DAPHNE - Why?

[Magnet_Eye]

Ok, so I am wondering why you need DAPHNE. If you can buy the DVD games (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc), what do you need to make MPEG's from the DVD for? Why not just play the DVD's?

Also, Digital Leisures has the DVD game AND a CD-Rom that is "Arcade Authentic". What's the difference? Just quality?

Thanks.

[SirPoonga]

daphne is a laserdisc emulator.
you need mpgs for daphne because that is very close to a real laserdisc image.


Otherwise, daphne does have a forum...

[Jakobud]

Well you can do three different things here:

1. Use Daphne to play individual laser discs...in which you have to manually switch between the laserdiscs to play them.

2. Use the regular DVD Rom player to play the DVD Roms on your computer.  Once again, having to switch between DVD's when you want to switch games.

3. Use Daphne to play MPEGS.  You have have all the supported games in MPEG format on your harddrive and you never have to swap any discs.  Just choose the game and go.  Perfect for a arcade cabinet.

If you have any vision, I think you can see that #3 is the obvious choice here...

[Magnet_Eye]

Yeah, i see that. I can have all the games on the HD. But other than that, there is real no advantage or need for it?

[SirPoonga]

Yeah, i see that. I can have all the games on the HD. But other than that, there is real no advantage or need for it?

Alot of game daphne plays are not on dvd.

[Lilwolf]

And the real reasons for owners of the DVDs who still use Daphne.

the DVD's arent emulated... and...well... suck.

1) No fullscreen without windows borders... how !@#!@# stupid was that?

2) Not as responsive.  I actually like the CDrom version better then the DVD for spaceace

3) You need windvd or other to use the DVD version.  Not a big deal for most... but I don't own winDVD or any other.  And the software dvd players, not all will work.  Big problem is that digital leisure is relying on someone elses code which creates a ton of "use another dvd decoder" in their answers.

Then all the other reasons (have more then one loaded on a cabinet at once.. Plays more then 2 games (since DL1 and SP are the only ones available on DVD that run daphne anyway)..

[1UP]

Yeah, the DVD roms themselves aren't TRULY arcade authentic, because there are menus, etc.  I used to play the DVD video version of Space Ace on my DVD player, and there was a 2 second pause between EVERY single move!    Then I got the DVD roms, and they wouldn't even work on my PC.  Finally, I got Daphne and ripped them, and now the response time is there, the original hardware is fully emulated, no disc switching, and I can even run it seamlessly with Mame using Raging Dragon!  That's important, because the last thing I want to see on my cabinet screen is Windows!  

[Dave Dribin]

Another thing to add is that the game logic on the DVDs is not the same as the real arcade.  Since Daphne uses the real software from the ROMs, it's playing exactly how you would find it in the arcade.  Now since it's a laser disc game, there's not a whole lot of game logic involved.  But it does determine which scenes get picked and in what order.  I remember playing on the DVD-ROM and getting the same exact scene sequence over and over again.  While playing under Daphne it was more random and actually more fun, too.

-Dave

[Howard_Casto]

Good point.  It should be noted that daphne is probably the only emulator that will ever be able to achive total, perfect emulation.  This is because there isn't any hardware to speak of on a laserdisc game.  All the main board was, was a fancy remote control for the laserdisc player.  It also counted score and in some cases applied an overlay image.  All of these things can be done flawlessly on a pc and thus I feel eventually daphne will give a truely arcade perfect experience.  That's something that even mame can't boast about.    

[Lilwolf]

btw, there is another DL emulator out there..  works with less hardware (one or two original hardware ld players)... but I htink it was dropped when Daphne did such a great job.

there was also a DL driver for mame that ran directly from the DVD.  I wish that was released!  That would have been very very nice.  I think it wasn't added becuase it wasn't authentic enought not running from the original hardware.  But it could have been incomplete and daphne lost the authors motivation.  If this came out with SA, then I would save about 3gig of harddisk space.