(Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc.) Anyone interested in Daphne laserdisc system?

[shoothere]

WOW this just made my day! Awesome stuff!

Easy to set up (need to rebind the controls but hey that is for another day).

One thing I do notice is that the video for all Dragon’s Lair 1/2 and Space Ace are allover the place. It parsed fine but then sort of became unplayable (video skips scene etc and no prompts for actions). Is this a setting in the .command I am missing or are the video files just wrong?

Would be magic with my new joysticks!

[shmoopty]

[quote=117692]Easy to set up (need to rebind the controls but hey that is for another day).[/quote]

I’ve added controller rebinding details to my summary post. I’ll update it when appropriate.

https://www.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/dragons-lair-space-ace-etc-anyone-interested-in-daphne-laserdisc-system/page/2/#post-117516

[quote=117692](video skips scene etc and no prompts for actions)[/quote]

That could mean a lot of different things. Are you talking about the skipped drawbridge scene in DL1? Are you talking about the text hints given on the “easy” setting of DL2?

[shoothere]

When it launches it goes through a quick series of self test screens and credit screens, which seems fine. The bridge scene I have not taken a closer look at but I figured that since Space Ace skipped the intro (it cuts itself off and restarts from the beginning) it was all related.

I’ll have a look later this week and report back. Thanx for the followup tho!

[johno]

I get an error when I try to install daphne from the experimental menu. It’s says could not install daphne.bin not found.

What am I doing wrong?

[cfx69]

[quote=117552]
cfx69, since you’re testing the more obscure titles I’ve put together a compatibility list to make it easier to share notes with everyone.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hy2VpPXgs4a9imeu0_w3SpehKEkhUNOLzD1jhcgwS3o/edit?usp=sharing

[/quote]

Well, went to add notes to the spreadsheet and you or someone else has beat me to it for the one’s I’ve tested so far!

Nice to see this coming along!

C..

[shmoopty]

[quote=117765]I get an error when I try to install daphne from the experimental menu. It’s says could not install daphne.bin not found.[/quote]

Your specific problem was mentioned earlier in the output. You may have overlooked it. That message just indicates that it was unable to finish.

If you copy the complete output somewhere, such as pastebin.com, I’ll help take a look at it.

[johno]

[quote=117765]I get an error when I try to install daphne from the experimental menu. It’s says could not install daphne.bin not found.[/quote]

Your specific problem was mentioned earlier in the output. You may have overlooked it. That message just indicates that it was unable to finish.

If you copy the complete output somewhere, such as pastebin.com, I’ll help take a look at it.

Ok thanks. Sorry to ask a stupid question but how do I copy the complete output?

[ninolozzo]

Hi
Me too have the same problem.

[shmoopty]

gcc/g++ “internal compiler error” is almost always an indicator of unhealthy hardware. In my experience.

Are you overclocking your Raspberry Pi?

[ninolozzo]

No, i’ve a raspberry pi2 b.

[ninolozzo]

TrIed with other rpi2b…the same…
:(

[shoothere]

Silly question but did you try with a freshly flashed SD, update the Retropie setup script and try that? Always handy to have a small 4GB/8GB SD around for testing

[ninolozzo]

Ya, i tried with a 8gb sd and all the update and then with a 32 gb . Nothing…
So sad.

[ninolozzo]

Found this…. could be?
In makefile.vars.linux_rpi2

# note : gcc 3.x has a bug that causes compilation to choke on m80.cpp

How to solve?

[cfx69]

[quote=117885]Hi
Me too have the same problem.

[/quote]

Weird. I’ve built it twice on my 2 I’ve been testing with here at work and just now on a brand new one a co-worker is having me set up and it’s built fine.

Have you tried with another powersupply? I know that sounds weird but the Pi’s can be finicky with power causing weird issues.

C..

[ninolozzo]

Found this…. could be?
In makefile.vars.linux_rpi2

# note : gcc 3.x has a bug that causes compilation to choke on m80.cpp

But i ‘ve gcc version 4.7.2
How to solve?

[shmoopty]

The successful builds have also been on a Raspberry Pi 2. The mystery is what makes your Pi different. Compiling software can be a very intensive process, so if you have a Pi that almost always works, compiling would easily be one of those rare times it fails.

If you share some more info, you may be able to solve this and help others in the process.

Do you have the newest firmware? ( <– click) In RetroPie, F4 will drop you to a prompt. Try installing daphne again after this.

What is the AMPerage output of your power supply? The very tiny print on the power brick will always include the text “Output: x.xA”, where “x.x” is frequently “2.1” or “1.5” or “0.7”… what does yours say?

What is the temperature of your CPU? Typing retropie_welcome at a prompt will show you the temperature while it’s resting. If you SSH into your RPi, you can check it again while it’s building. I’m wondering if your Pi is getting too hot or is in a case that doesn’t ventilate well.

Is it possible that during a late night, you overclocked it and forgot that you did that? You should check.

Good luck!

[mspaeth]

I haven’t pulled the new retropie package, since I compiled from source a couple weeks back, but if anyone’s interested, I’ve added support to drive an external LED scoreboard over USB.

Windows daphne builds control the scoreboard over the parallel port (and I started making repro scoreboards with DB25s for daphne about 15 years ago), but since newer PCs generally lack parallel ports, I developed a little USB dongle to interface to both original and repro scoreboards.

The only added dependency is libftdi1, which compiles cleanly on the pi.

Since there’s no ‘official’ source repository anymore, it’d be good to get my new code into the retropi git at least :)

I’ll drop a video on youtube.

Daphne / Pi with USB scoreboard

It’d be nice to do a build that uses the Pi’s hardware mpeg decoder instead of libmpeg as well.

[cfx69]

[quote=118226]I haven’t pulled the new retropie package, since I compiled from source a couple weeks back, but if anyone’s interested, I’ve added support to drive an external LED scoreboard over USB.

Windows daphne builds control the scoreboard over the parallel port (and I started making repro scoreboards with DB25s for daphne about 15 years ago), but since newer PCs generally lack parallel ports, I developed a little USB dongle to interface to both original and repro scoreboards.

The only added dependency is libftdi1, which compiles cleanly on the pi.

Since there’s no ‘official’ source repository anymore, it’d be good to get my new code into the retropi git at least

I’ll drop a video on youtube.

Daphne / Pi with USB scoreboard

It’d be nice to do a build that uses the Pi’s hardware mpeg decoder instead of libmpeg as well.

[/quote]

Very cool!

C..

[iesposta]

A real LED scoreboard is the ultimate, also if you were making or restoring a real cabinet, just too much for single-use Pi2 emulator.
I would spend $100 if it was on an LCD display that I could use for other Pi2 projects, like a pinball backglass with animation as the main display is the pinball table.

[shades42]

Oh this is interesting to see !

I have Dragons Lair running with the “mystery” build before and it was quite playable and the joystick functionality worked as well.

The only thing I had to do was write some code to I could use a key combo to exit the game and get back into emulationstation and make up a theme for it.

I am curious if you looked/ran the “mystery build” and visually how yours compares if I can ask? THe mystery build seemed a little fuzzy with the video , but that might be the files I have

Just trying to figure out if I should blow away my current setup to try this :)

[shmoopty]

The video should look the same. If you have fuzzy video, you probably have fuzzy video files. Copy the video file to your computer and open it to check. :)

This build works on the new Raspbian Jessie, as well as future platforms since the build steps are no longer a mystery.

You can map both keys and joystick buttons as well, when you install the controller mapping file in [this post]. That file is still waiting in queue to get testing attention before it’s installed automatically with daphne. By default, the button that you have chosen for “select” will exit.

[shoothere]

Well it seems the video file I was using is prolly not good.
How would one generate one from the DVD? I’m guessing the .bf files aren’t useable.
Any word on which DVDs are supported?
Does it have to be an .m2v file?

And last but not least:

what does the lair.txt (or dle21.txt) do exactly? Is it a sort of video frame skipper to tell it where to begin with its playback?

Wow that’s a lot of questions :p

[mspaeth]

[quote=118409]Well it seems the video file I was using is prolly not good.
How would one generate one from the DVD? I’m guessing the .bf files aren’t useable.
Any word on which DVDs are supported?
Does it have to be an .m2v file?

And last but not least:

what does the lair.txt (or dle21.txt) do exactly? Is it a sort of video frame skipper to tell it where to begin with its playback?

Wow that’s a lot of questions :p

[/quote]

Yeah, the frame file just lists the ‘start’ frame for each one of the video files.
The DVD rip I have has each scene as its own m2v file, but I know there’s other rips where there’s one file for the entire disc.

Daphne uses libmpeg2, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be modded to support other video formats and different libraries (or the pi’s hardware video decoders perferably).

The GPL’ed source tarball for daphne is *really* old software and a lot of it’s poorly written, so it’d probably benefit from a rewrite (and using more robust microprocessor emulators that the ones written specifically for Daphne), but who’s got that kind of time ;)

[caver01]

Is anyone successfully using the additional params in a .commands file? I haven’t been successful at all.

For example, something like

-fastboot

allows Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair to boot very quickly, skipping the process of running through all of the slates. Yet, the only way I can get this parameter to work is if I add it to the base launch script. I can’t get it to work in lair.commands for example, even though I have the lair.commands file inside my lair.daphne folder.

Ideas?

[shmoopty]

I have tried the “-bank” and “-fastboot” options, with success.

Although “-fastboot” only works on select ROMs. “lair”, for example, works with it. But I don’t think “dle21” does.

[caver01]

I just wanted to pass along an FYI regarding the use of single video file sets for multiple game engines.

Perhaps everyone already knows this, but you don’t have to have to duplicate the large mpegs or fiddle with things every time you want to try another ROM for a title that has multiple game engines. For instance, you can run lair, lair_f, or even dle21 by merely building out the respective .daphne folders but only one of them needs to have the mpegs and audio files. In the others, only the .txt framefiles are needed, provided you adjust the first line to point to other folder with the mpegs, effectively sharing one set of video files for multiple ROMs.

This let’s you launch different versions of the game, possibly with different command parameters, without stopping to configure things between or wasting disk space with multiple copies of the large video files.

[caver01]

[quote=118607]I have tried the “-bank” and “-fastboot” options, with success.[/quote]

Ok, thanks for confirming. I will go back and try again. I must have missed something.

You are right, -fastboot has limited support.

[scrummel]

I am absolutely loving this. I cant wait to get a few Laser disc games running on my Retropie 3.5 cabaret build. I absolutely dig what you guys are doing.

[David]

A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone involved in making this available. It is unbelievable that I can play Dragon’s Lair as if I was in the 80′!

I used to watch others in the arcade play this game as I could not afford to feed the machine. Now, I do not need to worry about this!

[tfphumorblog]

Thank you for building this!

As a non-programmer, I just want to make sure I understand how to get the roms up and running.

I opened the daphne loader on my windows machine and validated Dragon’s Lair 1 and 2 and Space Ace. (This requires the actual dvds, which I own). My understanding is that this effectively scrapes the DVD and keeps everything on the local pc.

On Retropie, I create a subfolder under the folder daphne. For example, “lair”.

Then I place all the contents of my daphne scraped lair folder in that folder? Or, do I only need certain files?

Below is a link to a screenshot of what is in the daphne loader lair folder. If you could tell me what to copy to the retropie, that would be awesome.

Dragon’s Lair files on my pc

Once I do that, I’m good to go? Or are there other steps?

Thanks again!

[herbfargus]

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Daphne

[tfphumorblog]

So, if I’m understand correctly, the only files necessary to play the rom are:

game.commands (Optional)
game.txt
game.m2v
game.ogg

Is this accurate? Thanks!

[caver01]

I think you have the files you need. ROM, + Framefile.txt, .m2v and .ogg files. I have seen rips that result in many more sound and video files (with a .txt framefile to match–and it works fine) but this is what you need.

A couple things worth noting:

The Daphne Loader on your PC doesn’t get the files off of the DVD. It merely verifies you own the DVD and decrypts the large video files that it downloads in the background (via Bittorrent). The .bf files are the encrypted versions. You don’t need them once they have been converted to .m2v and .ogg. Also, you often find .DAT files accompanying each of the media files. These get generated on the fly at first run (parsing). No need to copy them over. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. They often work as-is, but the .dat files are indexes which can be different on different systems (endian issues). No harm in letting Daphne rebuild them.

[tfphumorblog]

Hi – thank you for correcting. Yes, Daphne Loader just verifies you own and then downloads the files via torrent.

Thank you so much for clarifying I don’t need .bf and .DAT. As a newbie Daphne roms are a little more complicated and confusing that typical console or MAME roms (at least to me).

If I could make a pitch to the wiki editors to write a “For morons” section for Daphne, that would help bozos like me.

Thanks again!
D.J.

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