/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.10613017]

Is there still no way to dump Laseractive games? There's not even a Redump set.

[Anonymous No.10613023]

That looks really dumb.
I want one

[Anonymous No.10613024]

>>10613017
Sounds about as complicated as the Domesday restoration project. But it is very similar.

[Anonymous No.10613046]

>>10613023
Rocket coaster looks fun, other than that just a novelty that would be fun to fuck with from time to time.to bad no emulator, I hear laser discs are shitty and already accumulating disc rot

[Anonymous No.10613068]

Why were they called laser discs? Weren't all discs laser-based?

[Anonymous No.10613090]

>>10613068
No, discs prior to Laserdisc were magnetic.

[Anonymous No.10613096]

>>10613017
>Are zoomies still starting threads by stating stupid wrong things as fact?
Yes. I don't think that will ever change.>>10613068
>Why were they called laser discs?
Because they were discs that are read using a laser
>Weren't all discs laser-based?
No

[Anonymous No.10613113]

Shit is this one of those things? I remember playing this machine once

[Anonymous No.10613143]

>>10613017
Because laserdisc is analog you can't "dump" them. You have to digitize them, same as you would with film or VHS. And that is inherently lossy. Domesday seems to be the best bet but I guess the interest isn't there for LaserActive yet. The games are rare and mad expensive so even if someone can do it they may not be able to get the whole library even though it's pretty small.

[Anonymous No.10613151]

>>10613068
"Laserdisc" is really Pioneer's brand name. The format was actually called Laservision originally but since Pioneer was like 90% responsible for all Laservision products the Laserdisc brand name became what everyone called it.

[Anonymous No.10613153]

>>10613151
I prefer "disco-vision"

[Anonymous No.10613156]

>>10613143
If it's a laser read disc, then just getting the raw data is good enough, then structuring the data can come later.

[Anonymous No.10613164]

>>10613156
The discs can include digital audio but Laserdisc video isn't "data." It's not 1s and 0s like a CD. It's more like a vinyl record with the laser acting like a needle. The best you can do is come up with a sampling frequency high enough that you don't lose any perceptible quality.

[Anonymous No.10613267]

>>10613017
I saw one of these behind the Goodwill display going for $500. I asked if I could test it before buying and they said that if it doesn't work I can trade it back in for credit at Goodwill.

[Anonymous No.10613285]

>>10613068
>Weren't all discs laser-based?
Shut up.

[Anonymous No.10613330]

>>10613156
I really don't know how the domesday86 project worked. I am just presuming because I read about the process years ago. They captured everything and as you said figured it all out later. But they redeveloped their technique a couple times until they found the perfect solution.

Neat fact, the domesday duplicator works with all sorts of analog systems.

[Anonymous No.10613470]

>>10613285
ur mum m8

[Anonymous No.10613501]

>>10613023
It is enormous anon, but also very cool. Plays Laserdisc CD's and has a modular compartment for SEGA CD/Genesis or TurboGrafx-16/TurboGrafx-CD. Probably one of the coolest consoles ever, even if it is comically massive

[Anonymous No.10615451]

>>10613017
There are attempts being made using Doomsday project device.
https://nitter.net/tanks404/status/1552692860595617794

[Anonymous No.10615487]

>>10615451
I wonder if these would be playable on a regular Genesis with a Mega Everdrive. The LaserActive unit itself is just a bog standard Laserdisc player so it's really just running ordinary Genesis/Sega CD software on top of a video stream.

[Anonymous No.10615504]

>>10613267
They all need serious maintenance. I wouldn't buy any Laseractive as "working" unless it has been fully recapped. Neglecting to recap the PSU could lead to major damage just by turning it on.

[Anonymous No.10615620]

>>10615487
If somebody has the skill and knowledge to make an adapter between laserdisc player and megadrive/mega-cd, maybe? I know MSX is one of computers that has its own laserdisc add-on.

[Anonymous No.10615738]

>>10613143
Laseractive discs have a digital data layer you can dump.

attempts have been made as long as ten years ago (predating domesday projects), but the guy doing it stopped updating.

[Anonymous No.10615968]

>>10615487
>The LaserActive unit itself is just a bog standard Laserdisc player
sauce?

[Anonymous No.10616106]

>>10615968
https://laseractive.wordpress.com/about-the-laseractive/

The main unit itself has no game related hardware. It's just a Laserdisc player with an expansion bay and all the Genesis/TG16 functionality is inside the PACs.

[Anonymous No.10616130]

>>10616106
Apparently there were Mega-LD Laserdiscs and LD-ROM2 Laserdiscs. Obviously this relies on the MegaDrive or PC Engine.

[Anonymous No.10616160]

>>10613068
>Weren't all discs laser-based?
No. Pic related are also disks

[Anonymous No.10616193]

>>10616160
Those are aren't discs, they are disks. I think a better example would be the CED.

[Anonymous No.10616434]

>>10616130
The way it worked was the stock LaserActive would play regular Laserdiscs just fine because that's what it was for. If you inserted one of the PACs into the expansion bay it would turn the machine into a Genesis/Sega CD or Turbo Duo, fully compatible with existing software. The Mega LD and LD-ROM2 were basically Laserdisc games for each respective console, so yeah, if you wanted to play a Mega LD game you needed the Sega PAC. It wouldn't work with the NEC PAC and vice versa.

This is why I suspect that the Flashcarts could probably play the LaserActive games on a base Genesis/PC-Engine. A Mega LD game is really just a Sega CD game except the video is on a Laserdisc. A Mega Everdrive can already play Sega CD games on a Genesis without a Sega CD attached.

[Anonymous No.10616580]

It'd be nice to at least get dumps of all the games before they die to disc rot. There are apparently some guys who have dumped some of the titles, but I can't find any of them online, so it seems like yet another "preservation" attempt that is entirely local and bound to fall apart when he dies and his mom throws up all his drives on ebay.

[Anonymous No.10618385]

Don Quixote

[Anonymous No.10618410]

>>10613267
>I saw one of these behind the Goodwill display going for $500. I asked if I could test it before buying and they said that if it doesn't work I can trade it back in for credit at Goodwill.

That is a terrible deal. They won't let you plug it in and test it? Wtf? What kind of Goodwill is that? Also why would anyone spend $500 dollars and exchange a potentially untested/broken item for $500 "store credit"? No one in their right mind would do that. Just keep the money.

If Goodwill is going to sell something for $500 then is needs to be labeled as either working or not working.

Sorry for the rant. I used to visit places like Goodwill. It literally used to be a thrift store for people who needed cheap clothing and used items. Even old electronics like old computers, monitors, TVs, etc were cheap. I could pick up a spare computer monitor for cheap and other hidden treasures that were junk to most people. You could find really good deals. This was of course...MANY years ago.

Then it quickly morphed into a profit driven business. Now if they get any piece of electronics, they check eBay for the highest ebay price listed and slap that price on their store item. Especially for retro electronics and gaming junk.

Crusty N64 with dirt and greasy cartridges with torn off labels? $299!

Lmao

[Anonymous No.10618425]

>>10616193
Lord Sugar does not care about your linguistic conventions. Have a 3" disc.

[Anonymous No.10618435]

>>10616193
You wouldn't think so because the tech was obsolete before it was even released, but Laserdisc beat CED to market. CED was stuck in development for a decade longer than it should have been.
And you are being pedantic. The spelling does not matter.

[Anonymous No.10618728]

>>10618425
They spelled "disk" wrong.

>>10618435
>The spelling does not matter.
In most cases you would technically be correct. Disk is American English while disc is British English. However, in the case of a floppy, disk is short for diskette and therefore it must be spelled with a k.

[Anonymous No.10619169]

>>10613267
Once vidya blew up as a collector thing it was over.

[Anonymous No.10619192]

>>10613017
Idk. Got an msx laser disc rip. It works.

[Anonymous No.10619293]

>>10619192
Have to say, not sure if I didn't download it from this board in 2015 or so.js

[Anonymous No.10619316]

>>10613267
I keep the sticker on.

[Anonymous No.10619854]

>>10613017
youtube.com/watch?v=QDlbwl3f39Q

[Anonymous No.10619862]

I find it hilarious that LaserActive was the most expensive way to play Mega Drive games at the time, yet it was also completely incompatible with 32X because it does not output RGB video to pass through 32X.

[Anonymous No.10620483]

>>10619862
Laserdiscs are inherently composite video so nobody even thought to include more than that. The 32X is weird with a lot of those special Genesis variants. It doesn't properly fit on a Wondermega even if it technically "works" if you grind down the shell and I don't think it works at all with the Teradrive or Mega PC.

[Anonymous No.10621142]

>>10616580
I've been occasionally following the presevation efforts and it's exactly that unfortunately, in this case nothing has ever been released because tanks insists on sourcing AT LEAST three different copies of each game so they can combine them and have a close-to-lossless copy of the video feed. I do get that idea what with it being lossy analog video but it just seems like autist busywork to me, fucking get something out already, you can always put out a second set later Feels like there'll be no hope of any emulation efforts ever getting off the ground if there's fuck all to even test with.

[Anonymous No.10621246]

>>10621142
It's especially annoying because even releasing just one game will get attention. Flashcart authors won't add support for something that doesn't exist but they might if Pyramid Patrol or Rocket Coaster comes out. And that gets more eyes on the project and more support. Right now most people don't even know the LaserActive exists and people who do own games for it may not know this project exists.

[Anonymous No.10621280]

>>10621142
All the domesday stuff I've seen with multiple copies really barely makes an improvement unless the discs are really fucked, which some of them might be, but I'd take a shitty copy over no copy at all, and actually releasing something might make another hoarder pull his dick out and go "heh, my copy looks better than that, maybe I should get it backed up before my disc rots away into nothing too".

The tanks guy himself seems a bit of a delusional sort, he comes close to overstepping his ground in some of his test work with hideous AI upscaled garbage. I want as close to raw as you can get it, although I remember seeing something about how you're actually better off doing integer scaling on laser disc footage because modern video compression isn't built for resolutions that low and it just fucks them up.

[Anonymous No.10621910]

>>10621280
>actually releasing something might make another hoarder pull his dick out and go "heh, my copy looks better than that, maybe I should get it backed up before my disc rots away into nothing too".
This is basically how these things have worked since the beginning of time too. The copy quality in the early days of the Daphne emulator was horrific but as time went on people sourced better and better copies, nobody cares that someone released a subpar Dragon's Lair rom in like 2004. Tanks is typical of the eceleb age, he's riding his little bit of noterity as far as it goes and taking advantage of getting to write his own rules because it's a niche market with no competition. It's 'progress' in some form sure but I wouldn't be surprised if it goes absolutely nowhere or worse than nowhere with some AI interpolated shit at the end of it.

[Anonymous No.10622045]

Could the PACs essentially work on any laserdisc player with some modding?

[Anonymous No.10622048]

>>10621280
It should be noted that Laserdisc is a medium where disc rot is actually real. Though I don't know if it applies to discs made outside the USA. I doubt they manufactured them with low quality control in Japan.

[Anonymous No.10622057]

>>10622048
Is it across the board thing? I was looking at some laserdiscs today at an indoor antique store because of the rot claims and they all looked flawless from what i could see. Is it environmental conditions or just literally fucked up manufacturing that is supposed to cause it?

[Anonymous No.10622071]

>>10622057
Discrot happens when the glue holding the disc layers together melts and oxygen gets in. Laserdisc was popular in Asia where it's extremely hot and humid a lot of the time so it's basically a nightmare for that sort of thing.

[Anonymous No.10622092]

>>10622057
Bad manufacturing conditions.

[Anonymous No.10622828]

>>10621280
So are you asking for high resolution analog signal captures? That would be would be radical considering what Daphne ingresses. The way it works now is they store parsed data separate from the media.

http://www.daphne-emu.com/mediawiki/index.php/VBIInfo

[Anonymous No.10622831]

>>10613023
Lots of people do.

Fuckin' Linus Tech Tips has one.

[Anonymous No.10622892]

>>10622828
I mean, it'd be trivial to parse the data directly from the video stream if you're just doing integer scaling and the compression algo doesn't crush everything. I don't know how daphne works, but I assume they've just got a list of frame numbers and their associated VBI data for emulation so a video file in a more modern format can be synced up without the required info from the VBI, which is otherwise a waste to store because it means you've got some extra region of the video signal you have to ignore for screen drawing anyway. I'm fine with non-visual info getting stripped out as long as its preserved so the frame data can be decoded at a later date by an emulator, in the same way nobody expects film scans to come with the audio data on the sides visually.

[Anonymous No.10623616]

>>10622045
My guess is that the CLD-A100 has something internal that allows it to interface with the PACs in the first place. I suppose if someone could come up with a way to feed the PAC's audio/video through the Laserdisc player's own outputs as well as connect the disc tray then it might be plausible.

[Anonymous No.10623856]

>>10622828
I don't understand why they can't just capture the composite video at a high enough bitrate that maximizes what the human eye could perceive. I get the impression that people's biggest hangup is that it's "only" composite and therefore inferior so they keep trying to come up with increasingly complex ways of getting the information but Laserdisc *IS* composite video. It's inherent to the format. It's therefore "good enough."

[Anonymous No.10623860]

>>10623856
I guess running it through an extremely good comb filter beforehand would be a good idea.

[Anonymous No.10624003]

>>10613113
Played that at Gatwick airport in the UK back in about 1993, very futuristic at the time.

[Anonymous No.10624162]

>>10623856
The composite output of LD is absolute garbage and not at all representative of true picture quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHmtba9omSM

[Anonymous No.10624258]

>>10624162
Is that universal? I can't imagine the composite of every LD player is equally shit. Particularly once you get into MUSE territory.

[Anonymous No.10624448]

>>10623856
It is analog, there is no bitrate. It is a linear analog signal.

[Anonymous No.10624471]

>>10624448
The digital capture, however, does have a bitrate.

[Anonymous No.10624867]

>>10613113
>Shit is this one of those things? I remember playing this machine once

I remember when Time Traveller came to my local arcade and there was a literal line-up going all the way back out of the arcade of people waiting to play it. My cousin got a chance to try it out and I was watching him, and he plunked in a loonie (Canadian dollar coin) and died after the first minute. The effect was neat. But the game itself really is just a FMV QTE style game like Dragon's Lair, but with a 3D gimmick. It was neat to look at.

[Anonymous No.10625042]

>>10624448
>pseud moment

[Anonymous No.10625068]

>>10613164
That's actually really fucking cool, but horrible for anything that is based on programming. How the fuck do the games work? There's got to be a mechanism to tell the laser where to go, thats basically like an offset, right?

[Anonymous No.10625073]

>>10613330
That's rad as fuck. It could totally be used as a bases for laserdiscs. Im surprised nobody has rigged up something to transfer the data like in audacity as a raw file or something.

[Anonymous No.10625086]

>>10618728
>disk is short for diskette and therefore it must be spelled with a k.
Diskette just means small disk, moron.

[Anonymous No.10625090]

>>10625068
Laserdiscs can be really great that way. Because of the way they work each frame of video is assigned a number and you can seamlessly jump around in ways not doable on VHS or DVD. For CAV laserdiscs at least. CLV is a slightly different format that sacrifices this ability in exchange for longer run times.

Watch Technology Connections series for the full rundown:

https://youtu.be/Eg8tK1LpLS8?si=IPv9MCQV4Vz3VVjX

https://youtu.be/TClRRMFZ7Sw?si=QcDTA-D1Nk1tCOES

https://youtu.be/Nbo2QepTZNY?si=n8NnG04zm6xkEdLF

https://youtu.be/cvwuAKi1ZB4?si=PjtIsZTBqvQxW7Ju

https://youtu.be/behaBgwnB8M?si=4OxdZIy2BypDwnUC

[Anonymous No.10625154]

>>10625073
I thought some one here was suggesting that archival of this medium should be built around high resolution stream captures. Rather than what people are currently doing. They are breaking it up into frames and separating and parsing the frame data from the a/v stream. The latter is better for performant emulation but the former is better for accurate archival.

Everyone already knows the data, like audio, teletext, subtitles etc are just part of the stream that is outside of the visual frame.

A difference would be things like American Laser Games Amiga/LD arcades. Where digital data is stored on the computer.

[Anonymous No.10625182]

>>10625073
There are people ripping old VHSs and getting solid video out of it. vhs-decode ld-decode. You probably already know this but there are videogames that are VHS based too. Much more limited platform than LD and LD plus a powerful computer.

https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHmtba9omSM

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ANElCHQrQY4

[Anonymous No.10625407]

>>10624258
Yes, it's universal. Composite is an atrocious output method, even if the source is composite.

[Anonymous No.10625423]

>>10613017
And that’s a good thing.

[Radiochan !!8R5IcuH3PgQ No.10625519]

>>10613017
It's possible to dump the games. It's not possible to emulate them atm.

[Anonymous No.10625736]

>>10625073
>It could totally be used as a bases for laserdiscs.
It totally has been for many years
>Im surprised nobody has rigged up something to transfer the data like in audacity as a raw file or something.
You're surprised at the new scenery every time you swim around your bowl.

[Anonymous No.10625936]

>>10625736
Ohh because I don't know everything about laserdisc preservation im such a laymen, kek. Get a grip you fat chunked nigger compatriot. Nearly nobody knows about laser disc preservation, cause nearly nobody cared to own one, youre a rude nothing person with nothing but salt pouring out of your mouth. Pffft

[Anonymous No.10626230]

>>10625519
It is possible to emulate them. There just isn't emulator support.

[Anonymous No.10626231]

>>10625936
There are alot of links in this thread regarding LD dumping and analog dumping and decoding. Get off the thread and read the progress people have been making.

[Anonymous No.10626340]

>>10625182
That's a really old decode. I'm thinking of getting my Star Wars tapes backed up. This looks pretty good.
https://youtu.be/oYxdT2lBLgI

[Anonymous No.10627192]

>>10625936
>gets mocked for flaunting its ingnorance
>waaaahhhhh!
mfao. Back to le tiktok crybaby.

[Anonymous No.10627320]

>>10626340
That looks great but I was more excited by the comparison videos, even 2 year old decode videos look better than composite.

[Anonymous No.10627676]

>>10613046
Yeah laserdiscs suck. I've got a stack, it's very random if one will read or not. My copy of Homeward Bound 2 won't read on Side A but will read on Side B, so I can only watch it from halfway through.