Dragons Lair on the Amiga - How a laserdisc game fit onto 6 floppy disks | MVG
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- Опубліковано 13 лис 2022
- Dragon's Lair, originally released for arcades in 1983 by Cinematronics. It uses laserdisc technology, offering greatly superior graphics compared to other video games at the time. The game was ported to several other platforms, but as no home system technology of that era could accommodate the graphical quality of LaserDisc. But there was one port of the game that stood above the rest and was a faithful recreation of the laserdisc original. That version was the Commodore Amiga release from 1983. In this episode we deep dive and take a look at how Dragon's Lair on the Amiga came to be.
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#DragonsLair #Amiga - Ігри
Ah, the 80s...a time where a 17 year old could walk into the Arcades and ask for a laser disk, then the owner helps him get one from the company...also the time where a 17 year old can contact a company working on a next gen video digitizer and gets a prototype of it...different times...
You're absolutely right. Nowadays you might send a brilliant résumé along with your idea and not even be given as much as a formal reply. The web gives a fair chance to (almost) everybody, but companies have gotten much, much worse than they used to be. I'm sure there are several people as brilliant as Linden out there who will just never get a chance to prove their worth.
@@andy5178 You didn''t catch his sarcasm.
@@spectreman2532 there was none from my side.
@@andy5178 A big reason is that, companies use Hiring Managers to pick their employees. And what ends up happening, is they only end up looking for the perfect unicorn employee, with the most prestigious College degree and a impressive CV.
If you presented yourself really well, and they knew you were a geek, and trustworthy, they'd do that. I still think you'd find plenty of people today that would do that for kids who give off that same vibe.
Seems insane to me that a 17 year old could achieve all that. Not only programing, but the many business decision he had to make aswell. That man must have been on another different level than the rest, what a legend
For real, some people are just born into greatness.
I was 17 when I wrote BWTC32Key, my file compression program after 4 years of effort
Well since he was buying arcade machines and flying around the country I suspect he came from serious money.
@@craigix but even then... Like, having that mindset with 17, let alone programming skills. I started programming at 10 and with 17 my programs were still mostly dumb win32 spaghetti code, and I had no idea on how I'd ever approach a serious project, or any sense of how to turn anything I do into business....
Different era. We don't make ourselves like we used to
Randy Linden, one of the greatest programmers of the 80s and 90s.
We salute you Mr. Lindon♥️
The man is a genius!
Definitely. Millions of coders out there, many great, but you gotta pretty damn awesome and top-tier to do things others thought near-impossible and Linden proved he was that multiple times. :O
Don Bluth...
@@yellohammer8571 Don Bluth is one of the greatest animators of all time??? That is for certain but this video is about the port from an Arcade Laser Disc system to an Amiga with 6 floppy disk. Whatever Mr. Linden did was a miracle.
Randy Linden is up there with the likes of John Carmack, incredible genius
Galahad is also up there.
I never understood if I was actually playing Dragons Lair, or just watching a cartoon, but it didn't stop me from dropping a bunch of quarters.
that game ate quarters like no other
You were "playing" a glorified "choose your own adventure" book.
Dood i never pass the entrance gate
@@yellowblanka6058 Yeah this barely qualifies as a game. But it sure looked great in an arcade cabinet.
A different form of visual novel if I may call it that, really only Laserdisc could do it, if not done on the Amiga's art style.
What a massive disk swapping experience, but I relentlessly played this on my Amiga 500.
Would be cool to see an analysis of how the Gameboy Color version was made, it's very impressive.
That didn’t happen until ROM sizes were much larger.
its an impressive port, ill cover it at some point im sure
@@ModernVintageGamer I agree that it is impressive to fit into a 4MB (32mbit) cartridge but it came out during the era of the Game Boy Advance when they could shove two whole feature-length movies into a GBA Video cartridge. It just wasn’t going to make a big splash in the era of DVD and 64MB+ cartridges. Heck, they literally already had Dragon’s Lair for DVD players by that point… with a big fat “PlayStation 2 Compatible!” sticker on the shrink wrap! While Game Boy games in 1989 were only kilobytes the beauty of the Amiga version’s extra capacity and streaming tricks were that it made the experience more rich/impressive than even contemporary multi-disk games.
@@ModernVintageGamer honestly what's impressive is how it's been redrawn with a good bit of detail considering the resolution
Reminds me of how the sonic cd opening/endings had to be redrawn for the original megacd version
@@emmettturner9452 What was impressive about the GBA port was that they actually re-drew all the animation and backgrounds to fit the GBA's screen resolution and color palette.
It wasn't like the Shrek GBA movie (or other GBA video carts) where they just simply re-encoded it to a lower video quality.
He did this at age 17? I am blown away!
Yeah insane must have popped out of the uterus and started coding.. 😁
I'm 19 and I'm jealous I can barely make a decent html page
Yeah I was proud to know HTLM and Basic at 17 but I did nothing with it. Kudos to this kid for not wasting his teens binge drinking.
I find pretty much everything even tangentially related to laserdisc to just be utterly fascinating
The Amiga scene ´89 was something special
From someone who played DL in the arcade the first week it was out. And also, a huge pirate on C-64 & Amiga...that was absolutely fascinating. Thanks
Lol pirate 🏴☠️ arrghhh!!!
This took me back to my days at living in Texas. When I was a kid, Luther Jones Elementary School (Corpus Christi, TX) had this game on their Amiga computer. At the time I was four years old and I was complete rubbish (lol). Thank you for this video... it was a trip down memory lane I needed.
Best,
Patricio
Liden is really one of a kind genius programmer, so many impossible ports and incredible programs under his belt, this is beyong amazing. Thanks for this retrospective MVG
Its not the content. Its the way You tell the story. Awesome. Then again, You know exactly what subjects would make a compelling story. Well done.
This guy is the real deal, not a crappy journalist but a top dev and ex hacker
Whoever was around when Bleem came out know what a wizard this guy was. I went from playing Mega Drive games on my pentium PC to emulate full PSX games in less than a year, at the same time the PSX was being sold.
Doubt we'll ever see current gen console emulation that works that well ever again, once in a lifetime talent there
@@JoemamaTheHybrid yuzu and ryujinx are available rn and have been for the last few years
@@JoemamaTheHybrid Current-gen consoles literally are just cheap desktop PCs, so the only thing stopping them from being emulated day one is obfuscation.
@@JoemamaTheHybrid CEMU was a pretty great emulator for the Wii U that came out pretty early into the scene. Pretty surprising too considering how unpopular the console was, as well
Ultrahle was pretty impressive at the time too.
Yep, I had the pirated version of this game on my Amiga 1000 back in the 90's. I remember the ram expansion costed an arm and a leg here in Australia. Had heaps of fond memories of my A1000, I still have it tucked away somewhere.
You summed it up pretty accurately: This is wizardry!
Maybe it’s the early hour, but the Amiga digitized animation reminds me of Dr. Katz.
Randy Linden, John Carmack, Ken Silverman, and Justin Frankel are my boys.
Rotoscoping! The same magic that was used on Capcom's Game Boy Color port. It's equally as amazing. Maybe more so. Worth checking out for sure.
I remember playing dragon’s lair in the arcade a few times as a kid - I never knew what the hell I was supposed to do, always just felt like a frustrating way to waste $2
Me too. I played it once and died immediately. It felt like I had NO idea what I was meant to do.
Samsies. Y’all remember that hologram one? Where some lady talks to you and you have to make her jump I think lol
I remember when i bought this game, after being recommended to do so by my cousin who said he had never seen or played anything quite like it. And i also remember he told me that this game should not be possible, he said something like it being a marvel of design and engineering. Therefor, not just because the game itself looked good and was fun, it was like owning something truly unique, something extraordinary 😁
And then in reality it was just glorified cartoon :D
Mainly remember the bad reviews and complaints about the hefty price tag. But I never really realized that there's a really impressive story and proper genius programming behind it all!
There followed two more sequels and the two Space Ace games, so, yes, somebody must've been buying them!
I hope many viewers of this video have either seen Star Wars arcade and Dragon's Lair in person. Especially Star Wars... it's stunning on a vector CRT.
It's also an actual game.
cleaning up all that digitizer dithering by hand for every single frame sounds like a monumentous task, jeez. They did a good job too.
MVG always got something different to keep me entertained. Dragon's Lair was one of those games man!
TRON was my favorite arcade game from those days!!
I remember seeing the Amiga port of Dragon's Lair at computer/video game outlets like Electronic's Boutique, and being completely amazed! I had never seen graphics that advanced outside of the arcade before.
you're the goat of retro gaming youtube, my man. And Randy possibly the goat of code, the man is a living legend.
I remember playing this and Space Ace on Amiga 500. Beautiful, but frustrating to the point of being unplayable.
It played just like the arcade so you must have had trouble with that too.
I never had DL but I memorized space ace the weekend I got it and became upset I spent so much on it as a kid. It's much shorter than the arcade version too.
dragon's lair and space ace, just watchin' those arcade games was like lookin' into the future. I do remember the buzz on the amiga. thx 4 your video.
Absolutely FASCINATING!!! I had no idea this port existed and the amazing copy protection around it!
BLEEM! changed my life. I played Silent Hill on my PC at nights when I was 17 and I didn't have a Playstation. I have fond memories of that time!
You see, this is an example of things I wouldn't care to learn for myself (that is of course if I had a vested interest in this game or the amiga), but since MVG puts out a very comprehensive video on it I'm actually learning something new about the gaming industry in the 80s, which is f*cking cool! Thank you sir!
Dragon's Lair was a tough game to beat! Quarter after quarter!
In my arcades it was 50 cents to start too
Randy was doing that all at 17?! That man is a machine.
Another great Video, Dragons Lair was a Groundbreaking game back in the day and I could not believe there was a good version on the amiga.
Randy linden is a fucking champ. I've been getting into programming and he's an inspiration to me.
I remember cracking Thexder 2 on the PC 8801. To make a copy-able copy, it took hours because the disks had different sector sizes, track lengths per track on many disks. There was no other protection I think. I had to copy the raw data into the standard floppy format with a disk monitor and patch the loader with the same tool. Then you could copy the disks with any backup tool.
Great game, thanks
What I remember most about Dragons Lair is the input lag on the C64 and Amiga version. The game was a pain to play. Not that it mattered that much... It was revolutionary to be able to play this at home and I still enjoyed every frustrating second of it.
What I remember of Dragon's Lair arcade when I was a kid is that I never knew what exactly I had to do, but no matter the frustration I would try again right away again and later whenever I ran into the game again.
And the same with other Laserdisc games such as Space Ace, Cobra Command, or Road Blaster.
Before I even watch the video. I was literally JUST talking about Dragon's Lair to my mum a few hours ago which is a game I didn't even know about until yesterday and than now I've just hopped onto UA-cam, I have 1 single notification and it's that MVG uploaded a video about Dragon's Lair! What even are these chances lmao!
wow - waited a whole lifetime to get the details for this one. Remember how this was a released on 8 disks back in the days and stories about the crazy "slow drive thing" was circulating - but no one really understod anything back then.
Amazing insight - love it !
Great nostalgia vid as usual. Really loved the Star Wars Hot Seat moving cabinet that helped paved the way for other flight arcade games like Afterburner.
I love when you uncover such stories.
I've never thought that this game was such a technical accomplishment...
thanks for telling us such an amazing story. DL is a beautiful work of art still today.
Man I love the intro music!
No mistakes were made there 😂
This mad man just streamed the Laserdisc to his Amiga. Today, this would be the equivalent to capture every frame of a BluRay with a static Gameboy Camera.
I have DL2: Time Warp on the Atari ST and I was blown away when I played it. (It's also on just 6 floppies.)
I owned, (and finished) Space Ace on the Amiga back in the day. I loved it.
Now i have an arcade cab with several laserdisc games on it, i still like them because they look and sound spectaculaire.
Thank you for this.
I had a rough day today and this is soothing.
I'm sure many others turn to content like this for comfort. Thank you.
mean's a lot, thank you. I hope tomorrow is better for you
Randy is a wizard. For your next challenge Randy, I would like Doom running on an 8-bit machine!
The Amiga port was the reason i wanted an amiga. I first saw Dragons Lair in an arcade in italy when we were on holidy. I was about 8, 9 years old and Dragons Lair totally blew me away. There was nothing comparable on the market, the graphics was lightyears ahead of anything else. To play the game was frustrating though. It was a unfair game, cause it was impossible to know many times what you actually should do. So it was also very expensive to play cause you died often and quick in this game. The game had a very special atmosphere though. The knight, think his name was Dirk, with all his hilarious facial expressions, the sound and so on. It was all pretty well put together.
Randy Linden sounds like a person that should be doing games for the Amiga, today.
We had a neighbor on our street that had a laser disk player, It was wild the disks are huge
Okay, I was alive when all this happened, so here's some historical context.
When Dragon's Lair first appeared in the arcades in 1983/1984, yes, it was spectacular - but we very quickly realised that gameplay was almost non-existent. You'd play it once - maybe twice - and then never again. It was terrible value for money. There were far better games in the arcades. We had far better games on our 8-bit computers at home.
For the same reason, I never bought the Amiga version when it came out. Essentially, it was just a barely-interactive animation demo. There were tons of animation demos on the Amiga. I didn't know anyone who bought Dragon's Lair for their Amiga.
The game that achieved what Dragon's Lair failed to do - i.e. allow you to meaningfully interact with an animated movie - was Another World. That game got the formula right.
Bravo to the maker of this video - it's highly informative and interesting.
My only (slight) criticism is that I would have liked to hear more about the techniques used to create the Amiga version. For example, they appear to have reduced the on-screen palette to 16 colours to save memory - is that right? Also, they took out all camera movements. And were the animated characters done as bobs (blitter objects) or was there a whole-screen animation player in effect, with compression routines to just store the parts of the image that change from frame to frame etc...?
I'd love to know those details...
Great video. Brings back fond memories of my Amiga days. I was a huge DL fan and this was the closest I had to playing it.
Back in the arcade days I brought my Betamax into work and recorded the entire Space Ace laserdisc right off the machine.
We didn't have DL at the time so I didn't get a copy of that.
I had forgotten that I had seen a commercial for the Amiga back in the day featuring Dragon's Lair gameplay. It was so long ago and I had heard nothing else about DL on the Amiga since then, that I kind of concluded that I dreamt it up! Thanks for letting me know I'm not crazy!
Yeah, i had the C64 version and I was so bummed how it looked/played, but i knew it could never look like the arcade, but when i sold my C64 (ugh) and got an Amiga 500, that version blew my mind and so did Space Ace. Seeing both on my friends A500 is what sold me on an Amiga. I wish I still had both of them and the libraries I cultivated :(
While I had heard much of this story previously the part at the end about the A1000 blew my mind!!
Blew my mind when I first seen it in the arcade. Played the hell out of it!
I had an amiga500 with 512kb of additional ram ... and when dragon s lair came out I was already finishing the arcade was great!
Jim Bagely's port of Dragon's Lair to the ZX81 is also pretty incredible.
love getting Randy AND Galahad's perspectives on this - makes for a great telling of this story, indeed!
Dragon's Lair was the 1st game I'd bought for my Amiga in late 1989.
Thanks for the insight. The first computer I bought with my own money here in the States was a used A500 with 1mb trapdoor and Dragon’s Lair among the software.
Love these videos. Completely in awe of the ingenuity. Thanks for the presentation, MVG, really enjoyed this one :-)
Dragon's lair on the nes honestly blows my expectations away but I still have no idea how you fit so much animation on a small bunch of discs. Mad.
Outstanding video. Exactly the type of content that makes your channel unique! Great work MVG.
Cool that you were able to talk to someone from the Fairlight group.
This was not only a captivating story, but incredibly inspirational.
Such a brilliant programmer. I really love these detailed "impossible port" videos. Please keep them coming!
Stories like this are the most interesting IMO. Well done video, and well done programming by Randy. Pure awesomeness.
It was amazing for the time. I still remember the drum beat during the loading screen. The nintendo ds lite has an excellent IMO port If your a dragons lairs fan make sure you pick it up, it is amazing they captured the laserdisc version on a small cart.
This was so cool back in the day. Pretty neat animation. Remember "Revenge Of The Ninja" on SEGA CD? That blew me away. Pretty cool animation quick time game.
I never had an Amiga as a kid, so my first experience with Dragon's Lair was the CD-ROM version for DOS (also by ReadySoft, the precursor to Digital Leisure), but there's no doubt that this Amiga port is a true "miracle port". Absolutely amazing work done by Randy Linden, & my mind is just blown by how he did this at just 17.
i had the Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair II and Space Ace on the A500 with they first came out, it's fasinating how this was made
With all those stories and contacts, I'm pretty sure that you could make some incredible podcasts talking about those game programming challenges and miracles!
I'd guess that a ton of smaller tricks or even anecdotes aren't worth a full video by themselves, but an actual podcast or long format "interview" talking more about those developers experiences would be a killer concept! Much like the WAN Show concept from LinusTechTips, where Linus can use tech news to talk about his past and present experiences and his knowledge.
I'm probably not the first one to talk about this but I do wanted to share my thoughts on this if it can help make even greater content down the line.
Thanks again for all your work!
I remember Dragon's Lair being on the cover of one of the very first gaming magazines I ever purchased...those were really exciting times.
OMG I'd forgotten all about this game and I used to love playing it. Wow man, thanks for the trip down memory lane. Now I'm thinking about lots of other games I used to love playing on various ZX Spectrums. Happy contented smile at how much nicer and simpler life was back then.
Dragon's Lair being copmpressed down to about *6.28MB* for the Amiga port while remaining that faithful to the original arcade version is some real wizardry. And also apparently just another day in the office for Randy Linden.
I mean obviously it all looks much more flat than the richly detailed cartoon animation of the original, but the lack of other major compromises is amazing.
(Edited because I originally wrote this assuming 1.4MB floppy disks, not the 880KB (or 1.04MB for the custom format) of the Amiga)
One game that got me into the Amiga was "Space Ace", another Laser Disk game. I saw it in 1990s in the mall store called "Software Etc" playing in the display. I was hooked.
To this day I still have boxed copy of the "Space Ace" for Amiga.
BTW, this game comes with a booklet, and in the booklet there was a space for each scene that you can write down what moves you need to perform to advance to the next chapter. I still have the notes.
I also have the original Dragon's Lair disks.
Such pioneers these guys! It takes me back to the copy protection of "Leander" on the Amiga which I think was one of traveller's tales' first games. Really creative and sneaky protection.
The founder of Traveler's Tales actually has a channel here on youtube where he explained how the copy protection of their games worked, and I think he made a video for Leander specifically, too! It's GameHut, if you want to look it that up :)
@@redpheonix1000 thanks I have seen it!
My friend spent WEEKS watching other people play Dragons Lair and got all the moves down so well that the first time he put a quarter in he finished the game
I bought the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair when it first came out. The load times were longer than the actual game sequences, but it was still remarkable. Plus the copy protection was genius, no cracking program worked (i tried, haha). I loved DL and I upgraded my Amiga 500 to 1MB just to play this awesome game!! Thanks for the memories!!
So cool! He basically adopted the same technology as VHS tapes. You had SP (standard Play) and LP (long play). With LP the VHS tape writes and reads at a slower rate thus adding more Audio/Video on tape. He was at a good time to use the digitizer that came out. He only needed to write a engine to play frames and add gameplay to it. This guy is awesome!
Amazing story and what an awesome video to share it with us all. Thank you so much, always enjoy your content!
I had never heard of this port, and all I can say is WOW!
As a kid with an A1000, this game was a technical marvel and I never understood how they did it. It was pure magic to me until now.
Interesting. I've always thought that Amiga version was also some bad 2D platformer or something. Never knew it was that faithful to original. Impressive.
i had bought this game for my Amiga at the time, i remember showcasing the game at TPUG meetings and at our TPUG booth at the World of Commodore events.. also the reason that the game takes only 6 disks is that not all of the Scenes from the game were included in the Amiga release.
I bought Escape from Singe's Castle back in 1991 on PC for the equivalent of 60€, that in todays money would be a lot of more. It run perfectly in a 286 at 12 MHz with VGA, and for the time, it was very impressive. I finished it in a weekened, but played it a lot of times only to watch the entire movie that last 5 minutes.
Great video, as usual.
I was terrible at this game, but I loved showing off my Amiga with it. It was an incredible feat... I didn't know about that DMA trick on the drive, crazy! Thank you for this vid
Thankyou for promoting this cool game on the Amiga - very insightful video, love your research into this and all your videos.
These videos are my favorite. I love seeing the mechanics behind game ports, especially these kinds.
Brilliant story. Respect for your research. Was a pleasure to watch.
I CANNOT BELIEVE it is only now that I've actually just realised "Dragon's Lair" works as a pun on _dragon slayer._
Certainly remember swapping through those 6 disks on my A1000!
Thanks for the video, always appreciate the information
I remember playing video games on the computer with half a dozen or so floppy discs for each game. Simpler times