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This time, Digital Leisure is giving us something that we can't get ourselves: high quality scans of the original film. Most laserdisc game enthusiasts (myself included) have the original Dragon's Lair laserdiscs, so the CD-ROM or DVD releases offer nothing that we don't already have (when you realize that the DVD's are just NTSC, same as the laserdisc).

I've seen the trailer for this HD release and it looks absolutely astounding. The color is awesome, the detail is awesome... I will definitely be looking to get my hands on this one.

While the gameplay probably won't be authentic, I'm sure we'll get it working in Daphne soon enough, and then we will have the best of both worlds (awesome video, authentic gameplay).

Just because it's been remade over and over again doesn't mean you will get the same authentic experience that you got with the arcade. The only way I know of to get the arcade gameplay experience is to play Dragon's Lair using Daphne.

I was considering downloading Daphne as it is one of the few classic emulators I don't have.

http://www.daphne-emu.com/

>However, if I only emulate the original copy would that be considered warez now that a new shiny version is back on retail shelves?

You can always buy the standard-def DVDs and convert them for use in Daphne:

http://www.digitalleisure.com/contents/DVDVideo_ga mes.htm#dragonsLair20
http://www.laserarchive.com/dvd2daph/

Legal content *and* authentic gameplay!

I was considering downloading Daphne as it is one of the few classic emulators I don't have.

http://www.daphne-emu.com/

I am a big fan of software preservation. However, if I only emulate the original copy would that be considered warez now that a new shiny version is back on retail shelves?

Honestly, I wonder if this might spin off a retro-trend in similiar twitch-movie gaming. I don't see why people couldn't make similiar games with DVD systems today. You just branch to various chapters on a disc and hit a button at precisely the right time.

And quite playable. See Daphne.

You'll need to locate the graphic files yourself, of course. But anyone who has done the Mame thing should know how to do that.

Can we get any help with this? I would play Space Ace to death. I have seen Daphne, of course, but finding the actual laser discs has been rough. Even if I did, the setup looks complicated. I used to have various DVD and PC versions, but they just weren't the same.

You should check out Daphne Dragon's Lair / laser disc emulator

The hard part is uh... ripping your original laser discs to mpeg, or ripping them from the re-release DVD video, or uh other *wink* aquisition methods.

Although after firing it back up, it was both cool and slightly dissapointing, but it didn't cost me a dollar to die 3 times in rapid succession... stupid rope swingin sequence! At least I can change the dip switch/settings and have more lives

e.

As for the posters who have said that you can just stream some video linked to a few keypress inputs, that's only true if you've never played it before. There's a definite 'feeling' to it that most of the home ports just don't capture. (And I never saw one that was free, though there were some demos and a couple of magazine coverdisks.)

For those who know it well, you can play it just as it was in 1983 if you use the Daphne emulator.

There is also an enhanced ROM set available, which makes the moves and scene flow of the game much more logical. (The engineers apparently didn't understand quite what the animators intended, or just rushed it out half-baked. Those were crazy times!)

Personally, I played it once 'back in the day', and lost my 50 cents in about 20 seconds. Quarters weren't so easy to come by, so I didn't pile them in to learn the game. It was a fun game to watch, though - it may not have been a landmark in animation, but the visuals were truly unique for an arcade video game.

Don Bluth himself has expressed a certain irritation that this game is what he is perhaps best known for. (Coincidentally, it is 15 minutes long, so Warhol's Law applies.)

As with many things, those who like it and those who don't both think the other side just doesn't get it. They're probably both right.

Regards,

-bitrot.

Try Daphne with an arcade conroller of some sort and you'll get pretty much the real deal (minus the scoreboard) -- if you buy a real Dragon's Lair scoreboard, you can build an interface to have Daphne control it, though.

Maybe I am missing something but I don't see source code for this available to be downloaded. I'd be interested in using what he has done for another certain emulator. A bootable linux CD that has support for most modern hardware is something I've longed for but haven't bothered putting together.

I haven't seen anyone pointing out you can play the original Dragons Lair on Linux using . Works on Windows too. You just need to buy the DVD from Dragons Lair Project....or if you are lucky enough, plug in an original Laserdisk :)

How can you possibly have memories of Dragon's Lair 3d which is brand new?

Anyway, check here for info on emulating the original Dragon's Lair (and other classic LD games). Cliffy rocks!

I work on a project which has some developers with full read/write CVS access and others who have just submitted patches from time to time. A few of the patches I've received have been nothing more than quick hacks to solve an immediate problem, but which (in my mind) do not solve _the_ problem. I have chosen not to apply these patches. The people who submit these patches may be upset with me, but I think it's important to realize that not all code is good code and we as developers shouldn't be obligated to accept anything just in the spirit of cooperation. If someone is going to modify the source code, I think their changes need to have a few attributes.

1 - The change has to be in harmony with the overall goal of the project. Just because a piece of code has bugs or is incomplete in functionality, does NOT mean that the main developers don't know what they want the code to do. It often just means that the main developers are too busy to implement the feature at that specific time. If someone comes along and submits changes that go against the main developers' wishes for the direction of that particular piece of code, then that submitter ought to first a) know WHAT the developers' original goal was so that he can demonstrate that he b) is informed enough to know why his new method will work better. The developers aren't going to trust someone who just submits a new idea without first getting acquainted with the overall vision.

2 - The submitted code should be well written. If it's just a hack using borrowed code from other source with a few modifications, and lacking comments, the main developers aren't going to be too crazy about using that code. "Oh great, he just went and copied and pasted this other code, made a few hack changes to it, and now he wants to use it." Come on, let's have some pride in our work here.