E.R.I.C Laserdisc Found

[+DjayBee]

MAMEDEV has experience with dumping laserdiscs in a format suitable for archiving. Its complicated since they contain analog video and sound. Maybe you can get in contact with someone from MAME to help archive the ERIC disc.

 

This is probably the way to go for best results.

 

I googled a little and came up with a write-up from Ryan Holtz on imaging laserdics:

http://www.citylan.it/wiki/index.php/LaserDisc_-_the_state_of_the_art

 

This does not help directly but it indicates that he might be worth to contact.

He is also in Twitter as @TheMogMiner

[Kr0tki]

The normal resolution for laserdisc was 425 horizontal lines in the US.

Wrong. 425 is not the number of horizontal lines (which is synonymous with vertical resolution BTW, and it equals ca. 480 for NTSC), but the TVL of LaserDisc, which translates to horizontal resolution of ca. 567.

 

And the youtube videos are only 5 years old.

Note that broadband internet in the US at the time was reportedly rather slow when compared to Europe.

[Mathy]

Hello Thom

 

If somebody can dump the video, I can write something that can run on any ARM or PC board to do the interactive bits.

 

-Thom

 

Don't these interactive laserdisc players have a standard interface, like RS232 or something?

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

[tschak909]

Yes. The protocol for these players is unbelievably simple, a few bytes, some players have checksum (most don't.)

 

It's things like:

 

* Go to frame

* Get current frame

* Go to chapter

* Get Chapter

* enable on-screen-display

* do transport button (FF, REW, Pause, Play, etc.)

 

Some later players allow for simple macros

 

but really, not much going on via the RS232 interface.

 

It's usually pretty easy to figure out the flow of the presentation by marking and labelling different segments,

 

Just record it all to a single video file, and you can write a little program that then replicates the presentation flow, have done it for clients that were migrating old multimedia presentations to a newer format (one example was moving an AmigaVision presentation on laserdisc to an AmLogic ARM board viewing MPEG-4 data directly on the built in codec and outputting to the video plane..this would be infinitely simpler.)

 

-Thom

[Savetz]

Woo, I'm crossposting!

 

I spent the weekend writing a BASIC program called E.R.I.C. POP #1 player. It does what the E.R.I.C. cart does: play the interactive POP videodisc from an Atari computer. See this thread: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/265316-eric-cart-electronic-retail-information-center/?p=4036420

[Android8675]

All the good laser disc games like Dragon's Lair, their licenses are held by Digital Leisure, back in the day (1999) when I worked at EA I used to call and do "trades" with different software companies. I made friends with one of the owners of DL, Liz I think, and setup one of several trades for copies of Madden or whatever else they want and got back a huge box full of their current titles.

 

I gave a lot of them away, but I bet I still have a bunch of em in storage. Alas, never got actual LaserDiscs for the actual games, though I thought of buying a Daphnie box once which is basically a LaserDisc player emulator. You load it up with ripped laserdisc images and you could connect it to an arcade cabinet to replace a failing LaserDisc player. Used to love those games. Cobra Command, haven't played that one in a while.

[+x=usr(1536)]

MAMEDEV has experience with dumping laserdiscs in a format suitable for archiving. Its complicated since they contain analog video and sound. Maybe you can get in contact with someone from MAME to help archive the ERIC disc.

 

Replying to this comment since things have changed fairly significantly in MAME as regards laserdisc dumping over the past month, and how it's planned to be carried out moving forward.

 

The entire thread announcing the change is here, but the summary version is this: a hardware solution capable of capturing the VBI data from a laserdisc has been developed by a group working on preservation of the BBC's Domesday Project laserdiscs, and that hardware is also suitable for preservation of arcade game laserdiscs.

 

Existing laserdisc captures will be replaced over time by dumps from the new hardware. This is necessary both from an emulation and preservation accuracy standpoint: some games relied on data stored in the VBI that's not present in current captures, and since the current captures lack that data they're basically incomplete.

 

More info:

 

BBC Domesday and the Domesday86 Project

An introduction to the 1986 BBC Domesday project

Laserdisc Decoding Guide

[The Mr. Video]

Found this one on Ebay. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Atari-E-R-I-C-P-O-P-Videodisc-800-400-Computer-Kiosk-Advertising-Software-NEW/113024378558?hash=item1a50c726be:g:7VEAAOSwc9ha4729

[Curt Vendel]

Atari Museum ERIC page is up, much better quality video's than others had previously posted online, also all of the source code and OBJ files for not just Eric, but ERIK II (the 1200XL version) and Dragons Lair & Space Ace code to play those games through ERIC as well...

 

http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/400800/ERIC/index.html