MAME Work-In-Progress: Thayer's Quest
Channel: Mog's Emulation Station
Date: 2024-01-07

After Matt Ownby (of the famous Daphne laserdisc-game emulator) handed me four Domesday Duplicator captures of four different Thayer's Quest discs, I just had to try my hand at "stacking" the discs - that is, merging the contents in order to try to minimize laser dropouts.

To my surprise, the resulting stacked capture was completely free of dropouts that weren't there during manufacturing. As a result, I've spent the past week or so getting it up and running in MAME.

It's now fully playable, although the SSI-263 emulation is currently a gross hack, redirecting speech-synthesis requests to the Votrax SC-01 emulation in MAME, which is the direct predecessor of the SSI-263/SC-02. It sounds worse than real hardware would, but the speech is at least reasonably intelligible if you listen closely.

To answer a question that has been popping up, yes, once I've gotten a few more Laserdisc games added to MAME, I have an item on my to-do list to make a video about the history of Laserdisc games in MAME, similar to the Polygonet docu-video.