MAME LaserDisc Work In Progress - Time Traveler (Sega, 1991)
Channel: Mog's Emulation Station
Date: 2022-03-21

This is a very work-in-progress demonstration of Sega's LaserDisc-based arcade game from 1991, Time Traveler, running for the first time in MAME.

The LaserDisc capture was produced by the ld-decode toolchain, developed by the Domesday86 team, which can capture every shred of data on a LaserDisc.

Time Traveler is a particularly hard case for the ld-decode tools, as the audio was mastered very "hot", requiring some tweaking and bug fixes to the toolchain. In addition, only one disc has as yet been captured, so "disc stacking" to remove drop-outs (rather than filling them from neighboring data in the single capture) can't yet be applied.

In the case of MAME, Time Traveler also happened to be one of a small handful of LaserDisc games that doesn't use a player model which had been emulated yet. The current player implementation is based on high-level emulation of the Pioneer LDV-4x00 command set, and certain commands (e.g. Speed Set and Multi-Speed Forward) being unimplemented led to some of the playback glitches seen towards the end of the video. Last but not least, the scrolling messages towards the bottom of the screen should be implemented as alphanumeric LED groups via MAME's artwork system, rather than using debug pop-message functionality.

This wouldn't have been possible at all without the Herculean amount of effort put in by the ld-decode Team (Chad, Simon and Ian), Matt & Warren, and a whole lot of people working behind the scenes to source and capture LaserDiscs before the last of them rot.

To read more about the Domesday86 project as a whole, stop by the website here: https://www.domesday86.com/

Or, to read more about the technical nitty-gritty of the ld-decode toolchain, go to Chad "Happycube" Page's own Github repository for it: https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode