The 16-Year Odyssey It Took to Emulate the Pioneer Laseractive
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The article tells the story of a 16-year effort to emulate the Pioneer LaserActive, a rare and complex gaming console, and the community praises the dedication and technical expertise that went into the project.
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https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/
'But doctor… I am Pagliacci.'
OP spent 16 years fighting dragons, using his hw, sw and re skills to the max.
There is no competition.
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.
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.
Nvidia, Apple, Sony and Microsoft have all at one point (or maybe still do) use ridiculously cheap solder. This only saves them fractions of a cent on $300 devices. Every few years this leads to a device that will have it's solder crack from heat stress. This usually happens well outside the warranty window, and the manufacturer will swiftly give their customers the finger. Microsoft was the exception with the Red Ring of Death getting fixed outside of warranty. PS3 with the Yellow Light of Death? Sony gives you the finger. Nvidia card cooked or MacBook borked? Here's where you can buy our new model.
Another one is the proximity sensor on phones. On midrange models, these have been replaced by a "virtual proximity sensor". Saves Samsung or whoever maybe a couple of cents, seriously degrades your user experience.
There's hundreds of these things across all industries. Its a pretty clear symptom of the fact that businesses are no longer primarily interested in their customers, but rather their shareholders.
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... :)
I purchased it somewhere in the 1996 to 1998 timeframe. When I graduated to Blu-Ray, I gave it to my mother who used it once or twice a week up until she passed away this year.
Obviously that's purely anecdotal, but that one unit was a workhorse.
A few years ago I made a support to avoid board sag - https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5993459
These are actually a pleasure to work on, but their rarity makes everything a bit more stressful.
While a nuisance to store like the N64 rumble pack, the dreamcast memory card. It felt like upgraded solidity of the device.
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.
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.
Closest thing is that a friend of mine had a NES and a cartridge with 365 games on it (in a menu with snails crawling towards each other), two controllers and the gun.
It was purely one-way communication, so payment and access control (if any) was handled locally by the cartridge. As far as I know none of those supported per-game payment, so the payment was included in the purchase/rental price of the cartridge/modem.
Then once you accept this, it becomes easier to consider a company buying bandwidth on that satellite for its own purposes.
That this purpose is a modem on a Super Famicom, that receives game data from the broadcast satellite, and that at certain specific moments you can play the game with a voice track being blasted in real time by the broadcast satellite becomes conceivable.
Modular stuff is fun, especially if it looks nice on a shelf, but it becomes a nuisance when your shelf runs out of room, or when you upgrade a system and you either have to re-buy some gear or find that's there's no real replacement.
For example, after buying an N64, would you keep your SNES around just for your Super Gameboy?
* The Megadrive plus MegaCD plus 32X, affectionately called "The Tower of Power". I have one and it is quite a hefty beast.
* Sonic & Knuckles with its lock-on technology that allowed plugin Sonic 3 (or Sonic 2) to form the full game.
* Virtua Racing and its SVP chip, Sega's answer to the SuperFX.
* The Saturn and its extension cartridges that provided additional RAM.
* The Dreamcast and its VMU.
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.
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.
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-2_(video)
DVD-10 single layer, double side
DVD-9 dual layer, single side
DVD-18 dual layer, double side
With the dual layer discs, the first layer had to be larger than the second layer. There was a slight pause when switching layers, and care was taken to place the layer break at a spot to hide that pause as much as possible. At least on the discs where the author took pride in work unlike the YT decisions on when/where to place ads. Although, I've seen some really poorly placed layer breaks too.
Besides unlike the one hour max on an LD, a 120 minute movie will fit on a single side single layer, so most early movie releases would fit on a single side single layer (the quality did suffer).
More commonly in the early days the dual side was to provide a pan and scan and letterbox option or extras.
There are so called “flippers”, but they weren’t that common.
An LD is 1 hour max so you are almost always flipping for any feature length.
https://www.radios-tv.co.uk/1982-philips-vlp600-laservision-...
Look into Hi-Vision as well, which was HD LaserDisc back in the 90s in Japan. Muse was used to broadcast really high def signals for the time.
I have a player that can play both sides without having to get up and flip - CLD-D703
Until this emulator, there are 15 games that were only playable on the physical device, never released elsewhere.
https://segaretro.org/List_of_LaserActive_games
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.
Kudos to Nemesis for his hard work in preserving a bit of niche history.
I and the handful of other weirdos capturing Laserdiscs thank you!
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.
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.