&gt; &quot;“If the NES is just looking at the state of the photodiode, can I just point my gun at a bright light and score a hit every time?” This is another good question. The NES engineers took this cheat away by first writing a black screen and looking at the state of the photodiode, ensuring this would not be allowed. If it sees anything other than the black screen, it will record the shot as a miss.  It is rumored that some very early versions of the game might not have had this bug fixed, but there has been no demonstration of such a bug to date.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s funny that they mentioned this because my first memory of the NES was when a kid in my neighborhood got one for his birthday soon after they came out in the US.  This was the kid who got every cool toy and we were all a bit jealous.  At his birthday party we hooked up his NES Deluxe set (the one with the console, the light gun, and the robot that you used for Gyromite) and spent the afternoon messing with it and fighting over turns.<p>At some point, we found that pointing the light gun at the lamp in the room really did register as an automatic &quot;hit&quot; every time.  Maybe this was one of these early versions or maybe it was something else.  I just remember distinctly seeing the &quot;bug&quot; because it pissed off all the other kids when birthday boy started doing it to get the high score.