Ive been doing a lot of playing aound with converting video to run on my a1200 of late and have learned a bit along the way. Once I got to a point that I thought a had a good grasp on the matter I started thinking of finding something a little more "constructive" to do with it......

Enter "Dragons Lair AGA".

I always thought it'd be cool to get a more accurate Dragons Lair for cd + aga (ie cd32), so equipped with my new found knowledge I set out of creating one.

Thus far Im restricted to using a YouTube playthrough for the video source, so quality isnt quite what it could be, but Ive ordered the DVD version, so that'll improve soon.

Anyway, point to the thread is to ask for suggestions for how to distribute it? My best idea thus far is to simply add some commandline tools and scripts to do the conversion prior to playing the 1st time, but this is a hugely long winded (ie. days or weeks) process for real 68k cpus.

Alternatively I could start a torrent for converted video files, but obviously thats somewhat questionable in regards to legality.

It's all system friendly, so in theory it should work on MOS + OS4.x (but I have no way to test). It does work on Amithlon though, which bodes well for the ppc systems.

Anyway, its early days yet, but it's working.

It looks better in motion (dithering shows up in still shots), but thus far it looks like this:

http://postimg.org/image/c8hyfylcx/


Not sure if anyone else would be even interested, Dragons Lair is far from a great game, but Ive been having fun making it so thought Id offer to share it.

@fishy_fis

Sounds like a fun project! You should call it Dragon's Den and site the source as the youtube video :)

I'd be happy to give it a go on my AmigaOne if you would like.

Cheers,
Bill "tekmage" Borsari

@tekmage

I think with Dragons Den your now get in-conflict with TV program :)

Yes I think making a altered version of the game from the real one and distributing would be bad.

But having a 'Dragons lair' engine that will work on the original game files would be fine.

Or as on the A1200 the limited scope for video conversion,make your engine for PC/Amiga, so users can make the conversion(behind the scenes on a pc) and then they can store it for Amiga. So the user would be converting the video for their own use.

Even making an engine is not 'legally' right but its better than some ways.

Last edited by TheAMIgaOne on 26-Jul-2013 at 12:59 PM.

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@fishy_fis

now imagine getting Braindead onto the Amiga! (their last game... its for pc and playstation...maybe other formats too..dunno).

i have no idea how many times i have bought the dragons lair games, i think i have it for most if not all systems i own including the bluray...

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@fishy_fis

The original Dragon's Lair ran on a z80 with like 16k of ROM and 8k of RAM (if even that much), and a microcontroller to handle the LD player.

Now, I well recall streaming animation type FMV games on my A1200 back in the day, there's no reason you couldn't pull the same thing off, you've just got to keep your expectations in check.

Also, consider that most folks have SSD/flash card memory (or great big hard drives) on their amigas so while a CD32 game would be nice, it's not necessary if you can get it onto your mass-storage device (be it hard drive or flash).

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@fishy_fis

Probably best not to release it with the video files. Most people should be able to rip it on a PC and copy over to media suitable for the Amiga. If someone else makes a torrent that's not your fault.

@Rob

We are forgetting about the legal ramifications about this endeavor. Digital Leisure owns the rights to Dragon's Lair licensed from Disney and Don Bluth's Studios. Perhaps you should ask them first

Drewlio77

I wanted to chime in because these are people I know... please don't steal from them. Don pretty much makes his living re-making these popular old games and they really don't cost much. You can get the blu-ray version for 18 bucks and rip it for your use but please don't share the video files.

With that said, it sounds like a very cool project. Do they make a Daphne emulator for Amiga?

I found it on Amazon through Classic Game Source Inc. for $8.50..

LINKY

@tommywright

I'm one of the few that finished Dragon's Lair in one week when it came out in the Arcades. Lots of hours and quarters. I bought Dragon's Lair on Blu ray and love the game. I also bought the Amiga versions and the Gamecube version. Great stuff! Back in the late 80's Lou Wallace created an AmigaVison program that controlled the Dragon's Lair Laserdisc. I still need to buy Space Ace.

Almost forgot, I bought it for iPhone and iPad too.

Last edited by DiscreetFX on 27-Jul-2013 at 04:48 AM.

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@DiscreetFX

That's awesome!

@fishy_fis

Very awesome project: I love your concept of use your new skill in the most constructive way you could think of. But I think I must advise you to better use the videos of the most recent pc version. The difference in quality is huge.

@Toaks

There is "Braindead ?13?" for Mac (68k and PPC) and Dragon Lair
Full motion version on CD for 68k Macs , this version even has the
ability to resize video to adjust it to your system ...

I happen to own the original to that one and it looks better than the
old Arcade but has that old cartoon feeling , it would be a great game
on AGA :)

After giving it some thought I decided the "tidiest" way to go about things was to include a "config/convert" tool. This way a person can just enter a few parameters, click convert and wait (requires original dvd of course). Once this is done once the game will be ready to play.

This way it's a bit more flexible so a person can make sure it runs well on their own Amiga.
I'll be using existing 3rd party programs for the video conversion, so if anyone has any suggestions for small tools to do batch conversion of images to iff/ilbm I'd be happy to hear them.

One step at a time of course, but I think this could end up something more than my original plan (trying to do something using decent quality video on a 68k/aga amiga).
Given the simplicity of these games it'd be pretty simple to support other games of the same style when/if I decided I wanted to (already downloaded a Braindead 13 video from youtube to test out).

Also does anyone know if it's legal to redistribute small portions of copyrighted video? I suspect it's something akin to a wives tale, but Ive heard it mentioned that you can legally use %5 of a song/video/book/etc. without breaching copyright, and would love to be able to release a demo level through that.
Im not holding my breath, but there's no harm in asking :)

@fishy_fis

I don't think anyone would give you trouble if you used 5 % as
long you added copyright warning to video or if the copyrights
have expired ...

More safe way is to use video material that was already offered
as a demo version in one form or the other :)

http://www.droidgamers.com/index.php/game-news/android-game-news/4734-the-classic-dragons-lair-game-gets-a-free-demo-version-to-try-out

Not really familiar with "fair use" as it doesn't exist in europe but
this should qualify I think

You wouldn't be doing damages to anyone by including 5 % of the
(C) videos for this purpose anyway :)

@fishy_fis

I think you will find that even MAME which supports the Digital Leisure games (the main one being Dragons Lair) still requires the original DVDs to rip the videos in order to play the titles. This is because the titles are still sold and DL actively pursue any infringements of their IP.

That said, the game is not overly expensive to buy (around £6.99 as I remember).

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Having recently purchased Dragon's Lair on bluray my interest in this project was renewed.
Although I have a short attention span at the best of times I do at least have a tendency to keep most things I start so I can go back to them should the mood strike.

Ive spent a few hours over the weekend on this aga Dragons Lair, and thus far it looks like:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata_player&v=juvyvB0vGG0

To grap the video I used Winuae, which while working well, does rescale to a higher resolution, which then got reconverted and scaled again for youtube, along with the compression the format adds. There also seems to be some frames dropped