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Such a wonderful effort to see this rare game being restored as well as being accurately preserved. Of the future actions discussed at the end, this one seems m

Such a wonderful effort to see this rare game being restored as well as being accurately preserved. Of the future actions discussed at the end, this one seems most important to me: > Investigate a solid-state replacement for the LaserDisc players. Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks. While laserdisc based games were fairly rare, in the aggregate there were still quite a few notable titles made (led by Dragon's Lair (1983)). It would be terrific for the preservation community if someone made a solid state replacement based on an SBC like a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately, most of the games used a handful of fairly standardized serial protocols to communicate with the disc player. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard, especially using FFMPEG to drive the actual playback and the serial input could have a scriptable command parsing and translation layer. There weren't that many different commands a laser disc player could do. Basically, the usual start/stop/pause/ff/rew as well as chapter and frame seeking with simple loop.

throw4amP 2y ago
Someone did it about 10 years ago: http://www.laserdisc-replacement.com/ http://www.laserdisc-replacement.com/ via http://my-cool-projects.blogspot.com/search/label/vldp-hw http://my-cool-projects.blogspot.com/search/label/vldp-hw The DEXTER unit has connectors that are compatible with various industrial LD players and was designed as a drop-in replacement. Files containing frame-by-frame data are loaded onto the device. The end user has the option of driving the Dexter LD emulator using a software emulator like DAPHNE, or just it into the original arcade hardware. Some games do weird things with sync https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3170 https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3170 and additional hardware like https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/mediawiki/index.php/BegasSyncGenerationReplacement https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/mediawiki/index.php/BegasSyn... is required. It really does amaze me just how deep the rabbit hole goes, and that people have actually managed to preserve these games.
- mrandish 2y ago
  Cool. Good to know someone made a solution. After a quick look it seems like a solid offering that's been battle tested. I guess the only unfortunate part is that the code isn't open source and the price may be a little steep for hobby DIYers. But for operators who want to get a classic LD cabinet working, it seems reasonable enough since it's complete solution, the maker supports it and, with over a thousand sold, it's probably already been made to work with every LD game and the usual gremlins have already been identified and dealt with.
lordfrito 2y ago
> Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks They were notoriously unreliable, so much so it killed the laserdisc arcde fad that lasted about a year. Part of the problem was the way the games used the laserdisc. The games spend most of their time randomly playing different video tracks as gameplay changed (a-la Dragons Lair). The players were designed for "linear" playback -- like a CD, you move the head to a track, then slowly move the head forward play the track. Seeking a new track is a (relatively) infrequent operation -- but the laserdisc games hammered the players with constant track seeks, moving the head back and forth so many times it quickly wore the mechanism out. Player failure rate was so high operators started bailing on the tech. Funny story is that Atari looked into laserdisc games in the late 70's... Decided the tech was unreliable, but went ahead anyways. As Owen Rubin recanted: I spent two summer sessions at MIT in 77 and 78 (or maybe 78 and 79) educating myself on laserdisc games and technology in the Architecture Machine Group (later to become the Media Lab), and basically came back to Atari and suggested that we did NOT do any games with laserdisc. Bottom line, the technology would not survive the arcade environment, was slow and unreliable, and was very expensive for what you really got out of it. And I was right, but we started several games anyway.
- mrandish 2y ago
  > ...but we started several games anyway. That's actually surprising. While the early game industry was young and there wasn't much management skill or experience, it still strikes me as an unusually odd error. It wasn't just a subjective difference of opinion over what style of game would be more popular or something similarly unknowable. There was objective data available, they had a smart, trusted insider study it extensively and the actual issue was easy for even a non-technical person to understand.
  - lordfrito 2y ago
    Rubin's analysis was likely a big reason Atari was late to the laserdisc game craze... They were so late that their first (and only) laserdisc game Firefox shipped at the very moment the laserdisc craze was imploding. The phenomenal success of Dragon's Lair forced Atari to rethink their position about the technology -- Everyone in the industry was jumping onto the laserdisc bandwagon at that point, not wanting to be left behind on the Next Big Thing. So the execs at Atari figured maybe Rubin was wrong in his analysis, and therefore Atari needed to quickly catch up. Obviously, in hindsight, Rubin's analysis was spot on. But you can't blame the execs for jumping in - at the time it looked like laserdisc was the future of the industry.

throw4amP 2y ago

Someone did it about 10 years ago: http://www.laserdisc-replacement.com/ http://www.laserdisc-replacement.com/ via http://my-cool-projects.blogspot.com/search/label/vldp-hw http://my-cool-projects.blogspot.com/search/label/vldp-hw The DEXTER unit has connectors that are compatible with various industrial LD players and was designed as a drop-in replacement. Files containing frame-by-frame data are loaded onto the device. The end user has the option of driving the Dexter LD emulator using a software emulator like DAPHNE, or just it into the original arcade hardware. Some games do weird things with sync https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3170 https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3170 and additional hardware like https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/mediawiki/index.php/BegasSyncGenerationReplacement https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/mediawiki/index.php/BegasSyn... is required. It really does amaze me just how deep the rabbit hole goes, and that people have actually managed to preserve these games.

mrandish 2y ago
Cool. Good to know someone made a solution. After a quick look it seems like a solid offering that's been battle tested. I guess the only unfortunate part is that the code isn't open source and the price may be a little steep for hobby DIYers. But for operators who want to get a classic LD cabinet working, it seems reasonable enough since it's complete solution, the maker supports it and, with over a thousand sold, it's probably already been made to work with every LD game and the usual gremlins have already been identified and dealt with.

lordfrito 2y ago

> Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks They were notoriously unreliable, so much so it killed the laserdisc arcde fad that lasted about a year. Part of the problem was the way the games used the laserdisc. The games spend most of their time randomly playing different video tracks as gameplay changed (a-la Dragons Lair). The players were designed for "linear" playback -- like a CD, you move the head to a track, then slowly move the head forward play the track. Seeking a new track is a (relatively) infrequent operation -- but the laserdisc games hammered the players with constant track seeks, moving the head back and forth so many times it quickly wore the mechanism out. Player failure rate was so high operators started bailing on the tech. Funny story is that Atari looked into laserdisc games in the late 70's... Decided the tech was unreliable, but went ahead anyways. As Owen Rubin recanted: I spent two summer sessions at MIT in 77 and 78 (or maybe 78 and 79) educating myself on laserdisc games and technology in the Architecture Machine Group (later to become the Media Lab), and basically came back to Atari and suggested that we did NOT do any games with laserdisc. Bottom line, the technology would not survive the arcade environment, was slow and unreliable, and was very expensive for what you really got out of it. And I was right, but we started several games anyway.

mrandish 2y ago
> ...but we started several games anyway. That's actually surprising. While the early game industry was young and there wasn't much management skill or experience, it still strikes me as an unusually odd error. It wasn't just a subjective difference of opinion over what style of game would be more popular or something similarly unknowable. There was objective data available, they had a smart, trusted insider study it extensively and the actual issue was easy for even a non-technical person to understand.
- lordfrito 2y ago
  Rubin's analysis was likely a big reason Atari was late to the laserdisc game craze... They were so late that their first (and only) laserdisc game Firefox shipped at the very moment the laserdisc craze was imploding. The phenomenal success of Dragon's Lair forced Atari to rethink their position about the technology -- Everyone in the industry was jumping onto the laserdisc bandwagon at that point, not wanting to be left behind on the Next Big Thing. So the execs at Atari figured maybe Rubin was wrong in his analysis, and therefore Atari needed to quickly catch up. Obviously, in hindsight, Rubin's analysis was spot on. But you can't blame the execs for jumping in - at the time it looked like laserdisc was the future of the industry.