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The 16-year odyssey it took to emulate the Pioneer LaserActive
- daeken 1y agoWow. This may be one of the most intense reverse-engineering (and honestly, engineering) efforts I've ever seen for an emulator project before. Capturing the raw LD image to this degree, being able to play it in reverse, etc -- absolutely brilliant. Truly fantastic work.
- puilp0502 1y agoTop in my list of "insane engineering done by emulator people" is still Dolphin's ubershader; but still, I thank that there are people like the author that dedicate exorbitant time into preserving endangered medium.
- Sesse__ 1y agoWhy? Ubershaders were a common technique in graphics for many years before Dolphin adopted them.
- Natsu 1y agoYou can read more about the Dolphin ubershader project here: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/
- Sesse__ 1y agoWhat in my comments makes you think I haven't read it already? :-)
- tialaramex 1y agoOnly funnier if either you wrote it, or it cites you as the main source of its information. 'But doctor… I am Pagliacci.'
- Natsu 1y agoEven if you have, others would probably like that story, since I recall it being well-received here in the past.
- bdhcuidbebe 1y agoThe ubershader is cool, for sure but the idea didnt originate in Dolphin and only took them a few years to pull off, using prior art. OP spent 16 years fighting dragons, using his hw, sw and re skills to the max. There is no competition.
- sgarland 1y agoTIL that a. This system existed b. The author’s need for emulation is what drove ld-decode to support extraction of VBI from Laserdiscs. I and the handful of other weirdos capturing Laserdiscs thank you!
- Tor3 1y agoThis: "Pioneer's cost-cutting inside the LaserDisc player caused other parts to break:" Far far back in time when I did hi-fi repairs and similar work, Pioneer stood out with a nice look from outside, and cost-cutting low quality work inside. Not something I liked working on.
- jonhohle 1y agoPioneer provided fixes to some things, but for such a niche system there is virtually no way to get them now. A few years ago I made a support to avoid board sag - https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5993459 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5993459 These are actually a pleasure to work on, but their rarity makes everything a bit more stressful.
- ilamont 1y ago> Pioneer stood out with a nice look from outside, and cost-cutting low quality work inside. That seems to be the standard among many appliance manufacturers these days. Slick as hell on the outside, junk/buggy electronics on the inside that may not be repairable 10 years from now, either because the part is no longer made/supported, or the expertise doesn't exist. We had an LG refrigerator that failed under warranty, and the designated local repair specialist never answered the phone.
- wildzzz 1y agoIt's super cheap to copy the look of higher end equipment, materials might cost more (metal vs plastic) but that's baked into the unit cost. Actually making the thing work well requires paying for good engineers to do the upfront design work. If you can just buy a design for cheap from some Chinese whitebox firm, your initial investment in the product is very low.
- realo 1y agoYour 10 years is quite generous, methink... Try updating a 10 year old smart phone with latest version of the os as provided by its manufacturer , up to date with latest CVE patches... :)
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- doublerabbit 1y agoThe typical 90's add-ons are what made the 90's special for me. While a nuisance to store like the N64 rumble pack, the dreamcast memory card. It felt like upgraded solidity of the device.
- hammock 1y agoThe original rumble packs you plugged in were more powerful and they moved more weight, if I recall correctly compared to modern controllers. Would be cool to make a jacket or bodysuit + headset today you can wear that rumbles in the part of the body you got shot in
- DrillShopper 1y agoI worked on a project that made a vest with controller vibration motors in it connected to a microcontroller. That microcontroller was connected by a serial -> USB converter and was controllable by the computer it was attached to. Sadly, it wasn't for gaming. It was part of a study into the limitations of how much information humans can absorb at once, with the haptic feedback being tested as yet another input when there was a lot of auditory and visual input. I joked they should just use smell, but I don't think they wanted to subject the undergrad research subjects to weird smells.
- ramses0 1y agohttps://www.woojer.com/products/vest-3 https://www.woojer.com/products/vest-3
- jonhohle 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_Interactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_Interactor
- tiltowait 1y agoThe N64 rumble pak also had a longer lever to the controller, making that greater weight even more felt. The annoying thing, of course, was that you couldn't plug in a rumble pak and a memory card at the same time. There were third-party options available, but third-party memory cards had a bad reputation. The Dreamcast solved this by having two slots. The VMUs were insanely cool at the time, and honestly still are. Some games used them in cool ways, such as Resident Evil showing your health.
- Podrod 1y agoI'm a bit of a Sega fan boy but never heard of the Mega LD before now! What a weird and fascinating bit of video gaming history, and a good read too. Kudos to Nemesis for his hard work in preserving a bit of niche history.
- angus-prune 1y agoWhat a great write up of a fascinating story. I'm constantly impressed at the writing coming out of the emulation world. I can't think of any other technical niche that produces such consistently approachable writing about such esoteric technical subjects. I don't understand hardware, I barely program. I don't even use emulators. Yet I will always read write ups like this and from the dolphin blog and elsewhere which give me a great understanding of reverse engineering, the community nuances, and the hacks and shortcuts that made the games possible on the limited hardware available at the time.
- gambiting 1y agoIt's incredible, isn't it. I'm a professional C++ programmer working on games for well over a decade now, I've done some pretty complex low level stuff on playstation/Xbox but I bounced off hard from multiple attempts at writing a simple GameBoy emulator - I just don't "get it" - but I always find it fascinating when people work this kind of stuff out, I have so much respect for them.
- sandos 1y agoI never knew laserdisc was analog! Wow.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MBCook 1y agoYeah that was the big difference between it and DVDs. LDs are just the NTSC signal on the disc, the same way a CD is just raw audio on a disc (wrong! See replies). That means no compression. And given they didn’t have the higher density discs we got with DVDs they had to be the size of LPs and flipped mid movie. DVDs were digital so the video could be compressed. Except LDs aren’t like CDs, it’s sort of the other way around! Laserdisc came out 5 years before audio CDs. That blew my mind when I first heard it. Came out in ‘78.
- mmmlinux 1y agoCDs are still digital though. Its more like how records are just analog audio.
- MBCook 1y agoI was just looking up laser disk and I never realized just how analog they were. I always thought that they recorded the video signal the same way CDs did, in a series of bits. I had no idea the length of the pits on the disk actually corresponded to the wave form. They’re not digital in any way shape or form. Amazing. Thanks!
- actionfromafar 1y agoTo further mess with your mind, there was a digital tape format which is more like you imagined - it is a CVBS video signal, but in PCM format. Very similar to CD audio in concept. It was used in TV studios and also found use for mastering LaserDiscs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-2_(video) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-2_(video)
- Bud 1y ago[dead]
- jama211 1y agoThis is amazing
- nathan_douglas 1y agoSuper cool. I really admire the diligence it takes to commit to a reverse-engineering project on obscure hardware like this, and see it through. It's tough enough just reverse-engineering software, but hardware with the constant threat of failing capacitors, a bad connection nuking a chip, etc, even aside from the technical challenges of just figuring out how to read information... bravo.
- jonah-archive 1y agoThis is a really great read. I was briefly obsessed with laserdiscs in the mid-aughts and went as far as swapping the EFM decoder chip on a Pioneer player with something that could pull the digital audio signal out (details are a little fuzzy at this point). I wanted to figure out a way to extract the video data and it seemed so potentially possible but, as is clear, far from simple and far beyond my abilities at the time. Incredible to see that things have finally progressed to the point where one can fully capture the disc data and emulate these things.
- tetrisgm 1y ago“Nemesis decided to write his LaserActive emulation as a component of multi-system emualtor Ares, partially out of respect for its late creator, Near.” This wasn’t just a very dedicated coder with an obsession. This is someone who deeply cared and loved emulation and the community and did a monumental effort to preserve a part of culture that doesn’t get care. Much like Near did. Legends.
- us-merul 1y agoI highly recommend this video for an overview of the LaserActive: https://youtu.be/vK0rGekPOpo?si=6XRVtA0FTRGo5sYH https://youtu.be/vK0rGekPOpo?si=6XRVtA0FTRGo5sYH Until this emulator, there are 15 games that were only playable on the physical device, never released elsewhere.
- qingcharles 1y agoI always wanted a Mega LD setup. Were any of the (exclusive) games any good, though? So many of them were just Mega CD ports. https://segaretro.org/List_of_LaserActive_games https://segaretro.org/List_of_LaserActive_games
- us-merul 1y agoI really don’t know! The author of the video I linked to describes one game as having full-motion video 3D environments, unlike many games on the Sega CD that were just FMVs without real gameplay. That would be funny if the best games in this genre (if you can call it that) are stuck on the LaserActive.
- jeffbee 1y agoLaserDisc was a seriously impressive technology, or at least it impressed me as a kid. My school had the (vanishingly rare) Apple Visual Almanac and some other educational LD titles that controlled the player from HyperCard. You could use a LaserActive with the Computer Interface PAC for this purpose, or you could use several other devices because there was an industry-standard serial command protocol. The Visual Almanac came with a book, floppies, a CD-ROM disc, and the LD discs, all of which were required, so it was probably the pinnacle of "multimedia" taken literally.
- ethagnawl 1y agoWow! That is very cool. I'd love to see a more detailed write up or video about that system. I really miss that era of multimedia. So much of it seems hokey and awkward in retrospect but I feel like there are lots of unfinished thoughts and experiments in that realm that are only starting to be revisited now in the AR/VR/experiential context. I thought my elementary school was pretty baller (it wasn't -- especially in comparison!) because its library had an LD player which got pulled out once or a year to show the same space race video -- complete with frame indexing and crystal clear frames on pause. Until I bought one for myself in the 2010s, that was only one of two times I saw LD players in the wild.
- iJohnDoe 1y agoLoved the LaserDisc era. Still have a huge collection. Watching the Abyss for the first time with all the extras was amazing. My player eventually wouldn’t take the discs. Would go in the player and pop back out. A few tries would work for a while and then it eventually wouldn’t take any disc. HD DVD was really cool. Even today, putting in a movie like Harry Potter on HD DVD really catches people off-guard on how amazing it looks. Never got that reaction from Blu-ray.