Oddly enough, about five or six years before I started collecting I went on a quest to obtain the original laserdisc from a Dragon's Lair in hopes that I could hack together a playable equivalent on an Amiga-controlled laserdisc player. I was doing quite a bit of work at the time on kiosks and other interactive systems and thought it would be a fun project.

I searched high and low for a disc and somehow stumbled upon both a Dragon's Lair and a Space Ace laserdisc from an arcade operator no more than a mile up the road from my office (when I was self-employed in the booming metropolis of downtown Lynchburg, Va). I think I paid like $20 for the discs and two or three dead Pioneer LD1000 laserdisc players they had extracted from the original cabinets. The machines were long gone by this point.

An amusing aside is the fact that when I started hunting for classic arcades years later, I remembered this place and went and peeked in the front window of the rather rundown building. To my shock there were still signs of arcade paraphenalia. I tracked down the owners and ended up buying over 20 machines from them at one time. Among the parts was the marquee and control panel I mentioned above. The machine was still history, but I had come into posession of half the artwork that went with the very disc I had bought years before.

I've since sold everything but the laserdisc. Upon finding Daphne a week or so ago, I hooked up a good quality laserdisc player from my office and recorded the entire thing on my Powerbook Titanium using a Sony DV media converter firewired to Final Cut Pro 3.

The first version I made led to two days of crazy MPEG1 and MPEG2 codec shenanigans. The DV file I created played fine under Linux with mplayer and converted nicely to MPEG2 with mencoder. Daphne, however, refused to work with the resulting file. Several others including the ones provided by Apple for their DVD authoring products had other problems with frame accuracy. I finally ended up getting it encoded with BitVice on the Mac and creating a copy that made Daphne happy.

In the meantime, I figured I would need to rotate the video since my screen is mounted for vertical games. I used Final Cut to do a 90 degree left rotation scaled to 80% to accomodate the aspect changes and overscan loss from the image. It ends up being a very letterboxed but quite nice looking image.

The horizontal full screen version fired right up on my desktop Linux machine and played nicely with Daphne. I then repeated the encoding process on the rotated video, crossed my fingers and moved the entire thing to my MAME box. After a bit of toying around and having to compile in some SDL stuff I had not previously needed, it fired up nicely.

I had to play some games with paths, etc., but finally got it worked into AdvanceMenu to launch as a generic emulator. It takes a minute or so to set itself up, but I've not had to make any changes to the configuration since Daphne appears to use virtually identical keyboard controls to MAME. It coins up, plays, and exits using the same buttons already assigned to similar functions on my machine's MAME personality. The result is a virtually perfect Dragon's Lair clone, something I never thought I'd achieve. I'm now kicking myself for selling that Space Ace laserdisc...