Does anyone know or have contacts with those working on the MAME or Daphne project(s)?

As some of you may know I work in the A/V industry as a producer but in my spare time I encode 3.11 SBC DIVX AVI Anime for the Digital Anime group Soldats. I've been friends with a guy named Raymen who used to be a Math teacher for a local high school who is now retired but he collect old video media and players.. like LD's and CED's etc..
Well, he let me borrow a nice LD player and some arcade game LD's (Dragons Lair 1-2, Space Ace, and some other odd Fantasy LD game) and I'm currently encoding all the video to 3.11 SBC DIVX AVI, which I've gotten quite good at for Animation working with it for so long.
Anyway I'm looking for someone who into the MAME scene who could emulate the Dragon's Lair hardware to run the Video tracks in MAME. Sense the ROM is mostly a program to remote a LD player to play video I assume it isn't much of a stretch to take the video (as it was never digital) from an AVI as the remote video source.

My current project proposal is as follows:

all three (3) original games must fit in under 1 gig of space with DVD quality video and audio.
Video ROM data to fit in two AVI tracks. One for the main pathing of the game, and one for the death animation.

This formating of the data can be change once a programmer can be found for the project.

If MAME won't take the project into the main stepping (sort of the same reason as PONG, the LD is not digital) then I would think a DLMAME32 (Dragon's Lair MAME) would be in order. As for Daphne, this is already done with mpg2 but the file size is really bad and as far as I can tell there is no tools for the DL2: Time Warp.

Contact me at Tsouthern@cablelynx.com if you can help me out.

Although AVI's have fairly good seek times, DivX is apparently terrible at find a particular frame quickly - a necessity for games of this ilk.

What may make things interesting is that apparently MAME .63 is to be released under GPL, the same license as daphne, making code porting acceptable between the two - but you CANNOT port from the current MAME (.62).

I have not found that to be the case with 3.11 divx avi (seeking to a frame), it might have been true when everyone had 400mhz PII's but not today. Plus with 3.11 Divx you can control the encoding at the frame level, so if a seek occures to a frame you can create a KF, or DF there and improve seek times beyond anything possible with mpeg 1 and 2. The savings in file size should be the main consern here, as quality and portability to different OS's is the same.

I had a guy say to me "860meg for DL is not that bad." Well granted, that's a large download but nothing 24 hours and broadband couldn't handle. but consider the fact that you could fit all 3 bluth games in that same space and you've just saved a ton of bandwidth over the next 20 years.. also lets say all 3 games in mpeg2 fit in 4 gigs of HD space; how many LD games are there? once you get DL into MAME you open the door to all these other LD games. Now your talking 60gig's just for LD games.. that could have been under 10 gigs..

Look, these things need to be considered before progammers get to work on a MAME project because it needs to be done the right way the first time. 3.11 SBC divx AVI encoding is the only viable option.

Heh... I'd argue that's exactly what daphne has done.

Probably for ease of use on old technology. Just because it works ok doesn't mean it was the right way to do it.

I guess I'm in the wrong place. Obviously no one here knows anything about digital AV encoding beyond what their PRO-ONE or DV500 can pump out.


I'd wager that this Daphne is a dead project and can't be updated to be anything more then it is.. and that's fine, I'm talking about MAME, a program that people follow religiously.

I feel like I'm trying to show a bunch of old people the usefulness of the car over the horse when I bring up problems with mpeg2 in here.

The source code to Daphne is available for download which means you or anyone else can update it as you see fit.

Did you mention any problems with mpeg2 other than file size? Because apparently you are in the minority when it comes to being concerned about the file size.

I am concerned mostly about cross-platform compatibility, and performance.

I am a file size nazi.. I don't like wasted space, if it can be done with less space then i'm all about it.

Your right, even though my arguments are strong i've got no support so far.. This same post started a flame over at the MAME forum.

I agree. I also add quality/preservation to the list. File size isn't an issue at all for me when quality is at stake, and bandwidth isn't an issue at all for anyone who makes their own captures, like you're supposed to.

As an aside, props to everyone who makes their own captures. Personally, I think everyone who uses daphne should go through the process at least once. It's a real eye-opener into how the video side of things works, and you'll understand daphne a lot better after following through the tutorial.

A lot of us here know a lot about digital AV encoding. It's just that most of us don't throw around buzzwords and pretend that we know everything. I was willing to listen to your ideas, but it seems you aren't interested in any opinion but your own. I'd bet you don't even know the reasons why m2v/ogg were chosen for this project.



I've yet to see a strong argument from you. Grab the source and convince me. Then I'll admit I'm wrong.

You picked the formats for ease of ripping the DVD-roms would be my guess.. that and when Daphne was started everyone was using 400-700mhz pc's with 128meg of ram and Divx requires a lot of resources to push 640x480 along with an mp3 soundtrack.

Now you stand back and think you've done these games justice or something.. whatever pat yourselves on the back and all that.. Doesn't mean you did something special. Daphne doesn't even work on my 1.6ghz AMD XP with 512 meg DDr3200.. lots of people can't get it to work but I'm sure that's a user failure to you Chip, or just some morons who can't function at the speed of your big brain.

3.11 SBC Divx AVI is the only quality encoding tech. for what Daphnie tried to do. the reason's are simple.. compression ratio to quality is a lot better.


Anyone who pushes mpeg2 as the be all thing obviously doesn't know what they are talking about.

Gridle just told you on the MAME board that DIVX would never be allowed in MAME for portability reasons. Your whole plan is flawed. Give it up.

Go to a PC tech class and learn how to configure your computer properly. Daphne works fine on my slowest PC, a Pentium III 500Mhz. There is no reason why it shouldn't work on your configuration.

Your snide remarks above are not appreciated by me and they will not make anyone want to help you.

I was the one who picked the m2v/ogg format. The main reason was I had access to a nice GPL'd mpeg2 decoder which worked under both linux and windows, which are my target platforms for Daphne. I looked into having the video and audio streams multiplexed but decided I could get faster seeking if the streams were separated. Then I realized that there was really no reason I should use mp2 or mp3 for audio, and I decided to use ogg vorbis instead because it had no licensing restrictions and was an open source codec. Whether or not source code is free and Free (as in GPL'd) is a big determining factor in whether I will embrace software or not, esepcially for my own projects (such as Daphne).

The fact that the DVD-ROM .VOB files can be demultiplexed and the resulting mpeg2 stream used with Daphne was not a big determining factor. If you don't believe that, consider that those files have to basically be re-encoded anyway (further degrading the quality) to get rid of the ugly telecining. Yes, Digital Leisure blew it by using mpeg's designed for TV output in a game designed to be played on a PC monitor.

I don't want to add any more tension to this argument, but I'd like to invite you to relax your preconceived notions about what is the best way to do what you are proposing to do, if for no other reason than the fact that you didn't know why mpeg2 was chosen and didn't know we weren't using mp3 audio. I don't deny that what you propose could achieve the best video quality for the file size.. in fact, I think it probably _could_. But there is more to be considered here than just the quality/filesize ratio, specifically issues that you may not have considered.

> You picked the formats for ease of ripping the DVD-roms would be my guess..

Actually, when MPEG support was initially added to Daphne, ripping from the DVD's wasn't even on the radar. The ability to use rips from the DVD's was added by the users, not the developers. The reason m2v/ogg was chosen had more to do with getting it to work properly. Remember this is a lot more complicated than just playing the video -- it requires frequent, very specific seeks and graphic overlays and such.

> Now you stand back and think you've done these games justice or
> something.. whatever pat yourselves on the back and all that.. Doesn't
> mean you did something special.

Okay, now you're just acting like a spoiled child.

> Daphne doesn't even work on my 1.6ghz AMD XP with 512 meg
> DDr3200.. lots of people can't get it to work but I'm sure that's a user
> failure to you Chip, or just some morons who can't function at the
> speed of your big brain.

If that's the system that you're trying to run it on, then performance isn't the issue. Daphne isn't the simplest thing to configure in the world, but it isn't brain surgery either (VPinMame requires much more configuration and setup, support files, etc.). Without specifics I'm not sure what your problem is (although your attitude makes it difficult to want to help you anyway).

> 3.11 SBC Divx AVI is the only quality encoding tech. for what Daphnie
> tried to do. the reason's are simple.. compression ratio to quality is a
> lot better. Anyone who pushes mpeg2 as the be all thing obviously
> doesn't know what they are talking about.

That's a hell of a statement for someone to make who hasn't written a laserdisc emulator. The guys here <i>have</i>, so mind your P's and Q's. I don't think anybody here is throwing aside the possibility of accomplishing laserdisc emulation with DIVX -- in fact it's been discussed before at length, so don't think that it's being dismissed summarily here. But if you want to be listened to, you've got to come up with a better argument than file size. Hard drive space is cheap. Accurate emulation is somewhat more difficult -- and more important.

-etumor

Robert Lloyd? Is it you again??