon for each gun. You can source everything yourself if you want to, which I appreciate as that doesn’t lock you into needing to buy the parts from them. I really like that they decided to let consumers know how to build one of their guns from scratch without having to rely on Blamcon for parts, but also offer services to get parts from them or a fully constructed gun. This allows anyone from those who love to build things to those who have no ability and anyone in between to acquire a lightgun and use it with their arcade setup.

And another great thing Blamcon does is really document their process as well as create build videos. For the Vyper, there’s a great diagram of the wiring and a very detailed manual on putting it all together. If that’s not enough, Blamcon has a step by step video tutorial on building one and they are looking to provide one for each of their models. It’s a great service that Blamcon provides and I wish more companies would go that extra step in providing clear and concise directions for their products.

So after printing out everything and laying out all the parts, I sat down at a table with a laptop propped up so I could follow along with Chris on building a Vyper. Chris does a great job at detailing what needs to be done in his video and he goes through from when the parts come off the 3D printer to testing the final product at the end. There were a few spots in the video I did have some trouble with seeing what he used and where he placed it. Depending on the gun will determine how difficult it is. His video for the AutoCop improved on this as I saw better angles during his construction as well as some overlays on some of the screws he was using at the time he was assembling that particular part. If there’s one suggestion I have, it’s during the process of what he’s doing, to have maybe the list of materials and if there’s small printed parts, a picture of that in the corner during that section to make it a little less confusing for viewers like me.

The Vyper has a lot of parts that go into it and is a little more involved than the AutoCop. Whereas the AutoCop is about four major parts of the gun along with the trigger and a few other bits and pieces, the Vyper was split up into a few more build plates with a few smaller parts scattered around.

I did turn to the instructions at times when I was a little unsure of what was being done in the video. One of the things you have to be aware of is the wiring diagram for all the wires going into the core on the website have them going in the opposite direction than what you should be doing. There is a note there that this was done just to make it easier to see where the wires go to, but if you’re making this on your own the wires go into the side where the Blamcon logo is on the core and soldered on the other side where the Raspberry Pi is.

The ones I had the most trouble with to solder were the short wires to the microUSB plug and the wires to the GX16 connector. If you’re subpar at soldering like I am, this is going to be great practice by throwing you into the fire. I had some helping hands tools to help me out, but even with those I had to do a few multiple times before I was able to get a solid connection. It can be a long and arduous process to get everything soldered correctly, but through the process of building the Vyper, I greatly improved my soldering skills to where I feel a lot more confident going into building the AutoCop.

I also forgot to do the heat shrink on some of the wires, which does help get them out of the way when putting it together near the end. I decided to tidy up the wires with some electrical tape, so that helped a ton. There are some small nuts I lost during the process because I had to take it apart a few times as it wasn’t fitting together properly. Luckily I had a few spare ones laying around as I do a lot of 3D printing and that’s one of the few things that’s commonly used in some of my prints. I would have liked a small bag of some extra parts just in case, and I think I read they are including some in the current kits being sold. Since I picked mine up way early, there were only the required parts in there without any extras included.

Of course, since I wasn’t that proficient at soldering, I had to redo a few of them. Some of the wires are really short and unless you have a solid joint, they’ll pop off easily during times like putting the two shells together. Again, something to learn from and to make sure all your joints are solid before putting the gun together. Because the gun shakes and rumbles, it’s best to make sure everything is solid as you don’t want the operation of the gun to shake some of the contacts loose.

The build took me a better part of a day and half total time, but I feel as though I can burn through this and new builds quicker by learning from my mistakes. No one’s fault but my own, I had some issues with how the Vyper worked so I decided to move on to the AutoCop and tackle the Vyper again another time.

Building the AutoCop was much easier and using the things I learned from the Vyper, I had much cleaner soldering and an easier time putting together this one. There weren’t nearly as many wires to solder and I was able to get through the build in less than a day this time.

For the AutoCop, I used my Bambu Lab H2D’s multi-material feature and used TPU for parts of the grip. The print turned out pretty darn clean and I was really happy with how it felt in the hand. For the rest of the parts, my H2D had no troubles getting those printed out and I was really happy how it all came about.

Chris’s modeling is superb on the AutoCop and he does a great job at “hiding” the pieces. With some guns I’ve printed out, the seams can sometimes take away from the clean finish of it. But Chris’s way of breaking up the parts makes the gun look like one great solid piece when put together.

One thing I do like about all of the Blamcon guns is that they use the GX16 connector on the gun. This connector leads to a cable that splits into the USB and power wire to power the solenoid. Having that universal connector allows you to swap to other Blamcon guns quickly and easily and the GX16 connector should hold up well over time.

If you want to take the time and have the patience, I do suggest trying to build one because if you do need to service it in the future, you’ll have a better understanding on how everything is put together and can more easily fix anything that goes wrong. Just take your time, go through both the instructions and the video, and you’ll get there.

For testing, I added some IR lights around my 43” TV. GUN4IR needs the IR lights to be on top, bottom, and one on each side of the monitor which can be a little bit of a hassle depending on your setup. With the Blamcon, there needs to be two on top and two below. It can support other orientations of where the IR lights are situated such as the GUN4IR setup or one IR light in each corner of the TV. I like the flexibility of the system letting you place the IR lights where it best fits for you and if you already have a GUN4IR setup and don’t want to redo the IR lights, Blamcon will work with that as well.

After placing the IR lights where they needed to be, I fired up the Blamcon’s ARC software and calibrated the gun. Calibration can be done without needing any piece of software. It’s all built into the core, which I really appreciate. With GUN4IR, you need to run a Windows application to set up the gun. This can be a little annoying if you’re trying to use it with a Raspberry Pi build. To get into the menu system, you just hold the B or reload button down for four seconds until the LED turns blue. Once there, you’ll use a combination of button and trigger presses to navigate through the system. Blamcon has the manual on this on their website and the color of the LED on the gun represents where you are in the menu system. Blamcon’s application-less setup process is easy and requires no additional piece of software installed making it really nice to setup being OS agnostic.

If you are on a PC, Blamcon has a nice utility and demo game to test your gun out with. You’re most likely going to need to orient your camera after the build so I do suggest running the ARC software to get things all situated. The ARC software also lets you test the various buttons, rumble, recoil, and LED of any Blamcon gun as well as lets you easily upgrade the firmware. All told, the setup and calibration was pretty painless and it wasn't long before I was shooting away at a game.

Blamcon mimics a mouse setup with the ability to mimic a gamepad as well. That means as long as the device you’re plugging it into has mouse support, you’re good to go. That’s not all though as in Mame, the program detects it as a gun so setting it up with a lightgun was the go-to method for that emulator. Before firing up a game, I tried moving the AutoCop around really fast to see if it kept up with my movements. It tracked my slow and quick movements without any problems and felt very accurate all the time. The only time it had any issues tracking was when it lost sight of some of my IR lights, but after adjusting the distance on my larger display and doing another round of calibration, everything was good to go. I was able to go from side to side, up and down, and every which way in between without any issues.

The trigger for both guns I built felt solid with a nice clicky feel from the switches being used. Now they are pretty quick triggers meaning you don’t have to press back much to actuate them. Those looking for a longer pull will have to do some modifications, but for the models and parts provided, it’s a pretty small pull to fire. I love the smooth action recoil which provides a nice kick when the gun is fired. Going full auto, the action is quick and pronounced as the slide moves back and forth really smoothly in this mode. It’s fun to see half the body on the AutoCop slide back and forth while the Vyper has a charging handle that goes back and forth when shooting.

Settings are saved on the core so if you set the gun to go full auto recoil in the menu, for instance, it will retain that when you plug the gun back in. I was curious to know if I adjusted some of the gun’s buttons and features if they would keep them after I unplugged them from my computer and if it does keep these updates in memory. There’s an option to save up to four profiles for the gun, but it seems some things aren’t saved yet. For example, I just tested out something simple where I tried to set one profile to have recoil action per trigger pull while another had recoil action on full auto. Switching profiles didn’t save the recoil setting as it just set the game to the last recoil action set in Arc.

Blamcon’s own shooting gallery, which is free on Steam, is a nice quick way to test your gun. It’s a simple little game, but it will let you see how well your gun performs. But we all really want these guns to play old school and some recent light gun games. I tried the setup both on a Windows PC and a Raspberry Pi 4 running RetroPie.

On the PC, things were solid and I had no issues. No matter what game I threw at it, whether it was using an emulator or a Steam game, the Blamcon AutoCop and Vyper performed solidly. No hiccups, no jumps, no skips, no lost tracking. Every light gun was a treat to play with the two and I had no worries about whether my shot would miss because the gun would have difficulties tracking. Working with Mame was a little tricky coming in from a clean install. There’s a few settings you have to dive into to get it to work and some game specific items as well. With Terminator 2, I had to use the mouse to calibrate the gun for some reason and then I was able to just switch all the controls back to the lightgun in order to work. Not all games are going to be like this, but it does highlight that with emulated games, it can take little or some work to get it to work 100%. There also seems to be support for Mame Hooker and Hook of the Reaper so if you want your gun’s recoil to be accurate with what’s on screen, you can set up those as well.

With something like a Raspberry Pi, I tried both Batocera and RetroPie on my Pi 4. Batocera, I just couldn’t get working even when typing in some commands from the Discord. I had to run version 40 of Batocera since 41 couldn’t connect to my router due to my security settings. I saw that the commands don’t need to be run with 42, but that’s not in a stable state yet. Once Batocera comes out with a stable 42 version, I’ll revisit it.

After installing RetroPi, I plugged in my Vyper to the Raspberry Pi 4 and fired up Operation Wolf. In the settings menu, the Blamcon was detected as such and was set port 1. Again, there’s some fiddling you need to do in the setup to get things like lightguns to work properly and I do wish it was easier to get these types of peripherals working on emulators.

Nevertheless, I was able to fudge my way through the menu system to set up what I needed to get it working. Just like on the PC, the tracking was solid on the Raspberry Pi 4. The only time it hiccuped, and this was on my large screen TV, was when I moved my gun in such a way that only one sensor was visible. After some rearranging on the locations of them, I was able to get it all working fine and had a hell of time shooting enemies on screen. I tried out Duck Hunt on the NES and a few other arcade games with an equal amount of success. I didn’t try using Hook of the Reaper, but once I get some free time I will try and get it all installed as I want to get the correct recoil reaction in the game on my light guns.

Having a light gun on my arcade system was one of the things I really wanted when I started out building my arcade—and now there are plenty of good options available. The appeal of the Blamcon guns is the ability to print your own shells, source your own parts, and do modifications to the build if you have the skills to do so. They also provide fully developed guns if you don’t want to build it yourself. The software is pretty solid and allows for multiple IR configurations giving you the ability to mix and match setups with, say, a Gun4IR system if you already have those guns in your possession.

They are continuing to produce designs based off of your favorite movie, TV, or video game and my next project will be creating the Fallout laser pistol and the Aliens pulse rifle. If you’re looking for a light gun system for your arcade setup, Blamcon guns are a solid choice and one I would highly recommend for home arcade enthusiasts looking for some fun designs and reliable performance.