Wow. This may be one of the most intense reverse-engineering (and honestly, engineering) efforts I've ever seen for an emulator project before. Capturing the raw LD image to this degree, being able to play it in reverse, etc -- absolutely brilliant. Truly fantastic work.
Top in my list of "insane engineering done by emulator people" is still Dolphin's ubershader; but still, I thank that there are people like the author that dedicate exorbitant time into preserving endangered medium.
I'm constantly impressed at the writing coming out of the emulation world. I can't think of any other technical niche that produces such consistently approachable writing about such esoteric technical subjects.
I don't understand hardware, I barely program. I don't even use emulators. Yet I will always read write ups like this and from the dolphin blog and elsewhere which give me a great understanding of reverse engineering, the community nuances, and the hacks and shortcuts that made the games possible on the limited hardware available at the time.
It's incredible, isn't it. I'm a professional C++ programmer working on games for well over a decade now, I've done some pretty complex low level stuff on playstation/Xbox but I bounced off hard from multiple attempts at writing a simple GameBoy emulator - I just don't "get it" - but I always find it fascinating when people work this kind of stuff out, I have so much respect for them.
This: "Pioneer's cost-cutting inside the LaserDisc player caused other parts to break:"
Far far back in time when I did hi-fi repairs and similar work, Pioneer stood out with a nice look from outside, and cost-cutting low quality work inside. Not something I liked working on.
The very first DVD player I ever purchased was a Pioneer model with all the possible outputs, from composite to component video, 5.1 discrete audio channels, and coax + optical digital audio outs.
I purchased it somewhere in the 1996 to 1998 timeframe. When I graduated to Blu-Ray, I gave it to my mother who used it once or twice a week up until she passed away this year.
Obviously that's purely anecdotal, but that one unit was a workhorse.
I have a Pioneer DVD player of the same vintage, and it's still working to this day. The remote is sturdy, too. Currently lives in a summer house but gets regular use.
> Pioneer stood out with a nice look from outside, and cost-cutting low quality work inside.
That seems to be the standard among many appliance manufacturers these days. Slick as hell on the outside, junk/buggy electronics on the inside that may not be repairable 10 years from now, either because the part is no longer made/supported, or the expertise doesn't exist. We had an LG refrigerator that failed under warranty, and the designated local repair specialist never answered the phone.
What I really can't stand is inefficient cost-cutting.
Nvidia, Apple, Sony and Microsoft have all at one point (or maybe still do) use ridiculously cheap solder. This only saves them fractions of a cent on $300 devices. Every few years this leads to a device that will have it's solder crack from heat stress. This usually happens well outside the warranty window, and the manufacturer will swiftly give their customers the finger. Microsoft was the exception with the Red Ring of Death getting fixed outside of warranty. PS3 with the Yellow Light of Death? Sony gives you the finger. Nvidia card cooked or MacBook borked? Here's where you can buy our new model.
Another one is the proximity sensor on phones. On midrange models, these have been replaced by a "virtual proximity sensor". Saves Samsung or whoever maybe a couple of cents, seriously degrades your user experience.
There's hundreds of these things across all industries. Its a pretty clear symptom of the fact that businesses are no longer primarily interested in their customers, but rather their shareholders.
It's super cheap to copy the look of higher end equipment, materials might cost more (metal vs plastic) but that's baked into the unit cost. Actually making the thing work well requires paying for good engineers to do the upfront design work. If you can just buy a design for cheap from some Chinese whitebox firm, your initial investment in the product is very low.
“Nemesis decided to write his LaserActive emulation as a component of multi-system emualtor Ares, partially out of respect for its late creator, Near.”
This wasn’t just a very dedicated coder with an obsession.
This is someone who deeply cared and loved emulation and the community and did a monumental effort to preserve a part of culture that doesn’t get care. Much like Near did.
I really don’t know! The author of the video I linked to describes one game as having full-motion video 3D environments, unlike many games on the Sega CD that were just FMVs without real gameplay. That would be funny if the best games in this genre (if you can call it that) are stuck on the LaserActive.
LaserDisc was a seriously impressive technology, or at least it impressed me as a kid. My school had the (vanishingly rare) Apple Visual Almanac and some other educational LD titles that controlled the player from HyperCard. You could use a LaserActive with the Computer Interface PAC for this purpose, or you could use several other devices because there was an industry-standard serial command protocol. The Visual Almanac came with a book, floppies, a CD-ROM disc, and the LD discs, all of which were required, so it was probably the pinnacle of "multimedia" taken literally.
Wow! That is very cool. I'd love to see a more detailed write up or video about that system. I really miss that era of multimedia. So much of it seems hokey and awkward in retrospect but I feel like there are lots of unfinished thoughts and experiments in that realm that are only starting to be revisited now in the AR/VR/experiential context.
I thought my elementary school was pretty baller (it wasn't -- especially in comparison!) because its library had an LD player which got pulled out once or a year to show the same space race video -- complete with frame indexing and crystal clear frames on pause. Until I bought one for myself in the 2010s, that was only one of two times I saw LD players in the wild.
LD's could also have digital PCM audio tracks in addition to the analog tracks. Some of them later on had Dolby Digital 5.1 as well as some rare discs with DTS.
Look into Hi-Vision as well, which was HD LaserDisc back in the 90s in Japan. Muse was used to broadcast really high def signals for the time.
I have a player that can play both sides without having to get up and flip - CLD-D703
Yeah that was the big difference between it and DVDs.
LDs are just the NTSC signal on the disc, the same way a CD is just raw audio on a disc (wrong! See replies). That means no compression. And given they didn’t have the higher density discs we got with DVDs they had to be the size of LPs and flipped mid movie.
DVDs were digital so the video could be compressed.
Except LDs aren’t like CDs, it’s sort of the other way around! Laserdisc came out 5 years before audio CDs. That blew my mind when I first heard it. Came out in ‘78.
Dual-layer DVDs didn’t come out until later. Long movies on single-layer (or those whose producers were too lazy to optimize compression or use dual-layer) DVD had to be flipped mid-movie as well.
Mass produced dual layer DVDs came out early on around late 1997 (maybe confusing with DVD recordable?), it’s not like the spec changed. There were some low cost distributors that couldn’t afford the equipment but the majors were stamping early on.
Besides unlike the one hour max on an LD, a 120 minute movie will fit on a single side single layer, so most early movie releases would fit on a single side single layer (the quality did suffer).
More commonly in the early days the dual side was to provide a pan and scan and letterbox option or extras.
There are so called “flippers”, but they weren’t that common.
An LD is 1 hour max so you are almost always flipping for any feature length.
With the dual layer discs, the first layer had to be larger than the second layer. There was a slight pause when switching layers, and care was taken to place the layer break at a spot to hide that pause as much as possible. At least on the discs where the author took pride in work unlike the YT decisions on when/where to place ads. Although, I've seen some really poorly placed layer breaks too.
Fun fact, I remember my french version of Reservoir Dogs switching from first layer to the other exactly during the torture scene, with the pause you are describing. Absolutely no care taken. Or maybe to put this at the worst moment possible. What a turn down !
I don't think they came out later. They existed in the spec from the beginning and some very early long movies were a single disc (e.g., Titanic). Some movies still needed flipping or two discs, like Gone with the Wind but it's just too long.
To further mess with your mind, there was a digital tape format which is more like you imagined - it is a CVBS video signal, but in PCM format. Very similar to CD audio in concept. It was used in TV studios and also found use for mastering LaserDiscs.
We had an Ampex D-2 unit that was nicknamed the dishwasher for its size. Supposedly, there was a demo of the error correction abilities of the unit where the tape had a hole punched in it yet no concealment errors visible when playing frame by frame. They also had the demo rigged up to be able to rotate the machine to be inverted while connected to scopes to show now stable the transport was. I never saw any of these myself, and only heard of these 3rd person style, hence the supposedly. It was large enough to hold a 3 hour cassette. The smaller Sony unit could only hold 2 hour cassettes
The first audio CD demonstrations were also like that. People drilling holes in the discs, smearing them with ketchup, etc., to show how reliable the system was. At least the next 15 seconds…
I remember the first time I heard a CD skipping. It was at my uncle's house. Someone came to him and said hey, the music is skipping. He said CDs don't skip. The other person said, well... whatever CDs do, it's doing that.
I really appreciated the irony of stereos (particularly in cars with subwoofers) which were loud/powerful enough to cause the CD skip. So, in a sense, the CD was causing itself to skip.
This is a really great read. I was briefly obsessed with laserdiscs in the mid-aughts and went as far as swapping the EFM decoder chip on a Pioneer player with something that could pull the digital audio signal out (details are a little fuzzy at this point). I wanted to figure out a way to extract the video data and it seemed so potentially possible but, as is clear, far from simple and far beyond my abilities at the time. Incredible to see that things have finally progressed to the point where one can fully capture the disc data and emulate these things.
Loved the LaserDisc era. Still have a huge collection. Watching the Abyss for the first time with all the extras was amazing.
My player eventually wouldn’t take the discs. Would go in the player and pop back out. A few tries would work for a while and then it eventually wouldn’t take any disc.
HD DVD was really cool. Even today, putting in a movie like Harry Potter on HD DVD really catches people off-guard on how amazing it looks. Never got that reaction from Blu-ray.
Super cool. I really admire the diligence it takes to commit to a reverse-engineering project on obscure hardware like this, and see it through. It's tough enough just reverse-engineering software, but hardware with the constant threat of failing capacitors, a bad connection nuking a chip, etc, even aside from the technical challenges of just figuring out how to read information... bravo.
I never had any of these back then, and I keep wondering what it would have been like to be all-in on these ecosystems. Especially Nintendo; gameboys with link cables, N64s with controller add-ons to insert your GB cartridges into, Super Nintendos with cartridges that add 3D hardware to your system, etc.
Closest thing is that a friend of mine had a NES and a cartridge with 365 games on it (in a menu with snails crawling towards each other), two controllers and the gun.
Modular stuff is fun, especially if it looks nice on a shelf, but it becomes a nuisance when your shelf runs out of room, or when you upgrade a system and you either have to re-buy some gear or find that's there's no real replacement.
For example, after buying an N64, would you keep your SNES around just for your Super Gameboy?
I was still playing my NES games when I had my SNES, and I guess I stopped playing once I got the N64, same for the SNES/N64.
Actually I disliked the first gen 3d consoles, the lack of details and colors in textures was a large turn off, I never really understood indianapolis 500 on DOS, couldn't stand superfx games and all these games had such graphics.
It was even crazier in Japan and to this day I don't quite understand how their 90s- era "videogame sent over television" and "videogame sent over ancient cell network" features and dongles worked. I'm trying to remember the names of these features exactly but can't, I just know that it was like, the NES or SNES you could "download" games onto somehow from a TV signal, and then the GB or perhaps GBA had something similar if you connected your console to your phone.
The first thing to consider is that the island nation of Japan is geographically small. Small enough that a single satellite could serve the whole island with broadcast signal for satellite television.
Then once you accept this, it becomes easier to consider a company buying bandwidth on that satellite for its own purposes.
That this purpose is a modem on a Super Famicom, that receives game data from the broadcast satellite, and that at certain specific moments you can play the game with a voice track being blasted in real time by the broadcast satellite becomes conceivable.
A lot of those early "videogames over broadcast medium" worked by having all the games being broadcasted all the time in a loop and the decoder (typically a fat "cartridge" with a modem embedded) waiting until the chosen game was broadcast and then caching that broadcast into some (battery-backed?) RAM or rewritable ROM.
It was purely one-way communication, so payment and access control (if any) was handled locally by the cartridge. As far as I know none of those supported per-game payment, so the payment was included in the purchase/rental price of the cartridge/modem.
The original rumble packs you plugged in were more powerful and they moved more weight, if I recall correctly compared to modern controllers. Would be cool to make a jacket or bodysuit + headset today you can wear that rumbles in the part of the body you got shot in
The N64 rumble pak also had a longer lever to the controller, making that greater weight even more felt.
The annoying thing, of course, was that you couldn't plug in a rumble pak and a memory card at the same time. There were third-party options available, but third-party memory cards had a bad reputation.
The Dreamcast solved this by having two slots. The VMUs were insanely cool at the time, and honestly still are. Some games used them in cool ways, such as Resident Evil showing your health.
I worked on a project that made a vest with controller vibration motors in it connected to a microcontroller. That microcontroller was connected by a serial -> USB converter and was controllable by the computer it was attached to.
Sadly, it wasn't for gaming. It was part of a study into the limitations of how much information humans can absorb at once, with the haptic feedback being tested as yet another input when there was a lot of auditory and visual input. I joked they should just use smell, but I don't think they wanted to subject the undergrad research subjects to weird smells.
Wow. This may be one of the most intense reverse-engineering (and honestly, engineering) efforts I've ever seen for an emulator project before. Capturing the raw LD image to this degree, being able to play it in reverse, etc -- absolutely brilliant. Truly fantastic work.
Top in my list of "insane engineering done by emulator people" is still Dolphin's ubershader; but still, I thank that there are people like the author that dedicate exorbitant time into preserving endangered medium.
The ubershader is cool, for sure but the idea didnt originate in Dolphin and only took them a few years to pull off, using prior art.
OP spent 16 years fighting dragons, using his hw, sw and re skills to the max.
There is no competition.
Why? Ubershaders were a common technique in graphics for many years before Dolphin adopted them.
You can read more about the Dolphin ubershader project here:
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/
What in my comments makes you think I haven't read it already? :-)
Only funnier if either you wrote it, or it cites you as the main source of its information.
'But doctor… I am Pagliacci.'
Even if you have, others would probably like that story, since I recall it being well-received here in the past.
What a great write up of a fascinating story.
I'm constantly impressed at the writing coming out of the emulation world. I can't think of any other technical niche that produces such consistently approachable writing about such esoteric technical subjects.
I don't understand hardware, I barely program. I don't even use emulators. Yet I will always read write ups like this and from the dolphin blog and elsewhere which give me a great understanding of reverse engineering, the community nuances, and the hacks and shortcuts that made the games possible on the limited hardware available at the time.
It's incredible, isn't it. I'm a professional C++ programmer working on games for well over a decade now, I've done some pretty complex low level stuff on playstation/Xbox but I bounced off hard from multiple attempts at writing a simple GameBoy emulator - I just don't "get it" - but I always find it fascinating when people work this kind of stuff out, I have so much respect for them.
This: "Pioneer's cost-cutting inside the LaserDisc player caused other parts to break:"
Far far back in time when I did hi-fi repairs and similar work, Pioneer stood out with a nice look from outside, and cost-cutting low quality work inside. Not something I liked working on.
The very first DVD player I ever purchased was a Pioneer model with all the possible outputs, from composite to component video, 5.1 discrete audio channels, and coax + optical digital audio outs.
I purchased it somewhere in the 1996 to 1998 timeframe. When I graduated to Blu-Ray, I gave it to my mother who used it once or twice a week up until she passed away this year.
Obviously that's purely anecdotal, but that one unit was a workhorse.
I have a Pioneer DVD player of the same vintage, and it's still working to this day. The remote is sturdy, too. Currently lives in a summer house but gets regular use.
Pioneer provided fixes to some things, but for such a niche system there is virtually no way to get them now.
A few years ago I made a support to avoid board sag - https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5993459
These are actually a pleasure to work on, but their rarity makes everything a bit more stressful.
> Pioneer stood out with a nice look from outside, and cost-cutting low quality work inside.
That seems to be the standard among many appliance manufacturers these days. Slick as hell on the outside, junk/buggy electronics on the inside that may not be repairable 10 years from now, either because the part is no longer made/supported, or the expertise doesn't exist. We had an LG refrigerator that failed under warranty, and the designated local repair specialist never answered the phone.
What I really can't stand is inefficient cost-cutting.
Nvidia, Apple, Sony and Microsoft have all at one point (or maybe still do) use ridiculously cheap solder. This only saves them fractions of a cent on $300 devices. Every few years this leads to a device that will have it's solder crack from heat stress. This usually happens well outside the warranty window, and the manufacturer will swiftly give their customers the finger. Microsoft was the exception with the Red Ring of Death getting fixed outside of warranty. PS3 with the Yellow Light of Death? Sony gives you the finger. Nvidia card cooked or MacBook borked? Here's where you can buy our new model.
Another one is the proximity sensor on phones. On midrange models, these have been replaced by a "virtual proximity sensor". Saves Samsung or whoever maybe a couple of cents, seriously degrades your user experience.
There's hundreds of these things across all industries. Its a pretty clear symptom of the fact that businesses are no longer primarily interested in their customers, but rather their shareholders.
Blame the environmental plague of RoHS regulations for the bad solder. There's a reason military/aerospace still uses leaded solder.
It's super cheap to copy the look of higher end equipment, materials might cost more (metal vs plastic) but that's baked into the unit cost. Actually making the thing work well requires paying for good engineers to do the upfront design work. If you can just buy a design for cheap from some Chinese whitebox firm, your initial investment in the product is very low.
Your 10 years is quite generous, methink...
Try updating a 10 year old smart phone with latest version of the os as provided by its manufacturer , up to date with latest CVE patches... :)
TIL that a. This system existed b. The author’s need for emulation is what drove ld-decode to support extraction of VBI from Laserdiscs.
I and the handful of other weirdos capturing Laserdiscs thank you!
“Nemesis decided to write his LaserActive emulation as a component of multi-system emualtor Ares, partially out of respect for its late creator, Near.”
This wasn’t just a very dedicated coder with an obsession.
This is someone who deeply cared and loved emulation and the community and did a monumental effort to preserve a part of culture that doesn’t get care. Much like Near did.
Legends.
I highly recommend this video for an overview of the LaserActive: https://youtu.be/vK0rGekPOpo?si=6XRVtA0FTRGo5sYH
Until this emulator, there are 15 games that were only playable on the physical device, never released elsewhere.
I always wanted a Mega LD setup. Were any of the (exclusive) games any good, though? So many of them were just Mega CD ports.
https://segaretro.org/List_of_LaserActive_games
I really don’t know! The author of the video I linked to describes one game as having full-motion video 3D environments, unlike many games on the Sega CD that were just FMVs without real gameplay. That would be funny if the best games in this genre (if you can call it that) are stuck on the LaserActive.
LaserDisc was a seriously impressive technology, or at least it impressed me as a kid. My school had the (vanishingly rare) Apple Visual Almanac and some other educational LD titles that controlled the player from HyperCard. You could use a LaserActive with the Computer Interface PAC for this purpose, or you could use several other devices because there was an industry-standard serial command protocol. The Visual Almanac came with a book, floppies, a CD-ROM disc, and the LD discs, all of which were required, so it was probably the pinnacle of "multimedia" taken literally.
Wow! That is very cool. I'd love to see a more detailed write up or video about that system. I really miss that era of multimedia. So much of it seems hokey and awkward in retrospect but I feel like there are lots of unfinished thoughts and experiments in that realm that are only starting to be revisited now in the AR/VR/experiential context.
I thought my elementary school was pretty baller (it wasn't -- especially in comparison!) because its library had an LD player which got pulled out once or a year to show the same space race video -- complete with frame indexing and crystal clear frames on pause. Until I bought one for myself in the 2010s, that was only one of two times I saw LD players in the wild.
I never knew laserdisc was analog! Wow.
LD's could also have digital PCM audio tracks in addition to the analog tracks. Some of them later on had Dolby Digital 5.1 as well as some rare discs with DTS.
Look into Hi-Vision as well, which was HD LaserDisc back in the 90s in Japan. Muse was used to broadcast really high def signals for the time.
I have a player that can play both sides without having to get up and flip - CLD-D703
Yeah that was the big difference between it and DVDs.
LDs are just the NTSC signal on the disc, the same way a CD is just raw audio on a disc (wrong! See replies). That means no compression. And given they didn’t have the higher density discs we got with DVDs they had to be the size of LPs and flipped mid movie.
DVDs were digital so the video could be compressed.
Except LDs aren’t like CDs, it’s sort of the other way around! Laserdisc came out 5 years before audio CDs. That blew my mind when I first heard it. Came out in ‘78.
Dual-layer DVDs didn’t come out until later. Long movies on single-layer (or those whose producers were too lazy to optimize compression or use dual-layer) DVD had to be flipped mid-movie as well.
Mass produced dual layer DVDs came out early on around late 1997 (maybe confusing with DVD recordable?), it’s not like the spec changed. There were some low cost distributors that couldn’t afford the equipment but the majors were stamping early on.
Besides unlike the one hour max on an LD, a 120 minute movie will fit on a single side single layer, so most early movie releases would fit on a single side single layer (the quality did suffer).
More commonly in the early days the dual side was to provide a pan and scan and letterbox option or extras.
There are so called “flippers”, but they weren’t that common.
An LD is 1 hour max so you are almost always flipping for any feature length.
It needs to be mentioned that several players moved the laser to the other side of the Laserdisc, so you didn't have to flip the disc yourself.
DVD-5 single layer, single side
DVD-10 single layer, double side
DVD-9 dual layer, single side
DVD-18 dual layer, double side
With the dual layer discs, the first layer had to be larger than the second layer. There was a slight pause when switching layers, and care was taken to place the layer break at a spot to hide that pause as much as possible. At least on the discs where the author took pride in work unlike the YT decisions on when/where to place ads. Although, I've seen some really poorly placed layer breaks too.
Fun fact, I remember my french version of Reservoir Dogs switching from first layer to the other exactly during the torture scene, with the pause you are describing. Absolutely no care taken. Or maybe to put this at the worst moment possible. What a turn down !
I don't think they came out later. They existed in the spec from the beginning and some very early long movies were a single disc (e.g., Titanic). Some movies still needed flipping or two discs, like Gone with the Wind but it's just too long.
I totally forgot flipping DVD for some movies or series, I can't recall now. Damn.
CDs are still digital though. Its more like how records are just analog audio.
I was just looking up laser disk and I never realized just how analog they were.
I always thought that they recorded the video signal the same way CDs did, in a series of bits.
I had no idea the length of the pits on the disk actually corresponded to the wave form. They’re not digital in any way shape or form.
Amazing. Thanks!
To further mess with your mind, there was a digital tape format which is more like you imagined - it is a CVBS video signal, but in PCM format. Very similar to CD audio in concept. It was used in TV studios and also found use for mastering LaserDiscs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-2_(video)
We had an Ampex D-2 unit that was nicknamed the dishwasher for its size. Supposedly, there was a demo of the error correction abilities of the unit where the tape had a hole punched in it yet no concealment errors visible when playing frame by frame. They also had the demo rigged up to be able to rotate the machine to be inverted while connected to scopes to show now stable the transport was. I never saw any of these myself, and only heard of these 3rd person style, hence the supposedly. It was large enough to hold a 3 hour cassette. The smaller Sony unit could only hold 2 hour cassettes
The first audio CD demonstrations were also like that. People drilling holes in the discs, smearing them with ketchup, etc., to show how reliable the system was. At least the next 15 seconds…
I remember the first time I heard a CD skipping. It was at my uncle's house. Someone came to him and said hey, the music is skipping. He said CDs don't skip. The other person said, well... whatever CDs do, it's doing that.
I really appreciated the irony of stereos (particularly in cars with subwoofers) which were loud/powerful enough to cause the CD skip. So, in a sense, the CD was causing itself to skip.
Oh I think I saw a picture of that compared to a normal VHS cassette online the other day. But I didn’t know what it was.
Yeah, the earliest ones were basically just a wear-resistant higher quality version of VHS/Beta. I had this 1982 top-loader model as a kid:
https://www.radios-tv.co.uk/1982-philips-vlp600-laservision-...
This is a really great read. I was briefly obsessed with laserdiscs in the mid-aughts and went as far as swapping the EFM decoder chip on a Pioneer player with something that could pull the digital audio signal out (details are a little fuzzy at this point). I wanted to figure out a way to extract the video data and it seemed so potentially possible but, as is clear, far from simple and far beyond my abilities at the time. Incredible to see that things have finally progressed to the point where one can fully capture the disc data and emulate these things.
Loved the LaserDisc era. Still have a huge collection. Watching the Abyss for the first time with all the extras was amazing.
My player eventually wouldn’t take the discs. Would go in the player and pop back out. A few tries would work for a while and then it eventually wouldn’t take any disc.
HD DVD was really cool. Even today, putting in a movie like Harry Potter on HD DVD really catches people off-guard on how amazing it looks. Never got that reaction from Blu-ray.
Super cool. I really admire the diligence it takes to commit to a reverse-engineering project on obscure hardware like this, and see it through. It's tough enough just reverse-engineering software, but hardware with the constant threat of failing capacitors, a bad connection nuking a chip, etc, even aside from the technical challenges of just figuring out how to read information... bravo.
I'm a bit of a Sega fan boy but never heard of the Mega LD before now! What a weird and fascinating bit of video gaming history, and a good read too.
Kudos to Nemesis for his hard work in preserving a bit of niche history.
The typical 90's add-ons are what made the 90's special for me.
While a nuisance to store like the N64 rumble pack, the dreamcast memory card. It felt like upgraded solidity of the device.
I never had any of these back then, and I keep wondering what it would have been like to be all-in on these ecosystems. Especially Nintendo; gameboys with link cables, N64s with controller add-ons to insert your GB cartridges into, Super Nintendos with cartridges that add 3D hardware to your system, etc.
Closest thing is that a friend of mine had a NES and a cartridge with 365 games on it (in a menu with snails crawling towards each other), two controllers and the gun.
Sega was quite crazy too. From the top of my head:
* The Megadrive plus MegaCD plus 32X, affectionately called "The Tower of Power". I have one and it is quite a hefty beast.
* Sonic & Knuckles with its lock-on technology that allowed plugin Sonic 3 (or Sonic 2) to form the full game.
* Virtua Racing and its SVP chip, Sega's answer to the SuperFX.
* The Saturn and its extension cartridges that provided additional RAM.
* The Dreamcast and its VMU.
Like op says, fun and a nuisance. :)
Modular stuff is fun, especially if it looks nice on a shelf, but it becomes a nuisance when your shelf runs out of room, or when you upgrade a system and you either have to re-buy some gear or find that's there's no real replacement.
For example, after buying an N64, would you keep your SNES around just for your Super Gameboy?
I was still playing my NES games when I had my SNES, and I guess I stopped playing once I got the N64, same for the SNES/N64. Actually I disliked the first gen 3d consoles, the lack of details and colors in textures was a large turn off, I never really understood indianapolis 500 on DOS, couldn't stand superfx games and all these games had such graphics.
It was even crazier in Japan and to this day I don't quite understand how their 90s- era "videogame sent over television" and "videogame sent over ancient cell network" features and dongles worked. I'm trying to remember the names of these features exactly but can't, I just know that it was like, the NES or SNES you could "download" games onto somehow from a TV signal, and then the GB or perhaps GBA had something similar if you connected your console to your phone.
The first thing to consider is that the island nation of Japan is geographically small. Small enough that a single satellite could serve the whole island with broadcast signal for satellite television.
Then once you accept this, it becomes easier to consider a company buying bandwidth on that satellite for its own purposes.
That this purpose is a modem on a Super Famicom, that receives game data from the broadcast satellite, and that at certain specific moments you can play the game with a voice track being blasted in real time by the broadcast satellite becomes conceivable.
In the US there was the Sega Channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel which worked over cable.
I got to play that at my cousins’ house. I was so jealous.
A lot of those early "videogames over broadcast medium" worked by having all the games being broadcasted all the time in a loop and the decoder (typically a fat "cartridge" with a modem embedded) waiting until the chosen game was broadcast and then caching that broadcast into some (battery-backed?) RAM or rewritable ROM.
It was purely one-way communication, so payment and access control (if any) was handled locally by the cartridge. As far as I know none of those supported per-game payment, so the payment was included in the purchase/rental price of the cartridge/modem.
Mobile System GB. For both GBC/GBA. Didn't let you download games, but content/features for some games.
Satella view is the keyword I think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview (for anyone who's interested)
The original rumble packs you plugged in were more powerful and they moved more weight, if I recall correctly compared to modern controllers. Would be cool to make a jacket or bodysuit + headset today you can wear that rumbles in the part of the body you got shot in
The N64 rumble pak also had a longer lever to the controller, making that greater weight even more felt.
The annoying thing, of course, was that you couldn't plug in a rumble pak and a memory card at the same time. There were third-party options available, but third-party memory cards had a bad reputation.
The Dreamcast solved this by having two slots. The VMUs were insanely cool at the time, and honestly still are. Some games used them in cool ways, such as Resident Evil showing your health.
I had an N64 memory card (if memory serves, a third-party/Mad Catz one I got for Xmas) but I can't remember ever using it for anything.
I worked on a project that made a vest with controller vibration motors in it connected to a microcontroller. That microcontroller was connected by a serial -> USB converter and was controllable by the computer it was attached to.
Sadly, it wasn't for gaming. It was part of a study into the limitations of how much information humans can absorb at once, with the haptic feedback being tested as yet another input when there was a lot of auditory and visual input. I joked they should just use smell, but I don't think they wanted to subject the undergrad research subjects to weird smells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_Interactor
https://www.woojer.com/products/vest-3
[dead]
This is amazing