How to use a Sega Master System Light Phaser as the pink Konami Justifier

This is a simple hack that I put together from several places on the internet to get right. I don’t know that anyone’s done exactly this before, so I figured I’d share it here. The Pink player 2 Konami Justifier is a rare peripheral that has a 6p6c (6 pin phone cord) cable coming out of it, and it connects to either the Sega Genesis OR the Super Nintendo blue player 1 Justifier. This pink gun was only available directly from Konami by mail (yes this is me parroting back the same line in every article about this gun, I have no first hand knowledge of it AT ALL) and as such very few people went through the effort.

why is mine tipped orange? I dunno, ESRB panic of the early ’90s maybe. Orange tip or not, cops would still use it an an excuse…

Other people have gone through different levels of effort to get around the expense of the pink gun including modding a blue player 1 gun to work as the player 2 gun and replacing BOTH guns with a small circuit and two Sega Master System Phasers. I want to split the difference. Say you have a blue gun already but want player two. You can get another player 1 gun, but then the guns would look identical and it would be hard to tell player 1 from player 2. In addition to that, the blue Justifiers are not trivially inexpensive either. The resources linked above were very helpful for making sure all this worked the first time, go check them out.

The pinout for the 6p6c connector is fairly simple and I verified it with the pink gun I got as a reference model. If you hold the end of the cable looking at the gold contacts (and the cable pointing down) the pinout from left to right is:

1. Trigger
2. Start
3. N/C
4. Gnd
5. Light Sensor
6. Power

You can verify that your pinout is not rolled over by plugging in your 6p6c cable to the blue gun and measuring for power between 4 and 6. If you do not see power try 1 and 3, if there’s power there then you have the pinout backwards.

From here it’s a matter of opening up the Sega Light Phaser. The screws are all on the same side of the gun and there’s one hiding under the label (I destroyed mine trying to gently peel it off). Once inside you can remove the PCB and gently remove the microswitch from the pegs it is mounted to. Desolder the cable and save it for future projects. The board (for me) was helpfully labeled with Vcc (Power), Ground, TL, and TH. I looked at the traces on the board and saw the trigger switch was hooked to ground and TH, so that mystery is solved. The light sensor wire goes to TL then.

For the start button I carefully melted/carved away the bump in the back of the Light Phaser so I could install a large tact switch (I think 12mmx12mmx7mm) from a variety pack I had on hand. I epoxied the tact switch in place because I was concerned hot glue would eventually fall off over time, but hot glue cures faster so I hot glued over the drying epoxy so I could use it faster.

I was hoping this would work, and it did! What I didn’t expect was to find that the Phaser performed much better than the Justifier. There’s plenty of times I would shoot at the screen and the Justifier wouldn’t register at all, but the Phaser seems rock solid. I am tempted to replace the light sensor board in the Justifiers I have with ones from more Phasers… but not right now. I did find out that the light sensor in the Justifiers is the IS485E so I ordered some of those from aliexpress but they won’t get installed for a while because of how shipping works out.

As a final note: if you want to mod the player 1 gun into a player 2 gun, just but a double ended 6p6c cable and a board mount 6p6c connector, the PCB is the same and that’s what Konami did!