UnMAMEd Laserdisc Games unMAMEd Laserdisc Games Because these games used laserdiscs to play video footage, any attempt to emulate the original would completely lack the video without a large movie file - the machines rely on the frame number of the CAV laserdiscs to find the correct video to display, and there can be over 60000 frames (individual images that play to create the video, or pause for a still screen) on a LD. Any attempt at true emulation would have to take this into account. Has released Dragon's Lair 1, 2, Space Ace, and Hologram Time Traveler on DVD and DVD-ROM. For information on laserdisc games in general, visit the and arcade section. For those very motivated, you can connect certain model LD players (or download huge MPEG dumps of the video) to your computer and emulate some of these games using the emulator. Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics, 83) Pictures taken from MAME WIP page.
Astron Belt (Midway/Sega, 83) Galaxy Ranger / Star Blazer (Midway/Sega, 83) Laser Grand Prix (Taito, 83) Space Ace (Cinematronics, 83) Quarterhorse (Electro Sport, 83) Bega's Battle (Data East, 83) Star Rider (Williams, 83) Pictures taken from Pitchman (Stern prototype, 83) Possibly only one copy in existence. Albegas / Cybernaut (Sega/Bally/Midway ever finished/released?, 83) The disc is known (I actually bought it from a laserdisc rental store in Oakland California) but no board has been found. GP World (Sega, 84) Pictures taken from NFL Football (Midway, 84) Actually this game used not a laserdisc but a CED videodisc. This format differs from LD in that the discs stay in plastic cases (like minidiscs but a lot bigger) and they don't play with a laser. The CED player physically contacts the disc like a phonograph record. Road Runner (Atari prototype, 84) Snapshots from some CA Extreme YouTube videos. This version of the game plays almost exactly like the version later released by Atari, but with a background streamed off the laserdisc, and animated cutscenes from the cartoon.
Summer brings memorable news for the emulator of emulators MAME, that after the introduction of the dynamic recompilation engines and the preservation of obscure soviet games experiences a 'first time' long awaited by enthusiasts, priers and simple players interested of the matter: the last version of the software adds the first lasergame (or laserdisc videogame) to the supported arcade titles. Pioneer Palcom Laserdisc Artwork Pack for use with RocketLauncher Unzip to your RocketLauncher Media Folder Games Supported: 9 About RocketLauncher RocketLauncher is not just a launch solution. RocketLauncher is an abstraction layer that ultimately sets the standard in emulators and standardizes key mapping commands.
Arcade - LaserDisc emulators on Windows and other platforms, free Arcade - LaserDisc emulator downloads, as well as savestates, hacks, cheats, utilities, and more.
More info can be found. Battlestar Galactica (Atari prototype, 84) Snapshots of the YouTube video.
Shows footage of this unfinished Firefox conversion 'available this summer'. The jumpy format of the video suggests that it was a playable demo, though. It also mentions new features of 'increased flying', 'more action', 'visual realism', 'and introducing.
TURBO BOOST'. Near the end is a frame of signatures. More information can be found at, of course,. Casino Strip (Status, 84) Thunder Storm FX (Data East, 84) Japanese version of Cobra Command, in MAME. I'm not sure if the not-working Data East versions of Cobra Command are actually Thunder Storm, however without the Japanese laserdisc it's a moot point anyway. Road Blaster FX (Data East, 85) Road Avenger is the name of the version made for home systems such as the Sega CD. A version for the Pioneer LaserActive unit was also made called Road Prosecutor.
Max Mile (Konami ever finished/released?, 84) Ninja Hayate (Taito, 84) Thayer's Quest (RDI Video Systems, 83) Super Don Quixote (Universal, 84) Badlands (Konami, 84) Cosmos Circuit (Taito, 84) Goal to Go (Stern, 83) Gold Medal with Bruce Jenner (Stern prototype, 84) Supposedly only two copies in existence. Esh's Aurunmilla (Funai/Gakken, 83) Interstellar Laser Fantasy (Funai/Gakken, 83) Atomic Castle (Stern/Sega/Bally/Midway, 83) Possibly only one copy in existence.
Top Gear (Universal prototype?, 84) Pictures from. Flyer describes the racing game as having four courses: Present, Near Future, Future, and Space, with 2 minutes per course, however flyer for Top Gear 2 appears to describe it as only having the above two courses 'City' and 'Circuit'. Outside of trade show pictures and flyers, I don't believe there is any other trace of this game to be found in the US at least. Top Gear 2 (Universal prototype?, 85) Picture from. The flyer describes this as a 'volume two' expansion pack of more courses for the Top Gear cabinet: 'Space Course' and 'Park Course'.
The flyer's picture of the cabinet also appears to have a working game showing the title screen. Captain Zapp (Universal prototype?, 85) Pictures from.
From the pictures, appears to be very similar to Super Don Quixote. Time Gal (Taito, 85) Space Battleship Yamato (Taito, 85) Freedom Fighter (Malibu Grand Prix / Millennium Game Products, 87) The Spectre Files (Midway prototype, laserdisc, 87) Info from: A film adaptation of an original interactive text adventure designed for an Arcade Laser disc game that was scrapped before the game's completion. Galaxian³: Project Dragoon (Namco, 90) Galaxian³ was a theatrical 6-player polygon game in the same vein as the one-player Starblade. You aim the crosshairs at the enemy and fire away. The background, though appearing to be computer generated like Starblade is actually played off a set of laserdiscs.
A Japanese version of Galaxian³ exists for the Playstation. Including the vertical black bar in the middle of the screen! Attack of the Zolgear (Namco, 94) Similar game to Galaxian³ (theater setting) but you could choose your path at certain parts of the game. According to Styx Zolgear was a conversion kit for Galaxian³, with a different romset and laserdiscs.
Mad Dog McCree (American Laser Games, 90) Who Shot Johnny Rock? (American Laser Games, 91) Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold (American Laser Games, 92) Space Pirates (American Laser Games, 92) Gallagher's Gallery (American Laser Games, 92) Crime Patrol (American Laser Games, 93) Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars (American Laser Games, 93) The Last Bounty Hunter (American Laser Games, 94) Fast Draw Showdown (American Laser Games, 95) (Hologram) Time Traveler (Virtual Image Productions / Sega, 91) Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp (Leland, 91) The US version 3.16 of Dragon's Lair II is a Most Wanted ROM, if it exists. Shootout at Old Tucson (American Laser Games, 93) Marbella Vice (Picmatic SA, 94) Pictures taken from Spanish game that uses light guns.
YouTube also has a video of. Cops (Atari, 94) Zorton Brothers (Los Justicieros) (Web Picmatic, 93) Laserdisc needs to be dumped. Tierras Salvajes (Picmatic SA, 95?) Picture from Picmatic webpage.
Western lightgun game. LD Mahjong #4 Shabon-Dama (Nichibutsu, 9?) Platoon (Nova?, 9?) Laserdisc needs to be dumped.
Summer brings memorable news for the emulator of emulators, that after the introduction of the and the preservation of experiences a “first time” long awaited by enthusiasts, priers and simple players interested of the matter: of the software adds the first lasergame (or laserdisc videogame) to the supported arcade titles, making real a work of years and putting an end to controversy and speculations that go along with the matter since. The maker of the exploit is once again, dean of mamedevs and current supervisor of the MAME project on the whole. Giles himself had announced, that the endless debate on the lasergames addition to the emulator would had given way to facts and concrete coding work. A work that has evidently been long and toilsome, during which the coder and emu-maniac Giles has ran into the difficulty to adapt the analog nature of the games recorded on laserdiscs to the principle of “accuracy first of all” pushed by the emulator-Borg core team and by Giles himself.
As in fact is well known to the enthusiasts, on what are optical supports to all intents and purposes (laserdiscs, precisely) the publishers have encoded, in the period of time between 1983 (release year for Don Bluth’s ) and the half of the Nineties, analog animations rather than digital ones, dooming the contents to a slow but steady reduction in quality with the time passing. And just the implementation of proper lossless codecs was the first of many problems confronted (and evidently solved) by Giles, worried as usual about integrating the lasergames emulation with an adequate cleanness and structural consistency of the code, to let the archiving of the inner workings of the laserdisc-based arcades be as closer as possible to the original hardware., the emulator that since and first has reproposed the genre classics on PC, is satisfied by a hugely inferior level of fidelity being enough a simple audiovisual stream in MPEG-2 compressed format. According to the information published by Giles in the past months and years, the movies that act as a background to lasergames “semi-interactivity” (that are for the most cartoons to wind on by using the fire button or the joystick lever just at the right time) have been captured to the standard resolution of the DVD format with NTSC video (720×486), packed with an ad-hoc custom algorithm and lastly stored in enormous files in CHD format (Compressed Hunks of Data), already used for those arcades based on hard disks or optical disks like CD or the above said DVD. Is the game chosen to be the bridgehead of the new “laser” era of MAME, opened by the just released. Therefore not games extremely popular (despite the twenty years passed) as Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, but a semi-unknown psychedelic shoot’em up dating back to 1983 too which combines a polygonal graphics with the animations stored on the laserdisc “projected” in streaming on the background.
Road Blaster Laserdisc Game Over
On the game are available on the site The Dragon’s Lair Project, including six clips in AVI format taken in a pre-MAME era. The Cube Quest CHD weighs 12 Gigabytes: a size that’s remarkable and that should further increase with the addition of lasergames fully based on animations like the above said Dragon’s Lair saga, Cliff Hanger, Mad Dog McCree and others, but that nevertheless appears to be a lot smaller than the estimations considered correct up to now that expected 35 Gigabytes for every 30 minutes of movie. Even so, anyway, the yet substantial amount of space needed to hold a complete collection of the titles emulated by MAME (that on the whole takes up to 20 DVDs for the version 0.126 set) is excessively increased. Most of the known lasergames are yet in the capable hands of Giles and the mamedevs, and the should now be reduced with time. Returning to talk about Cube Quest, anyway, it seems that the game is fully working under MAME 0.127, and the first information available report of a speed barely up to 100% on an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU at 3 GHz without the CHD.
A fault, says Giles, of the for the management of the graphics and the game logic to whom the laserdisc animations act as a background. Before handing the word over the images of the first laserdisc videogame emulated in the decennial history of MAME I close by poin ting out, for whom isn’t afraid of the technicalities of video encoding and knows how to manoeuvre between the constant angular velocity of optical disks and vertical blanking interval lines, that Giles has recently started again to talk about the inner workings of lasergames by discussing of DirectShow (, ) and the full-blown disks (, ).
![Laserdisc arcade games Laserdisc arcade games](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126281570/741628227.jpg)
Cliff Hanger | |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Stern Electronics Wolf Team |
Publisher(s) | Stern Electronics |
Series | Lupin III |
Platform(s) | Arcade |
Release | 1983 |
Genre(s) | Retro, Laserdisc video game, Interactive movie |
Mode(s) | 1-2 players alternating |
Cabinet | Upright |
Display | Horizontal, Raster standard resolution |
Cliff Hanger is a laserdisc video game that was released by Stern Electronics in 1983. It uses animation from two Lupin III films, most prominently The Castle of Cagliostro, as well as The Mystery of Mamo. Like many laserdisc games, it is a reactive game which requires the player to press a button or move the joystick in a particular direction when prompted by the game to progress the storyline. The segments from The Mystery of Mamo use the original English dub commissioned by Toho, while the segments from The Castle of Cagliostro use a dub created for the game. The voice actors for this game are unknown.
The game's plot is based very loosely on that of The Castle of Cagliostro, and follows Cliff (Arsène Lupin III) as he attempts to rescue Clarissa (Lady Clarisse d'Cagliostro) from the evil Count Draco (in some materials called 'Dreyco'[1] and in the instruction manual 'Dragoe'), who wants to marry her. Cliff is aided in his quest by Jeff (Daisuke Jigen) and Samurai (Goemon Ishikawa XIII).
The original version of Cliff Hanger features an animated sequence of Cliff being hanged at the gallows immediately following the 'miss' animation sequence. The sequence was taken from the opening sequence of The Mystery of Mamo (where Lupin was supposedly hanged in Transylvania), plus a later scene in the same film. According to the instruction manual, a setting on the game cabinet's logic board would allow the individual owners/operators the option of not playing the sequence if they so chose. The game was originally edited at Associated Audio Visual, Inc., in Evanston, Illinois. Jack Bornoff, was the editor, Paul Rubenstein, was editorial supervisor.
Cliff Hanger was released as the novelty of laserdisc games waned, thus many cabinets were destroyed or converted over time. Unlike other laserdisc arcade games, Cliff Hanger can work perfectly on MAME as well as DAPHNE, a laserdisc-game emulator.
The game was considered for inclusion on the American Blu-ray release of The Castle of Cagliostro by Discotek Media, however, due to an inability to find the original contracts for the game, it was left off the release.[2]
Goofs[edit]
The voices were overdubbed mainly in English. However, when 'Cliff' finally reaches 'Clarissa's' chamber, the player can clearly hear Yasuo Yamada's voice saying 'Kurarissu?' ('Clarisse?') from the original vocal track of Castle of Cagliostro. The American voice actor then says 'I think we'd better get out of here' before one other missed overdub can be clearly heard: the Count (Taro Ishida) from the original film saying 'ute' ('fire').[3] Also, several soundbits of Yamada can be heard when Cliff and the Count are fighting on one of the rotating gears, and Cliff says 'Kurarissu?' again before Clarissa goes up the stairs.
Appearances in other media[edit]
- The television show Starcade featured a special episode where rather than playing the usual three games, the contestants played three rounds of Cliff Hanger. The winner of the show, Mark Walsh, won a Cliff Hanger cabinet.[4]
- In the film The Goonies, Chunk is playing Cliff Hanger when he sees the Fratelli Brothers driving past while being chased by the police.[5]
- On the special features of the DVD video game Dragon's Lair released by Digital Leisure, a group of children can be seen playing Cliff Hanger during a visual montage.[6]
Technical details[edit]
Cliff Hanger uses a unique feedback loop to read frame details from the game laserdisc. This prevents the laserdisc and gameplay from ever going out of sync (a common occurrence in other lasergames as the disc players aged).
References[edit]
- ^Dragons-lair-project.com
- ^Bertschy, Zac (26 June 2015). 'ANNCastle of Cagliostro'. Anime News Network. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
- ^'DLP'. Archived from the original on 2006-12-07. Retrieved 2007-02-22.
- ^'Starcade'. Starcade. Episode 103. WTBS.
- ^Thegoonies.orgArchived 2012-09-18 at Archive.today
- ^Digitalleisure.comArchived 2013-08-30 at the Wayback Machine
External links[edit]
- Cliff Hanger on IMDb
- Cliff Hanger at the Killer List of Videogames
- The Dot Eaters entry on Cliff Hanger and the laser game craze
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