MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Question about ALG driver status

> > > And Firefox, is one of the best looking games here. 90% of the LD games will look
> way more ugly. They where produced very fast and very cheap with the lowest eighties
> technology.>

Agreed on that point. But we can't do anything about source material that was poorly-produced from the start. We're just stuck with the final results in the form of the discs that we have to work with. More:

> I am sorry, but you got me completely wrong here and i should explain that more
> clearly. Its not the LD medium itself (this in fact, was awesome at that time). I
> meant more the "content" of it, the what you called "master". This content was
> produced fast, very cheap and with low-quality standards and is that, what was
> mentioned by Dave about Firefox for example and Firefox is one of the better
> "masters". I have seen four captures from SailorSat and three of them, are just
> "quick and dirty" work. Only Mad Dog looked "acceptable", but still far from a good
> "master".

I think I might see where some confusion of terminology has crept in, and I should have been clearer in my use of the term 'master'.

When referring to a 'master', I'm speaking solely about the disc used to press all of the discs that would have originally shipped with the games. These pressing masters would have determined what we are working with today as source material; we don't (as far as I am aware) have access to any media that's further upstream from pressed copies and which would have been used to create the pressing masters. Because of this, pressed copies as our source material are as good as it gets.

> With this, you answered your own questions regarding Digital Leisure and DL, Space
> Ace and so on. They had Don Bluth and they had the original masters.

Maybe. It's possible that they did transfers from Beta or other sources used in the creation of pressing masters; it's possible that they just read them from existing pressed discs. We just don't know, short of a Digital Leisure employee chiming in and saying, "yep, here's how we did it."

One thing we can probably safely assume, though, is that Digital Leisure wasn't concerned with preservation in the sense that we are as they were creating a commercial product. Ignoring the VBI would have been beneficial to them from the standpoint of (at the very least) saving space on the DVDs. Given that they were transferring to a format that didn't need that data for gameplay or video playback, its loss was likely a non-issue for them.

Again, though, this is speculation on my behalf, but it seems reasonable to my mind. Unfortunately, I don't have my Space Ace or Dragon's Lair DVDs close by so can't check on this.

> As this is
> basically a animation movie, it was quite easy to recapture stuff and even create a
> HD release of it. Stuff that you simply cannot do with Mad Dog and all the other
> games, with real actors. Those games where not recorded on film (nearly resolution
> independent, huge colorspace), but rather on video (fixed small resolution, small
> colorspace). So even if you have the masters, you will not come far with it.

I take your points regarding the differences between film and video, but the frames stored on the discs were either PAL- or NTSC-formatted. Ultimately, that creates a fixed resolution of either 625 or 525 lines, respectively, with a colourspace determined by clock frequency and available picture bandwidth (if I'm understanding the broadcast format workings correctly).

What this means is that we are working with a fixed amount of output per frame from the player - each frame should be the same size, determined by the broadcast standard the disc is pressed for and that the player outputs (which should be the same).

In this case, the source material used to create the pressing masters isn't relevant: it may have been created in higher quality than either PAL or NTSC are capable of reproducing, but since we're working with source material in those two formats a digital capture solution should be tailored to those standards.

Realistically, though, I'm low on ideas at this point. And while there have been a lot of really good ideas kicked around, until both a capture method and format are settled on this is all very much academic. Good to discuss, to be certain, but not really moving anything forward.