> What a shame, I didn't know there was a dark back story. I thought the method to > preserve the discs information was agreed upon. > > IIRC, Microsoft's Direct Show was being used to encode the additional data. > > Reading posts in the past it seemed as if the emulation part wasn't that difficult > (correct me if I'm wrong) > > I hope it is not a "capture" sticking point for MAME. LD is one of the last great > frontiers for MAME and the discs just keep degrading.
Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what it is, and it's not going to be until other devs get off their respective asses and realize that there's no such thing as "perfect" that we'll be able to see these sorts of games in MAME. Personally, I'm pretty tired of the argument that we have to have everything bit-perfect, given the fact that laserdiscs are inherently analog. Yes, we certainly want the auxiliary information for each frame, but that's one hell of a gulf between "what MAMEdev at large seems to want" and "what's viable to dump for the average person". I may be on the dev mailing list, but I'm more than happy to call out bullshit when I see it, and I think that the current situation with laserdiscs qualifies as such. We're sitting here, twiddling our thumbs, while these discs rot away in whatever storage unit they've been slung into, waiting for some idealistic level of perfection that will never come. I say fuck that, let's get this stuff into MAME sooner, rather than later.