![]() ![]() Yeah, I said licensed! Dexter is a completely above-board system you pay for the rights to any game you use. Instead, there's a program called Dexter Manager to keep the system up to date and download your licensed games. There's no software to configure, though. Connect the audio/video interface to your player, and the installation is complete. In fact, pulling the old player out for replacement takes as much time as installing Dexter. The Dexter board has a BNC-style video port, audio connectors to wire sound into your game, various plugs for the different laserdisc players it replaces and even an IR blaster, which the Cliffhanger game used for control of its player. The device ships with a microSD card, the board set itself, all the necessary cables, a power supply and a USB memory key. The beauty of this design is that Dexter can play many different games and emulate many different laserdisc players.ĭexter is made up of two boards stacked on top of one another: a Raspberry Pi 2 that's piggybacked on the Dexter board. Dexter (named for the hero in another laserdisc game, Space Ace) fits in this picture by receiving the game commands originally sent to the player, figuring out which scene to play and then playing it back on screen. If you die, the game plays a death animation. As the gamer, you make your character's choice with proper timing, movement or action, and if you live, the program plays the next scene. Broken down: When playing a game, the game ROMS dictate the game flow, and the hardware asks the disc player to play a chapter from a laserdisc. Ownby and Warren Ondras spent the next eight years or so creating the hardware and software needed to make Dexter possible.Ĭompared with modern gaming, laser games are pretty basic as far as hardware requirements go. The natural progression from this was Dexter. In 2008 Ownby extended the experiment using his first board design to interface a laserdisc game with a computer, with it now acting as the player. ![]() With it you could play an assortment of laserdisc games on your home computer or set it up in an arcade cabinet as a complete replacement for all the game's original parts. Somewhere around the year 2000, Matt Ownby wrote a piece of emulation software called Daphne (named for the princess in Dragon's Lair) to emulate laserdisc games. ![]() Everything is doom and gloom for fans and collectors. Basically, then: Laserdiscs are dead and players are dead. If you're able to find a replacement disc, it can cost as much as $500 (for a Dragon's Lair Limited Edition), and no facility is making new ones. Alternatively, they might show so many artifacts that the game looks awful. Discs can oxidize over time from scratching and eventually refuse to play. This has stretched these games' lives even further, but inevitably even the newer players will become scarce. In fact, a gent named Shaun Wood created a special card called Merlin that enables game owners to replace laserdisc players in the game with newer models. Players can be fixed, to a point, but eventually there simply won't be any left, as the moving parts are doomed to fail and replacements no longer exist. Laserdisc game owners today have several major problems to overcome to keep the games running, including laser rot and failing player parts. To understand why we even need Dexter to replace the original hardware, first we have to discuss its failings. For $359, you get an updatable solid-state replacement for your ancient and failing laser player. Fast-forward 30 years and this is where the Dexter laserdisc replacement joins our story: Dexter attempts to solve a number of laserdisc-game issues with modern hardware by completely removing the need to have a laserdisc player in your machine. Cinematronics even offered a satellite monitor for the top of the game so that more onlookers could follow along with other people's gameplay.īut the game had problems from the get-go - chief among them was the unreliable home-use Pioneer PR-7820 laserdisc player and later, the LD-V1000. It wasn't unusual to see it situated at the entrance of an arcade, surrounded by a crowd that spilled out of the front doors. It quickly became an instant star in any arcade that paid $4,200 (or more) for a Dragon's Lair cabinet. It was a pioneer game, an animated laserdisc title drawn by veteran Disney animator Don Bluth that demanded not one but two of my hard-earned quarters to play. In 1983 Cinematronics found its solution in the form of Dragon's Lair.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |