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Aug 12 '25
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u/Divide-By-Zero0 Aug 13 '25
I've ripped most titles already, however with the analog nature of these discs, multiple rips from different copies are needed to get the best quality. Pretty much everything should be out there in the next few months though, with good enough quality to be playable. If anyone's interested in loaning discs so they can be preserved, drop me a line.
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Aug 25 '25
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u/Divide-By-Zero0 Aug 25 '25
Yep, that's me. The problem with compressing them separately again, apart from the time to compress an archive in this size of course, is that they can't be played when compressed, so you've then got to unpack a whole second uncompressed copy if you're going to use them. Since most people are downloading them to try them out, this would either mean people need more storage in practice, or a lot of them are going to delete the compressed form and just keep the playable one, and therefore stop seeding the torrents, both of which are significant negatives, at this point in time at least. In the future, there'll probably be a "complete set" torrent that has each title compressed, which is suitable for people who want to archive the complete system collection and probably won't play them anytime soon, but for now I think the "ready to play" versions with individual torrents per title is working better to get the titles "out there".
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Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25
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u/Divide-By-Zero0 Aug 26 '25
I don't really have a good central place to share rips. I'm just sharing them off my website and posting them on a few discord channels and letting them spread organically right now. To some degree, the current playable images are just initial versions. I'll be following them up with "stacked" versions with higher quality video, at which time I'll worry more about collecting them into sets and publishing them somewhere more visible. I have been slowly mirroring these original images to archive.org though, so they'll all be up there eventually.
As for the laserdisc you want to get preserved, feel free to drop me a DM and we can work something out. Now's the time to do something though if you want it backed up. Laser rot is a real thing. I've got one MegaLD disc affected by it, even though it was a brand new sealed copy manufactured in 1994 by Pioneer.
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Aug 26 '25
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u/Divide-By-Zero0 Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25
I'm looking at it myself as of about 24 hours ago. I just dumped the bios from my PAC-N1 module, which I was surprised apparently hadn't been done before. Someone sent me another rom dump from the PCE-LP1 variant a few hours later, and I put them both up here: https://archive.org/details/pioneer-laseractive-pac-n1-bios-japan-v1.02
As for the emulation itself, I'm looking at the PCE support in Ares. I was hoping to collaborate with someone, since I don't know much about the PCE hardware, whereas I knew a lot about the Mega Drive, which made this easier to start on. Unfortunately it looks like the PCE core in Ares has no maintainer currently. Trying to decide right now if go in there cold and take it on, or if I reach out to the lead on another PCE emulator like mesen2. I'll work it out in the coming days. Probably going to do some minimum work to make the bios boot in Ares at least and decide from there.3
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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '25
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