Does anyone make reproduction laser discs?

chuchunesme

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I had someone tell me there were reproduction laser discs for games like Space Ace and Dragons Lair. Is there any truth to that and where can I buy them? The one in my Space Ace isn't the greatest condition and I wanted to add Dragons Lair to my machine.
 
I had someone tell me there were reproduction laser discs for games like Space Ace and Dragons Lair. Is there any truth to that and where can I buy them? The one in my Space Ace isn't the greatest condition and I wanted to add Dragons Lair to my machine.

No no one makes them and to do so would be an extremely expensive progress as they are not burned like cds they are pressed, back in the day there was a home recorder but the quality and process was nothing like the real deal and you cannot at all find blank media for them and i think each side could only record 30 mins
 
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I had someone tell me there were reproduction laser discs for games like Space Ace and Dragons Lair. Is there any truth to that and where can I buy them? The one in my Space Ace isn't the greatest condition and I wanted to add Dragons Lair to my machine.

Yes, back in 2002, there was a reproduction laser disc made for Dragon's Lair. It was known as the Dragon's Lair Special Limited Edition laser disc. There were 412 of them made (400 production and 12 test copies of the same material) The disc contains all of the orignal footage AND as a bonus about 12 scenes from the cutting room floor. If you have the Dragon's Lair Enhancement ROM revision 2.1, you can actually play these scenes that were cut from the game.

Unfortunately the discs sold out really quick as many people hoarded them. Right after the disc was released in 2002, there was some talk about possibly making Space Ace, but that never happened because the last plant in the USA pressing laser disc (Imation) closed the doors on that department, making the Dragon's Lair Spacial Limited Edition the final laser disc to be created in the USA forever.
 
So is there a controllable DVD Player or solid state storage solution for the laser disc games?
 
Yes, back in 2002, there was a reproduction laser disc made for Dragon's Lair. It was known as the Dragon's Lair Special Limited Edition laser disc. There were 412 of them made (400 production and 12 test copies of the same material) The disc contains all of the orignal footage AND as a bonus about 12 scenes from the cutting room floor. If you have the Dragon's Lair Enhancement ROM revision 2.1, you can actually play these scenes that were cut from the game.

Unfortunately the discs sold out really quick as many people hoarded them. Right after the disc was released in 2002, there was some talk about possibly making Space Ace, but that never happened because the last plant in the USA pressing laser disc (Imation) closed the doors on that department, making the Dragon's Lair Spacial Limited Edition the final laser disc to be created in the USA forever.
That's too bad, it makes owning one of these games even more tough without having replacement discs available. Mine will play but some of the audio sounds like crap and the picture isn't very clear. I've tried 3 different players and get the same results with all of them.
 
Well Matt Ownby (DAPHNE Creator) and Warren Ondras (DAPHNE Dev) have been working on a project that is good news for laser disc game fans. Basically it will completely replace the laser disc and laser disc player in your favorite laser disc game. They started working on it with Dragon's Lair about a year ago or so. Last year at CAX we had two dragon's lair machines running side by side. One had the original laser disc and the other had a prototype of this hardware running. The project has been named "Dexter" You can read more about it here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/194221630621455/
 
Well Matt Ownby (DAPHNE Creator) and Warren Ondras (DAPHNE Dev) have been working on a project that is good news for laser disc game fans. Basically it will completely replace the laser disc and laser disc player in your favorite laser disc game. They started working on it with Dragon's Lair about a year ago or so. Last year at CAX we had two dragon's lair machines running side by side. One had the original laser disc and the other had a prototype of this hardware running. The project has been named "Dexter" You can read more about it here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/194221630621455/

That's very cool! I just got a LaserCon card and an LD-V8000 to get my game up and running, I'm waiting for my board set to get back from being tested. I'll see if my game will work after that. I checked the Facebook page out but didn't see any prices listed there on what that kit might cost.
 
I think they originally sold for around $140 back in 2002. A few years later after they were all sold out, you couldn't touch one of these discs for under $400.

The last one #350 sold on ebay for $602 + 15 shipping... "The picture quality was good, but it appears that the quality degrades slightly the further you go into the disc. I have heard that this was a printing error with the factory." - Auction poster

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The last one #350 sold on ebay for $602 + 15 shipping... "The picture quality was good, but it appears that the quality degrades slightly the further you go into the disc. I have heard that this was a printing error with the factory." - Auction poster

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Damn that is half of what I paid for my entire machine with that disk in 2009! :eek:
 
... "The picture quality was good, but it appears that the quality degrades slightly the further you go into the disc. I have heard that this was a printing error with the factory." - Auction poster

That is freaking hilarious. I'm guessing the reproducers failed to do their Laserdisc homework before embarking on that project.

Laserdiscs came in 3 different flavors of "groove production" (encoding) : CLV, CAV, and CAA. Each with varying degrees of playback quality. Clearly they chose not to use the original method and went with Imation. Mistake.

"With the exception of 3M/Imation, all Laserdisc manufacturers adopted the CAA encoding scheme, although the term was rarely (if ever) used on any consumer packaging. CAA encoding noticeably improved picture quality and greatly reduced crosstalk and other tracking problems." -Wikipedia

Should have looked for a different plant to revive and make those.
 
to do so would be an extremely expensive progress as they are not burned like cds they are pressed

CDs are pressed as well, but obviously home users have the ability of "burning" a disc themselves. This home recorder for LDs, was it a burner as well?
 
$602 for the repro disc? That's just nuts. And I love this game and have a Dedicated DL, but there's now way in hell I'd pay that.
 
To the OP: Have you tried polishing the disk?

Laserdisks, like their smaller cousins, CDs and DVDs, have autocorrecting code in them to help with the dropouts caused by scratches. But most of them were for analog media and errors were easily ignored. DL & DL II were different because of the digital content. But that was a common fix with laser games to just polish the disk. I don't recall if there was a special polish for them but I do remember there were devices that had counter-rotating pads that would polish the surface in a radial (from the edge to the center) motion that cleaned and polished the surfaces. I even had a smaller hand cranked version for polishing CDs.

ken

Edit: Here are a couple links:
http://www.instructables.com/id/how-to-polish-out-scratches-on-laser-discs/
http://www.discdoc.com/p13.html

If you want more just google 'polishing laser discs"
 
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To the OP: Have you tried polishing the disk?

Laserdisks, like their smaller cousins, CDs and DVDs, have autocorrecting code in them to help with the dropouts caused by scratches. But most of them were for analog media and errors were easily ignored. DL & DL II were different because of the digital content. But that was a common fix with laser games to just polish the disk. I don't recall if there was a special polish for them but I do remember there were devices that had counter-rotating pads that would polish the surface in a radial (from the edge to the center) motion that cleaned and polished the surfaces. I even had a smaller hand cranked version for polishing CDs.

ken

Edit: Here are a couple links:
http://www.instructables.com/id/how-to-polish-out-scratches-on-laser-discs/
http://www.discdoc.com/p13.html

If you want more just google 'polishing laser discs"
Thanks for the tip, I'll look into that. The surface isn't in bad shape, its got a couple small scratches but I've read that they can get something people call "laser rot" or something like that so that could be what I've got going on. I'll research it a bit and see what I can figure out.
 
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