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He also wants instant gratification
He doesn't wanna open up his new...
You know, "Oh I got this cool laserdisc replacement!"
and then realize that he can't plug it and play it
because he has to...
you know, install a bunch of stuff or do a bunch of maintenance
he doesn't wanna waste time with that
he just wants instant..
he wants to plug it in and have it work
and see something awesome right away.
So he wants instant gratification.
He wants... He also wants a familiar interface.
Which means that
Anything that I'm going to make
has to have the exact same plugs, or ports, that the original player had.
So, if the original player had two RCA audio jacks
and a 24-pin... thingy whatever-it-is
our replacement has to have the exact same interface.
He also wants long-term reliability.
He doesn't wanna come back a year later, turn on his games and realize
that "Oh! They don't work again."
He wants something that he can.. he knows [that] he can just turn it on
and it's gonna work for years and years and years.
'Cause he's.. he's tired of wasting time fixing his games.
He wants.. he just wants to turn 'em on and have them work, right?
And he doesn't wanna feel stupid,
which is a goal for everybody.
You know,
A lot of software pops up big error messages that say:
"Oh, error! Cannot proceed! You've done something wrong!"
And the user, even though they might not realize it consciously, subconsciously, they're feeling like they're computer program is telling them that they're stupid.
So, Ed does not want.. does not want his new gadget to make him feel stupid.
(Tony) Like Microsoft.
(Tony) Bluescreens always tell the user "Oh it must be your fault, you'd better check it out. You must've done something wrong."
So, that's the direction I'm headed right now.
I'm still willing to do more interviews.
So, what I would you is,
If what you've heard so far
If you have a problem that you don't think I'm addressing
that you feel like you need this thing to address
then get in touch with me and tell me what your problem is.
And I will definitely take it into account.
'Cause like I said, I wanna make something that people love.
So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about the hardware,
which we will demonstrate soon here.
So, as I said, I'm just a "software guy" basically.
[I] don't really know much about electronics.
[I] don't really know much about hardware.
I do have a Dragon's Lair cabinet, but if anything goes wrong with it, I'm just kinda like "Oh, I don't know how to fix it."
And so I'm not really a "hardware guy."
But, I decided I needed to kinda of start to learn to be a hardware guy
because otherwise I wouldn't be able to do this project.
And so, we used a program called Eagle
which is something you use to lay out schematics and PCB's.
And so I made a schematic,
I decided for the first prototype I was only going to support the LD-V1000
because that was.. you know, [you] gotta start small.
and so we laid out a PCB that only does the LD-V1000.
We sent it off to a company in China and had a few prototypes made.
It came back and then we bought the parts and soldered them on by hand.
So that was pretty fun.
And so here's what the first prototype looks like
as of today.
So you can see it's got--
I don't know if anyone's big into electronics--
but there's no surface mount parts
it's all "through-hole" and all hand soldered
and it has the port here for the LD-V1000.
We're.. we've been feverishly working on a second revision,
but.. but it's so much work [that we didn't get it ready in time to show].
We're to... for the second revision we're trying to have like...
you know, a lot more ports on it to (I have no idea what I said here).
And right now, when you plug it in,
You have to have like a PC, or in this case a laptop, to serve the video.
But we realize that that's probably not what Ed's goal is.
He probably wants something a lot smaller, so we hope to have something like this
for the final product.
This is called a Beagleboard. It's basically a really small PC.
And it's even smaller than our prototype.
So basically, it would either go above or beneath.
(Warren offers board) (Matt declines offer)
It'd either go above or beneath
and so you'd basically have like this really tiny cool thing
that would replace the laserdisc player. It would be a lot smaller,
it would be solid-state, so no moving parts,
and it would perform a lot better than the original.
So now I'm going to through the games that we are trying to support
'cause I figure people will probably wanna know that.
So here's the first list. This is the LD-V1000 and also the PR-7820 [games].
And so Dragon's Lair [and] Space Ace, those are the ones we've started with
'cause I have one in my garage.
But I also wanted to point out that games like Badlands and Esh's Aurunmilla
those are pretty rare games, especially Esh's, and getting discs for that's pretty hard these days
so, I'm extra excited about supporting those games
'cause those are games that we can really save.
We're also gonna support games that use the Sony players and Hitachi players.
So like uh.. Bega's Battle is one that's pretty rare.
Dragon's Lair 2's kindof a pain 'cause you have to have a specific player
for the video overlay to work.
Road Blaster's one of my favorite games, and it's also very rare
so I'm very happy to bring that one more out of obscurity.
And all American Laser Games should work too.
And we are also
targeting the PR-8210 and PR-8210A player
which is used in Cliff Hanger, MACH 3, Us Vs Them, and Star Rider.
I don't know how much you guys know about Star Rider but..
It's.. the player it uses is..
I have n... I don't think I've ever seen one that works.
and I think I've only seen one, ever. So it's a very rare player.
So we're excited about supporting that one.
These players are a little bit trickier because the hardware, the machines...
actually capture the VBI data. I don't know if you guys are familiar with VBI data.
But just suffice it to say, it gets its frame numbers a different way
than all the other laserdisc players.
And we don't really have a good solution for this so we're...
We have an idea we can try but we can't guarantee that we'll be able to support these games.
But the other ones, we're pretty sure we can. So we're pretty excited about that.
So these are the games that we're targeting.
As you can see that we've got some really great coverage.
And we're really excited about the games that we're supporting.
(crowd panics because the VP931 hasn't been listed)
Oh and we're also working very hard to support these games.
(crowd breathes sigh of relief)
So this one uses the infamous Philips player called the VP931.
It's infamous because it's very fast, it can skip very quickly,
but it's also extremely unreliable and extremely rare.
And actually these games are probably the that reason I started on this project in the first place.
'Cause I was at CAX and I saw a partially working Freedom Fighter
and I decided that I wanted to see a perfectly working Freedom Fighter
'cause I want to play the game, and this is probably the only way that I'm gonna be able to play it.
So...
Anticipating what some questions might be, you probably wanna know...
actually I'm sure you wanna know,
when's it gonna be done?
And you might wanna know how much it's gonna cost.
So I've put up a web site uhm so you can track the progress.
The web site is pretty basic right now
so don't expect too much.
But I do tend.. I do have my blog on there and I to tend to post updates
uhmm on a pretty regular basis, pretty much every day.
When's it gonna be done?
I don't know. Probably.. probably won't take another year.
But it's probably gonna be longer than three months.
So..
You know, we're working on it in our spare time.
How much is it gonna cost?
Well right now, it's looking like it's be about $400.
But, if we can bring the price down, we will.
So, that's where we're at right now.
So now, we're going to have the live demonstration.
And I'm gonna turn the microphone over to Warren.
(audience) Watson!
Ok, uhm..
Just one note on the price for that, uhm..
We are gonna try to bring it down if we can but uh..
if you think about it,
it's replacing a conversion card, a laserdisc player, and a laserdisc.
When you add all that up, trying to get all those in working condition is pretty hard.
So uh, you know, even that is still pretty reasonable.
So Brad is helping out with cameras so you can see this. It's all pretty small working on a machine.
(audience) Do these ship with the laserdisc content on them, or do you provide that?
Um, it won't, I mean it won't be sort of included with it but
it will..
what's the word? Uh...
(audience) you'll have to upload it into it?
uh, yeah. I mean basically it'll plug in on like a USB stick
which is effectively a laserdisc.
and uhm..
We haven't figured out exactly how that's gonna be distributed
but uhm it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
You have to have the games to be able.. you know..
it's not like an emulator where you know "I just want everything for free."
You have to have the game to be able to use it.
So uh you know that's half the battle right there.
But that uh.. you know.. we're.. whu.. there's still a couple of ideas
but we haven't completely nailed that down yet.
But it will be.. it will be available uh in various ways so uh..
I don't know.
Matt might have a better answer for you than I do (unintelligible).
But uh..
Anyway, before we uh figure out how you're gonna get it uhm
Why don't we take a look at how it works?
Uh, this was the.. the board, um there's one installed in the machine right now.
And um these are the connections from the game itself.
There's the laserdisc player interface, the video, and the audio.
Those are the only connections that the original player has
and those are the only connections that you make with this board.
So you don't make any other modifications to the machine itself.
It's just the laserdisc player, so there's no wiring of PC's or all kinds of harnesses and things
uh 'cause that's pretty difficult. For some games it's pretty much impossible.
So as part of.. as Matt said the goal of instant gratification and ease of use
um that's pretty much the interface.
You know, you plug that in, you plug in the uh.. the..
appropriate disc and you know uh.. virtual disc in a sense
and uh and you should be good to go.
The uh the other piece of it we have right now is uh..
[I] have a laptop as my development system.
Uh which it uh.. basically all it does is it displays the video frames
that the Dexter board tells it to display.
All of the kind of the logic and the timing and talking to the game happens
on the Dexter board
and the computer is very much just you know serving up video frames
so, as you saw in the picture
we're targeting the Beagleboard
which is just a very very small single board computer
which uh looks like it'll have enough processing power
to uh serve up video frames real-time so..
so we're actually pretty happy with that (?)
nice kinda small solid state solution
it's plug and play, there's no fussing with operating systems
and cables and all kinds of stuff like that
so uh you know it's a pretty messy laptop setup right here
but the final product will be something that's you know
very streamlined and small and simplified
and you know Matt's working very hard to uh
with his list of goals and designing it to make sure that happens
so um... assuming I've got this all right
this is effectively the same as a laserdisc player that's powered on
uh and if I power on the rest of the game everything should be fine
I haven't tested it since we wheeled it in here
so this'll be (unintelligible) if it really is plug and play
so this machine itself this is one that someone recently purchased
that had been basically sitting in storage for probably at least ten years
uh (?) this machine is all original
but the laserdisc player doesn't work
so uh you know it's kind of a perfect candidate for uh showing this
so we plugged it in in place of a laserdisc player
which is sitting here non-functional
so if I power it up it should go through the same startup procedure
and you know displaying kind of the startup things
that the disc (can passively gain?)
and uh and .. start the attract modes
so let's see if it does it
*BEEP*
Dragon's Lair has a three beep startup
The first is the board saying "I'm here, I'm alive."
The second one says "I'm getting signal from the laserdisc player,"
which we should hear any minute now
*BEEP*
there we go
and it tells the laserdisc player to start
which you should see in a minute
there we go
and then the third beep is when everything's ready to go
and the attract mode starts
and you should get that right about now
*BEEP*
Ooh.. but we have the sound turned off for that
(tony mumbles something)
(Matt asks to have the mic back while Warren fixes the missing audio)
So, one thing I forgot to mention is since this is a prototype
uh not finished, there's _no_ seek delay.
So, the scenes change instantly.
Which, I know that the Ed guy, the Ed persona's not going to want.
He's gonna want everything exactly like it was.
So I will definitely put in artficial seek delay to match the original player.
But for now, it's gonna be instant.
So that's actually kind of cool.
I think it's cool 'cause I'm kinda like the tinkerer guy.
But um, you'll be to tell that it's not the [original] laserdisc player
by seeing how fast the scenes change.
(Warren suggests starting a game to see if audio comes on)
I'm not hearing sound. (Warren) Oh no!
(audience members moans in anguish)
We had this working [before].
(Warren unplugs audio jack and laptop starts producing audio)
(discussion about how cabinet sound doesn't seem to be connected)
(Warren) It's a missing connection on my development board.
(sound comes on loudly)
Ok (unintelligible) Can you get the camera over here?
Can you guys see the screen?
(audience) No.
Well, I don't know if we can get the camera over here.
Does anyone wanna come up and play it? Just go through it really fast.
(audience) Brendon's good at it.
(laughter)
Brendon, go for it.
(audience mumbling)