NEW LASERACTIVE MODULE FOUND!!

Heh, took me a while to figure out what you were on about there. Good one ^_^

(anyone who doesn't "get it" look at the far right mini console)

 

Is it real though? I don't know about the Laseractive, but the PAC-Rev1 says HD-DVD under it....

 

Um, Laseractive was an obscure addon for the Megadrive, as you can see on Assembler's site. This is a pisstake since the Revolution seems to fit in

 

LOL some people...

 

:-D Nice one Kev. Had to look at that for a second or two thinking "What the hell is he on about" Then IO saw the HD-DVD text then though the image looked a lot cleaner than the other two then it hit me. OK, took a good 5 seconds but it is 0:15 here.

Yakumo

 

Actually, the Laseractive was a model of Laserdisc player made by Pioneer that had the unique ability to run PC Engine or Megadrive games with the proper add-in module. CD-based games for both the Megadrive and the PC Engine could be played in the Laseractive disc tray (there were special slots for normal-sized CDs), and there were even some Mega-LD games developed for use specifically on the Laseractive. There may also have been some PC Engine games like this, but I've not heard of any.

I had to laugh when I noticed the 'lost module' - did you do that yourself, Assembler?

 

There are PCE LDROMs, not sure how many though

 

And I was going to add I have a PAC-K1 for sale if wanted

 

I wonder, was there ever a standard for digital data on LD?

 

There are around 20 Mega LD titles and I believe between 5 and 10 PCE. Mega LD titles are really overabundant, you can get practically any of them still sealed for under $30, they're so not scarce.

Regarding the data, who knows? (I'd like to find out) I don't have a Laseractive and am not that interested in obtaining the monstrosity, but I would love to play the games. I've never played a Laseractive game before so I'm not sure if they actually utilize the Laserdisc A/V or not, but from the screenshots I've seen, it doesn't appear that they use LD video (but that makes sense because Pioneer would be nuts to develop something so expensive.) Maybe they just stream "LDDA" audio off the disc?

 

Yeah, but where would the data be? Mega LD games did not come with separate cartridges, did they?

 

I've always wondered that too. The earlier LD games like the ones that could be used certain Pioneer MSX systems worked by overlaying MSX graphics on LD video. It lead to very linear games, obviously, and mostly shmups. I don't know where the actual MSX program data came from - I assumed it was a cart or something, as AFAIK all the interacting between the computer and LD player was just controlling the video overlaying and controlling the video playback. I assume LaserActive games worked in a similar way, just using a MD or PC Engine instead of an MSX.

Outside of AC-3 Dolby Digital audio (and possibly DTS?), I've never heard of any digital data being on LaserDiscs, and even then that kind of stuff didn't come into use until the mid-90s at least.

 

Hey, the Star Wars Episode 1 LaserDisc (yes it exists!) has 6.1 Digital Audio frequency-modulated onto it. Slap yo mothafuckin self.

And, IIRC, LaserDiscs hold *some* digital data, but it's just very little, and it's used for indexing. I doubt they could fit any general-purpose data in there.

 

Someone with a hefty analyzer could snoop the 68K, that'd surely be interesting but extremely tedious. I'm sure the games make use of the LA BIOS routines though sadly, I'd really like Mega LD games hax0red for MCD

 

hey ASSEMbler look in ebay

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=62054&item=4382819186&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW