Laser Grand Prix: A Lost Media Mystery

[artech09]

I'm actually friends with someone who owns a retro arcade in my area, and they have lasergames running on Dexter boards, so I think I have that covered.

That's good to hear! Also, if @Alpha1 has the means and possibility to dump/try to dump their LGP disc themselves (with the frame info, etc.), that would be great too. Less chance of damage than in shipping the disc, etc.

On another note, I considered this from one of your earlier posts:

It seems that the hardware for LGP has already been implemented, otherwise, why would the game start to run the demo? This is important, as the code for LGP emulation must be somewhere in the files, ...

And after looking in the source code of Daphne...
View attachment 26086
You were right! I have some (very, very limited) experience with C from a few years ago, and know some (1970s) assembly decently well, so I'll see if I can try and finish Daphne's unfinished LGP emulation. Though even if I am successful in doing so, there would still be the issue of the framefile; would it be possible to recreate it manually? Or perhaps force the game to play without background video? (I'm unsure since I don't have much knowledge of the LD format)

Lastly:

I'm a bit too busy on LGP to assemble the tiles into actual graphics, but if anyone reading this wants to, be my guest.

That reminds me, the car graphics you managed to extract from the ROM dump don't seem to be the same as the ones seen in gameplay photos:
View attachment 26089 View attachment 26090
The extracted ones are top-down, whereas the graphics in the gameplay photos are from a rear perspective point of view.

Any ideas as to why this is the case, and where the original car graphics could be? (After looking through all the ROMs in YY-CHR myself, there did seem to be a few odd scrambled graphics that resembled some kind of perspective car/tire graphics, but I can't be sure)

P.S.: You guys have probably found this already and I doubt it's of much use, but the Dragon's Lair Project website has the original LGP service manual and parts list: https://dragons-lair-project.com/te...ix_Service_Instructions_and_Parts_Catalog.pdf

 

[Fantazia2]

I wasn't aware you could dump/capture Laserdsic video with a Dexter, I thought it was just a replacement for a LD player.

What you need to do is look into the domesday project and the subsequent process that is now used to capture the data directly from the RF signal on the Laserdsic for mame CHDs etc.

 

[lemmyk2008]

I wasn't aware you could dump/capture Laserdsic video with a Dexter, I thought it was just a replacement for a LD player.

What you need to do is look into the domesday project and the subsequent process that is now used to capture the data directly from the RF signal on the Laserdsic for mame CHDs etc.

Got it!

 

[artech09]

I wasn't aware you could dump/capture Laserdsic video with a Dexter, I thought it was just a replacement for a LD player.

What you need to do is look into the domesday project and the subsequent process that is now used to capture the data directly from the RF signal on the Laserdsic for mame CHDs etc.

Yeah, that was a mistake on my part. 😅 Sorry about that. I only found out that a Dexter wasn't actually capable of dumping the disc after reading a bit more about it, and by that time if I were to submit a message correcting my previous, I would have to wait a while for it to be approved. Speaking of which, a pretty long message I posted hours ago with some info and new questions I had is still awaiting moderator approval, so please check the previous page of this thread in a bit if it doesn't show up on this one.

Also, is the Domesday Duplicator usable on the Panasonic LD-V1001 (the player originally used by LGP), or can Laser Grand Prix be dumped from any LaserDisc player? According to the Dragon's Lair Project's page on LGP, the LD-V1001 is not natively compatible with any other player: https://www.dragons-lair-project.com/tech/pages/lgp.asp

 

[yoganuggy]

The mame team have a method of dumping laserdiscs. Due to rot, sometimes several sources may be needed to combine for the perfect disk image. Hopefully you are lucky.

Ask "just desserts" on the mame dev forum. He added dragons layer and thayer's quest laserdisc perfect dumps to mame earlier in the year. I'm sure he would love to help with this one.
More info:

https://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=122995#Post122995

 

[Fantazia2]

Usually it needs multiple passes, sometimes even from the same disc to get a perfect capture.

The process is also being used to capture films on Laserdisc to preserve any special editions.

I don't think it makes a difference which player was used originally but it needs specific ones to give the correct RF output to capture, the disc itself should play in any player that accepts the format it's in (NTSC at a guess)

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/domesday-project-for-archiving-laserdiscs.476284/

https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978

 

[lemmyk2008]

That's good to hear! Also, if @Alpha1 has the means and possibility to dump/try to dump their LGP disc themselves (with the frame info, etc.), that would be great too. Less chance of damage than in shipping the disc, etc.

On another note, I considered this from one of your earlier posts:

And after looking in the source code of Daphne...
View attachment 26086
You were right! I have some (very, very limited) experience with C from a few years ago, and know some (1970s) assembly decently well, so I'll see if I can try and finish Daphne's unfinished LGP emulation. Though even if I am successful in doing so, there would still be the issue of the framefile; would it be possible to recreate it manually? Or perhaps force the game to play without background video? (I'm unsure since I don't have much knowledge of the LD format)

Lastly:

That reminds me, the car graphics you managed to extract from the ROM dump don't seem to be the same as the ones seen in gameplay photos:
View attachment 26089 View attachment 26090
The extracted ones are top-down, whereas the graphics in the gameplay photos are from a rear perspective point of view.

Any ideas as to why this is the case, and where the original car graphics could be? (After looking through all the ROMs in YY-CHR myself, there did seem to be a few odd scrambled graphics that resembled some kind of perspective car/tire graphics, but I can't be sure)

P.S.: You guys have probably found this already and I doubt it's of much use, but the Dragon's Lair Project website has the original LGP service manual and parts list: https://dragons-lair-project.com/te...ix_Service_Instructions_and_Parts_Catalog.pdf

Arcade ROMs usually don't work in YY-CHR, I remember trying to see sprites from Commando, only to get scrambled graphics. You usually use MAME to see them, but the LGP stuff in MAME are the same exact thing as my rip, no cars included. They're likely compressed in some way, not unlike the Pokemon games on Gameboy or Sega arcade machines like Space Harrier. I did hear you can do some shenanigans to get it to work, but it's honestly way out of my league.

Also, where do you find the Daphne source code? I've tried tracking it down before, but to no avail. What happened to those attachments, too?

Oh, one more thing: I think the top-down car sprites were probably used at the start of a race to show positions, as when you watch the laserdisc footage, right before the Grand Prix race, you can see a top-down view of the track.

 

[artech09]

Also, where do you find the Daphne source code? I've tried tracking it down before, but to no avail.

Their download page has a tiny link to the source code below the main downloads (which looks like just text, but is a clickable link):

http://www.daphne-emu.com/download/daphne-1.0-src.tar.bz2

There are also a few GitHub mirrors:
https://github.com/mirror/daphne-emu
https://github.com/DavidGriffith/daphne (this one being unofficial, but having more updates than the official Daphne)

What happened to those attachments, too?

For some reason my post took quite a while to be approved by a moderator (probably because of how long it was), and I had initially posted it to page 4, but subsequent messages pushed it back to page 5 by the time it was approved; my guess is the attachment links got broken somewhere in the process. I doubt they would've been of much importance though, I basically described everything in them in the surrounding text.

 

[TerminalInternet]

While I'm working on getting the disc for LGP, I do have something quite interesting to share:
You might be aware of Funai's "Interstellar Zangus", another lost lasergame meant to be a sequel to Interstellar Laser Fantasy. I don't know how, but the ROMs were somehow dumped. While they're not playable in MAME, you can view the graphics through the built-in tileset viewer. Due to this discovery, I have extracted all of the graphics and their palettes into a more easily accessible set. I'm a bit too busy on LGP to assemble the tiles into actual graphics, but if anyone reading this wants to, be my guest.

izvram.png

drive.google.com

Interesting with the ripped sprites graphics.

 

[TerminalInternet]

It's been about hours and minutes while i tiles puzzling on the graphics and seemed to be Interstellar Zangus sprites tile with color pattern something like difference sprites size than the original, Until i finally came finished this showcase how's Japanese developer regarding made up the colorful sprites this.

So here it is, The super rare sprites showcase of Interstellar Zangus.

 

[lemmyk2008]

It's been about hours and minutes while i tiles puzzling on the graphics and seemed to be Interstellar Zangus sprites tile with color pattern something like difference sprites size than the original, Until i finally came finished this showcase how's Japanese developer regarding made up the colorful sprites this.

So here it is, The super rare sprites showcase of Interstellar Zangus.


View attachment 26666

Great work! If only we could do the same for LGP...

 

[artech09]

You might be aware of Funai's "Interstellar Zangus", another lost lasergame meant to be a sequel to Interstellar Laser Fantasy. I don't know how, but the ROMs were somehow dumped.

Also, I've recently been looking for this ROM of Zangus; I can't find it anywhere. Do you still have it, and/or do you know where it was from?

P.S.: Speaking of other obscure but cool games that haven't been dumped, there's Namco's 1992 SimDrive/SimRoad, which was the very first game with texture-mapped 3D polygons. It was the prototype of Ridge Racer, which released in October 1993, but the original SimDrive/SimRoad did have a limited release in Japan in December 1992. There's only a few bits of footage and photos of it online, and no ROM has been dumped.

 

[artech09]

P.S.: Speaking of other obscure but cool games that haven't been dumped, there's Namco's 1992 SimDrive/SimRoad, which was the very first game with texture-mapped 3D polygons.

Turns out I was wrong! A successor was planned to Atari's 1984 title "I, Robot" (which itself was the first arcade game to have real-time shaded 3D graphics, albeit being an enormous commercial flop) and a prototype was functional by 1987:

(Image scaled down a bit as to not take up the whole screen)

It had both texture-mapped polygons and Gouraud lighting (both being things SimDrive was acclaimed to be the first to do) at least 5 years before SimDrive. There is a bit more of this system described on the last few pages of this presentation and on this page. I might try inquiring further about this and seeing if it'll be possible to get this thing's documents scanned. This Facebook group also has had people discuss prototype "I, Robot" cabinets which, to my knowledge, no ROMs have been dumped from either, so it would also be nice to preserve those as well.

Anyways, I apologize from straying from this thread's original topic of Laser Grand Prix, but figured this was a nice tidbit to share nonetheless.

Edit: This page has much more info than the previous two on this successor to "I, Robot": https://www.manfreda.org/i-robot/epilogue

 

[Alpha1]

Turns out I was wrong! A successor was planned to Atari's 1984 title "I, Robot" (which itself was the first arcade game to have real-time shaded 3D graphics, albeit being an enormous commercial flop) and a prototype was functional by 1987:
View attachment 27169
(Image scaled down a bit as to not take up the whole screen)

It had both texture-mapped polygons and Gouraud lighting (both being things SimDrive was acclaimed to be the first to do) at least 5 years before SimDrive. There is a bit more of this system described on the last few pages of this presentation and on this page. I might try inquiring further about this and seeing if it'll be possible to get this thing's documents scanned. This Facebook group also has had people discuss prototype "I, Robot" cabinets which, to my knowledge, no ROMs have been dumped from either, so it would also be nice to preserve those as well.

Anyways, I apologize from straying from this thread's original topic of Laser Grand Prix, but figured this was a nice tidbit to share nonetheless.

Edit: This page has much more info than the previous two on this successor to "I, Robot": https://www.manfreda.org/i-robot/epilogue

It was Atari Air Race that was the demo.

 

[John Bennett]

Also, I've recently been looking for this ROM of Zangus; I can't find it anywhere. Do you still have it, and/or do you know where it was from?

P.S.: Speaking of other obscure but cool games that haven't been dumped, there's Namco's 1992 SimDrive/SimRoad, which was the very first game with texture-mapped 3D polygons. It was the prototype of Ridge Racer, which released in October 1993, but the original SimDrive/SimRoad did have a limited release in Japan in December 1992. There's only a few bits of footage and photos of it online, and no ROM has been dumped.

Sim Drive evolved into the Mitsubishi/Namco DS5000 and DS6000 System21 and System22 based driving simulators. There's six CRTs on the DS5000! Three for driving and three little ones for the mirrors! It's a colossal PCB stack.

 

[lemmyk2008]

Also, I've recently been looking for this ROM of Zangus; I can't find it anywhere. Do you still have it, and/or do you know where it was from?

P.S.: Speaking of other obscure but cool games that haven't been dumped, there's Namco's 1992 SimDrive/SimRoad, which was the very first game with texture-mapped 3D polygons. It was the prototype of Ridge Racer, which released in October 1993, but the original SimDrive/SimRoad did have a limited release in Japan in December 1992. There's only a few bits of footage and photos of it online, and no ROM has been dumped.

I found them on archive.org, but as you may know, it was recently taken down by some hacker group. I heard they're trying to get it back up, but in the meantime, here's what I've got:

 

[TerminalInternet]

I found them on archive.org, but as you may know, it was recently taken down by some hacker group. I heard they're trying to get it back up, but in the meantime, here's what I've got:

Let's see.

 

[TerminalInternet]

I tested the Mame running work for Interstellar Zangus, With only sprites shown graphical, But there's something wrong with the system doesn't work gameplay, ROM working functional, No laserdisc footage ever seen exists, Still i have brought istellar2 only short playable, I'm not sure how to play it this Zangus game.

 

[Alpha1]

I have a Captain Zap flyer somewhere which apparently wasn't released.

 

[lemmyk2008]

I tested the Mame running work for Interstellar Zangus, With only sprites shown graphical, But there's something wrong with the system doesn't work gameplay, ROM working functional, No laserdisc footage ever seen exists, Still i have brought istellar2 only short playable, I'm not sure how to play it this Zangus game.

The game, much like LGP, is unfortunately lost media. Sorry about that.