converting youtube interactive movies into MSX-Palcom-Laserdisc games

By nitrofurano

Champion (301)

nitrofurano's picture

28-01-2014, 11:48

sorry about starting another topic instead of continuing at http://www.msx.org/forum/msx-talk/development/palcom-laserdi... about this, that i think is specific enough to the conversation going there, that is more technical on the hardware side (very interesting information and feedback there, obviously, and i don't want to destroy that conversation path! ;) )

the question is, from the msx software side, how easily could we convert youtube interactive movies into MSX-Palcom-Laserdisc games, at least for running them on OpenMSX?

i guess youtube is plenty of these interactive movies, and as an example i'd take this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQxvx3R2ncU

next step would be downloading and converting each splitt to ogg 480p 4:3 like:
youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAkhn5cWQwk
ffmpeg -i filmejogo03_PAkhn5cWQwk.mp4 -vf "crop=960:720:160:0" -s 640x480 filmejogo03_PAkhn5cWQwk.ogg
and joining all .ogg files into one, and perhaps, create a metafile with all the "chapters"

what i don't know is how are the games running on the msx side, if they are in tapes, cartridges or floppies, if they are mostly in interpreted basic or compiled, how is the rs232 accessed in these games, etc.

the goals would be:
- providing more games for this kind of hardware, and this openmsx emulator feature, and have these kind of games available in a less restrictive way (that situation with Konamito from Konami was enough... :S )
- incentive homebrew game developers on coding them, if they want
- having something fun and interesting to show in msx and retro meetings! :)
- etc.

Login or register to post comments

By Manuel

Ascended (19273)

Manuel's picture

28-01-2014, 12:15

The games are on the laserdisc itself. They are in one of the audio channels. You really need that to load it with CALL LD.
Also, the OGV files contain some chapter/stop frame meta data as is explained here: http://openmsx.sourceforge.net/manual/setup.html#laserdisc

But perhaps there are ways to get it done anyway :) Just giving some info here.

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6016)

NYYRIKKI's picture

28-01-2014, 14:00

The game it self is normally encoded to audio channel, but nothing prevents to save the program to ie. cassette just as well. I think that is good starting point as the audio encoding is not documented AFAIK.

Many LD-games are made with BASIC and I think that is the most easy way to get things running.
Here is the list of supported PBASIC-commands:

CALL BLD
CALL BLDR
CALL BLIND
CALL CHAPTER
CALL CHAPTER OFF
CALL DEF UNIV
CALL EXTV
CALL FRAME
CALL FRAME OFF
CALL IMPOSE
CALL INPUT
CALL LCOPY
CALL LD
CALL LDV
CALL MUTE
CALL MUTE L
CALL MUTE OFF
CALL MUTE R
CALL PAN
CALL REMOTE
CALL RETRY
CALL RLD
CALL SCLOAD
CALL SCSAVE
CALL SEARCH
CALL SYMBOL
CALL VIDEO

How ever I don't expect this to be easy task by any means. Smile