The 1993 Pioneer LaserActive certainly ranks high on the list of obscure video games. It was an odd duck; it used both a LaserDisc for data storage and provided compatibility with a range of existing video game consoles. Due to the rarity and complexity of this system, emulating it has proven to be a challenge. The Ares emulator version 146 is the first to officially add support for the LaserActive. You’d expect getting to that point to be a wild journey. It was, and [Read Only Memo] documented the author’s ([Nemesis]) quest to emulate the odd little machine.
The LaserActive had a brief lifespan, being discontinued in 1996 after about 10,000 units sold. Its gimmick was that in addition to playing regular LaserDiscs and CDs, it could also use expansion modules (called PACs) to support games for other consoles, including the Sega Genesis and the NEC TurboGrafx-16. You could also get PACs for karaoke or to connect to a computer.
By itself, that doesn’t seem too complex, but its LaserDisc-ROM (LD-ROM) format was tough. The Mega LD variation also presented a challenge. The LD-ROMs stored entire games (up to 540 MB) that were unique to the LaserActive. Finding a way to reliably dump the data stored on these LD-ROMs was a major issue. Not to mention figuring out how the PAC communicates with the rest of the LaserActive system. Then there’s the unique port of Myst to the LaserActive, which isn’t a digital game so much as an interactive analog video experience, which made capturing it a complete nightmare.
With that complete, another part of gaming history has finally been preserved and kept playable. Sure, we have plenty of Game Boy emulators. Even tiny computers now are powerful enough to do a good job emulating the systems of yesterday.
Add DVD and NES/SNES/GB/GBA support and you’ve got a hit console for early 1990s. You can play Mario, Chip n’ Dale, Tank 1990, Chrono Trigger, Pokemon, Golden Sun and whatever else you like. If there’s DVD then it could also run PSX and PS2 games (so Tony Hawks or GTA SA)
It should be noted that this was only viable preservation wise thanks to FM RF Archival and the full 4fsc image frame data output from LD-Decode, which there is a good keynote that Nemesis uses a modified export on the chroma-decoder side.
This unit looks familiar. Did HaD do an article within the last year or so about an arcade that had a giant ride/game that featured a bank of these?
Lots of big amusement type machines used laser disc but not necessarily laser active
Are you thinking of Galaxian 3?
I love that people work on stuff like this. What a project.
Oh my goodness… There was an official port of Myst that runs by seeking within an analog video stream? And that video is interlaced with 2 different unrelated scene per frame to save space? That is a gloriously hacky design in itself. The creators must have dismissed the idea of recompiling any existing game code and instead screen-captured someone doing a 100% completionist playthrough and then filled dozens of notebooks with all the timestamps and possible transitions.
I am old enough to remember how cd-rom game technology was marketed when it first came out. The belief was that games were going to become more like choose-your-own-adventure books but with video of live actors. So I bet they justified this design by saying the framework would be reusable for all the interactive movies that were going to come out. But then that genre never materialized.
From reading the writeup, it sounds like the two different videos were interlaced together, not just to save space, but so that the console could transition between them almost instantly, with no waiting for the disc to be read at a different spot.
“The LD-ROMs stored entire games (up to 540 MB”
I would think that the Laserdiscs would be able to store a few GBs of data, comparable to a DVD. I would really like to know if this is some sort of firmware limitation, like if they were using a standard Sega CD bios but just storing the data on Laserdiscs instead of CD-ROM.
But this is more statistics than anything as game data (excluding CD based BGM and FMV games) probally never came anywhere close to filling up a CD.
Laserdisk is well out of my wheel house, but I believe the video on them was encoded in analog, which boggles my mind. With that piece of information, I can see how data might be limited. Actually I think the audio was digital, maybe that gets used for the datatrack, and that’s why it’s so small?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LV-ROM#LD-ROM
It stores the data along with 2 hours of analog video. They probably based it on storing about the same amount as a CD-ROM, but with a movie’s worth of video on top.
About the only use anyone had for even hundreds of megabytes of data in games at the time was full-motion-video. So the format was designed to have both the Laserdisc analog video and the digital data present simultaneously. It didn’t need that much data if the video was already handled because a console could only keep a handful of megabytes or less in memory at the same time.
I’m guessing they probably stored it the same way they stored optional PCM soundtracks.
Reading the blog post even compressed the video is 10s of gigabytes, the game ‘files/data’ would be 540MB.
Here’s an actual answer from someone (me) actually involved somewhat in the ld-decode project, and who has also worked on bringing up the emulation of some LD-based arcade games:
Both LD-ROM and LV-ROM made use of the fact that the LaserDisc/LaserVision bandwidth allotment allowed for for stereo PCM audio, encoded almost exactly the same way as on a CD-DA disc – with eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM) and similar CIRC error correction.
However, LD-ROM had a requirement of precise frame-seeking on arcade games, Acorn Interactive Video applications, and the occasional Laserdisc-enhanced titles for MSX (PALCOM), Amiga, and Macintosh, so these titles were limited to CAV (Constant Angular Velocity). These were limited to 54000 frames per disc, and so were limited to about half of the data storage capacity by making use of the EFM band of the signal.
LV-ROM was much more akin to the FMV-heavy games of the Sega CD and its ilk, so to squeak out more video time, the discs used the more capacious CLV (Constant Linear Velocity). This brought the run-time up to approximately 60 minutes.
Given a burned CD-R can hold approximately 700 megabytes of data or 80 minutes of audio, multiplying 60/80 (or 0.75) times 700 gets you 525 megabytes, which is right in the ballpark of that 540-megabyte number. If you account for disk capacities usually being rated in “disk megabytes” – i.e., 10241000 – instead of binary megabytes (10241024), that takes you from 525 binary megabytes to around 540-550 disk megabytes.
Misread the title and was fully ready to accept that this obscure system had been somehow emulated on a Magnavox Odyssey.
This is a console I would not mind having a “mini” made of it, with all the LD games loaded on it.