What 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.
This: "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.
TIL 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!
“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.
I highly recommend this video for an overview of the LaserActive: https://youtu.be/vK0rGekPOpo?si=6XRVtA0FTRGo5sYH
Until this emulator, there are 15 games that were only playable on the physical device, never released elsewhere.
I never knew laserdisc was analog! Wow.
LaserDisc 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.
This 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.
Loved 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.
Super 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.
I'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.
The 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.
This is amazing
Wow. 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.