The 16-year odyssey it took to emulate the Pioneer LaserActive

Summary

Hey there ROM readers! I've got an absolute whopper of a story this issue with a genuine longform dive into the emulation of the LaserActive, plus a bit of backstory on the new fan translation of the Cowboy Bebop game for PS2, plus your usual quick hits on emulator improvements, FPGA happenings and other fan translation progress. That means there's absolutely no more time or space to waste on this intro.LET'S GET TO IT.The Big Two1. The LaserActive "might be the last vintage home console of note which hadn't been emulated," but no longerThe story behind the birth of any new emulator has some common ingredients. Fearsome programming skills; hundreds or thousands of hours of thankless work; the drive to understand exactly how and why a piece of technology works. None of these things come without patience. But lifelong Sega fan Nemesis, who released the first-ever emulator for the Pioneer LaserActive this week — 16 years after first pondering the idea — had no choice but to be patient. Because for most of the last decade, emulating the LaserActive was simply impossible."All along the way, the video made things difficult," he says. "The hardware to capture the signal properly didn’t exist. The software to decode the captured signal properly didn’t exist. And finally, a format to store the decoded video in a form suitable for emulation, also didn’t exist."There's no other game console quite like the Pioneer LaserActive, which was released in 1993, sold abysmally and was dead in the ground by 1996. That's not a unique story for a '90s game system, but the LaserActive kinda... wasn't one. It was a LaserDisc player with an expansion bay that owners could slot different modules into. One transformed the LaserActive into a karaoke machine. Another would give it the guts of a PC Engine. And a third added the brains of a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, able to play Sega CD games as well as about two dozen made for the short-lived Mega LD.The Mega LD format represented a technological ...