LD-CHD's versus Daphne

[bkenobi]

I've been playing around with Daphne over the last few days and have most of the available games set up. I've just noticed that the LD-CHD's available for MAME are the same as a few of these (Firefox, M.A.C.H. 3, Us Versus Them). Anyone know which system emulates these games better? I'm thinking things would be cleaner if they were included in MAME, but they seem to take up WAY more space (probably due to the use of encoding for Daphne). Does MAME have any performance limitations when playing these (like Seattle games)? Unless there's a big advantage, I'll likely stick with Daphne for the time being, but I'd like to hear any opinions that people have.

[Tempest]

I sent you a PM.

[Circo]

I sent you a PM.

I am curious about this too.

[chriss]

For my 22" screen the Daphne games look great! They are encoded in MPG and I couldnt ask for better quality. I somehow understand that the mame guys are trying to stay as close to the original as possible. Thats why the games take up a lot of space (<10GB)

If I had the space I would set up the available LD games in MAME, just to have the complete archive (same with the other CHD games)

but for now I dont have the space and I don't see a reason in terms of quality. Dragons Lair HD looks awesome when playing with Daphne, I couldn't ask for more!

[bkenobi]

Yeah, I figured the reason they were so big was due to mpg/ogg encoding used in Daphne. Since these run fine with any version of Daphne and look decent (at least on my SDTV) I can't see an advantage currently to go to the MAME LD releases (other than for accuracy...which is the primary focus of MAME. At 10-13GB per vs up to 1.5GB, I'm thinking I'll stick with Daphne for the time being. Thanks for the input!

[Tempest]

I am curious about this too.

I can't link to the thread, so here are the highlights:

They're completely different formats, also the daphne ones are like 'recording as the video was playing' the CHD is a copy of the actual laserdisk.. The CHDs are also compressed otherwise youd be looking at an estimated 30-40Gb in size for each one.

Though digital audio was added later, the video laserdisc is an analog medium. The MAME team is capturing the video at full D1 (720x486) and compressing and storing it using a lossless codec (HuffYUV, I think).

they need to capture every line, not just the visible ones (theres needed info in there which daphne "cheated around" by using framefiles).

Read Aaron Giles' homepage for info on laserdisc capturing.

http://www.aarongiles.com/

[chriss]

thanks for the info tempest!

two little things: i wouldnt describe huffyuv as lossless (it compresses to half the size of lossless approximately) and the HD releases of digital leisure (space ace, dragons lair) are more than just a recording while the video is being played. They look even better than the original laserdisk releases!

[bkenobi]

The digital leasures releases were cleaned during remastering I assume. The MAME team is simply capturing the original release in the best quality it can and preserving it in a lossless format. I understand what they are doing and why, but I'm not sure I agree with doubling the recorded resolution even if it might capture some lost data before as this data obviously wasn't needed to make things work. Either way, I'm happy the MAMEdevs are going to include the LD-CHDs, but at this point I'm simply not willing to use that much space for the current releases since Daphne works just fine. If things change, then I'll change as well, but that's something for down the road I guess.

[chriss]

word

[Circo]

I think as we are now seeing $99 1TB drives, the space concern won't matter as much in the near future.

[bkenobi]

Storage-wise, I agree. But, my connection is not going to get any faster for quite some time. I still see the download time as a big deal since we are now talking about a LD-CHD set of nearly 500GB all said and done (from what the unspeakable threads above guesstimated). My Saturn set is 66GB and it took FOREVER to finish (and now I find out I can't play them on my current rig ).

But yes, drive space is getting really cheap! I have 3 750GB drives in RAID5 and expect to expand them to 6 750's within another year depending on the plans for our server's usage. Those 750's cost $150USD when I got them but I've seen them for ~$50USD recently.