"This is the first:" The 16 year odyssey of "time, money, wrong turns and frustration" it took to finally emulate the Pioneer LaserActive

Hey there ROM readers! I've got an absolute whopper of a story this issue with a genuine longform dive into the emulation of the LaserActive, plus a bit of backstory on the new fan translation of the Cowboy Bebop game for PS2, plus your usual quick hits on emulator improvements, FPGA happenings and other fan translation progress. That means there's absolutely no more time or space to waste on this intro.

LET'S GET TO IT.

The Big Two

1. The LaserActive "might be the last vintage home console of note which hadn't been emulated," but no longer

The story behind the birth of any new emulator has some common ingredients. Fearsome programming skills; hundreds or thousands of hours of thankless work; the drive to understand exactly how and why a piece of technology works. None of these things come without patience. But lifelong Sega fan Nemesis, who released the first-ever emulator for the Pioneer LaserActive this week — 16 years after first pondering the idea — had no choice but to be patient. Because for most of the last decade, emulating the LaserActive was simply impossible.

"All along the way, the video made things difficult," he says. "The hardware to capture the signal properly didn’t exist. The software to decode the captured signal properly didn’t exist. And finally, a format to store the decoded video in a form suitable for emulation, also didn’t exist."

There's no other game console quite like the Pioneer LaserActive, which was released in 1993, sold abysmally and was dead in the ground by 1996. That's not a unique story for a '90s game system, but the LaserActive kinda... wasn't one. It was a LaserDisc player with an expansion bay that owners could slot different modules into. One transformed the LaserActive into a karaoke machine. Another would give it the guts of a PC Engine. And a third added the brains of a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, able to play Sega CD games as well as about two dozen made for the short-lived Mega LD.

The Mega LD format represented a technological leap over early LaserDisc-based arcade games like Dragon's Lair. The mid-'90s promise of FULL MOTION VIDEO GAMEPLAY may be quaint as hell today, but it's the reason the LaserActive has been impossible to emulate for 30 years. And it still would be today, if Nemesis hadn't spent much of the 21st century proactively collecting Sega hardware and Mega LD games with the goal of one day preserving them.

Nemesis's history with both games and emulation started with the Genesis (which I will refer to as the Mega Drive for the rest of this issue, out of respect for his native Australia). After owning a Mega Drive, 32X and Mega CD growing up, he played his first emulator, the Nesticle successor Genecyst, on a Pentium 133 circa 1997. That eventually led to contributing to reverse-engineering and emulation efforts.

"I did a lot of work on the YM2612 FM chip in the Mega Drive back in 2008 in particular, and a lot of Mega Drive emulators finally had decent FM sound after that as a result," he says. "Sharing that research, seeing the results made use of, and finally hearing the games I remembered from my childhood sound right for the first time, was a really good feeling."

In 2004, when buying loads of retro consoles was not yet a universal pasttime for nostalgic millenials and Gen Xers, he paid about $200 for one of the approximately 10,000 LaserActives that Pioneer manufactured in its short life, along with the Mega LD "PAC" module. Throughout the rest of the decade he scooped up every bit of Sega hardware he could get his hands on with an eye towards future reverse-engineering projects, but it wasn't until 2009 when he started thinking: Why isn't there an emulator for the LaserActive?

So he did what any retro game fan would do in 2009: started a forum thread about it.

"This system keeps popping into my mind," he wrote in the thread, which is still online today. "I don't think anyone's had a serious crack at emulating it yet, and I really don't think it would be very hard to do."

Well. About that.

"I honestly feel like I've nearly 'solved' this system half a dozen times over by now," Nemesis says here in 2025.

"The digital side of the system was actually pretty straightforward. When you break it down, the LaserActive is really more like a big oversized add-on to the console hardware. What that add-on provides is a different drive control interface, another audio source, and another video source, with mixing features to combine that video/audio with the console video/audio. That's really about it. On paper, it's pretty simple. In reality though, the LaserActive hardware did present a lot of challenges, mostly due to its inherent unreliability."

With prior experience writing a Genesis emulator of his own, Nemesis originally thought he'd be well-positioned to tackle the LaserActive. But the problem started to pile up immediately. First there were the almost 100 capacitors in the Sega PAC that were guaranteed to fail at some point, causing many to have to be replaced on even a mint condition system. Pioneer's cost-cutting inside the LaserDisc player caused other parts to break, too. Learning to fix the LaserActive was a necessary step to figuring out how it worked.

2011 was a year of progress. Nemesis:

• Coded a program to load onto a Mega Drive flash cart that allowed him to "probe" the LaserActive hardware
• Disassembled the system BIOS to identify that "ll the interaction with the LaserActive hardware happened over a custom register block"
• Coded another program that allowed direct read/write access to those registers using a controller
• With the help of other forumites, mapped most of the registers by comparing the system's actions to the code in the disassembldd BIOS and documented what it was doing

The next two years were focused on figuring out how to rip the LaserActive's games. This involved writing multiple more custom programs and using a special USB-to-MD link cable to copy the digital data from the disc, which contained the game code as well as audio tracks. When that didn't prove to be enough to capture the TOC (or table of contents) data that essentially acted as a guide to how all the data on the disc was organized, he had to go deeper.

"I soldered a bunch of physical tapping wires into my Sega PAC-S10 module, and used a Saleae logic analyzer clone to do a streaming capture of the data lines when the TOC region was being read, which the hardware didn't make directly available. I wrote a program to parse the bus trace and extract the data from the raw capture and reconstruct the lead-in. At this point, I had everything I needed to rip a full bin/cue image of the digital data from a LaserDisc."

In 2014, Nemesis started soliciting other members of the forum where he chronicled the project to send him Mega LD games to dump (shout out to doc eggfan, who acquired most of the library including two Myst prototypes; "if he hadn't done that, there's a good chance they would have been lost forever). With a pile of games in hand, he bought a PC video capture card to rip the audio and video from the discs. And this is where the 2-3 people reading this who have an intimate understanding of the LaserActive will probably reflexively say "uh oh."

LaserDisc, despite looking like a jumbo DVD, is an analog video medium. No big deal if you're just capturing a movie. But for a game? Big big deal. Here's the long-form breakdown — skip ahead if you don't want to get way deep into analog-to-digital misery.

"No analog capture cards of the day were actually up to the task of what we were trying to do. ... The LaserActive has one of the fastest, most powerful control systems for LaserDisc playback ever made, and the game has direct, immediate control over it. Rarely is the player just playing back a video normally. Games will often have completely different video footage per field, with only one shown, or skip over every second frame, to mix four or more video streams in the same area of the disc. Many games use this for seamless 'branching' such as whether you go left or right, and this can change constantly and seamlessly during playback. The unit can play faster or slower, even playing in reverse, such as in Rocket Coaster as you speed up, or slide backwards down a slope. The unit can perform rapid nearly instant seeks with seamless looping, and does for games like Myst. In fact, the entire Myst title is basically using the LaserDisc as a set of random, short transitions, and still images, and other titles do this as well to differing degrees. ...

Games used the skip play features to further interleave different video streams at half the framerate between each other. Analog capture cards of the day didn't deal with this well. None of them could compress lossless video, everything was encoded to lossy formats. Most of them would assume a 480i image. This would cause the separate video streams in each field to 'bleed into' each other, destroying the image. The same problem occurred between frames when they had separate video streams interleaved together, where inter-frame compression would cause artifacts from the two streams to bleed together.

A high end Canopus capture card I had was the only one that was capable of compressing into huffyuv, not in a lossless form, but at least in a format that prevented this bleeding problem. Unfortunately, this card still had a limitation, in that it couldn't capture the VBI data. It was common in the day for special 'control codes' to be encoded into lines normally hidden on a normal TV, which contained information. In the case of LaserDiscs, it contained frame numbers, timecodes, picture stop codes, video TOC information in the lead-in, and other such data. None of that could be captured by capture cards of the day. For cards that had VBI capture features, they didn't work on LaserDiscs, since LaserDiscs used different lines/formats than other sources, and no capture cards in the world expected to be capturing LaserDisc video.

At this point, I felt like I'd hit a bit of a dead end. It could, perhaps, have been possible to cobble something together at this point in 2014, but I felt the result would be poor, and the discs would not have been properly preserved. I decided a different approach was needed for the analog video content, but the technology to do what I needed to do at this point, didn't seem to exist."

With an increasingly busy home life thanks to two young kids, a long commute and demanding workload at the office, Nemesis did the only thing that made sense at that point. He put the LaserActive on the shelf.

Two years later, he took another stab at it by trying to build his own hardware capture setup. By tapping into the LaserActive directly, he was able to capture a full, raw composite video signal — but it was useless unless he could decode it. Back on the shelf it went for another two years.

A house move, shorter commute and more balanced work-life, er, balance, later, Nemesis decided to dust off the LaserActive. Enter the Domesday Duplicator — an open source, community-driven hardware project dedicated to ripping LaserDiscs.

Surely this was the capture solution he'd been waiting for. Turns out it was... but not in 2018. A key companion to the Domesday Duplicator, ld-decode, was then still "in its infancy." At the time there was no publicly available software solution to decoding composite video; by the time computers were fast enough to do it without dedicated hardware, analog was donezo. Nemesis went down the path of trying to write his own decoder to mixed results, but when he found out kid #4 was on the way, he decided to wait for the broader community effort to mature.

And it did mature by a lot, with both the Duplicator and ld-decode improving process of ripping LaserDiscs in the higest possible quality. But there was still a problem when it came to LaserActive discs — they were interactive games, not static films. In 2020 Nemesis started chipping in to ld-decode:

"I started pushing for the need to add extra features into the decode process. Until then, focus had been entirely around the requirements of capturing movies on LaserDiscs, as you'd expect. LaserActive games needed more though. I needed a way to capture the full lead-in, which stored the TOC data for both the analog video and the digital data. If you're just ripping a LaserDisc to an mp4, you don't need this info, but we do for emulation. I also needed the full 525 lines of NTSC video, with VBI data. That was stripped by ld-decode, they just cared about the visible region you'd see on a TV. I needed to deal with mixed-mode 'CD' images in the digital data track. They just needed audio tracks to work. I needed to be able to play through picture stop codes seamlessly without corrupting the audio data, they didn't need to worry about that. All kinds of things like this added up, to mean that ld-decode increasingly worked great for regular LaserDiscs, but still wasn't checking all the boxes for LaserActive games."

Before he could fully commit to adding those features himself, COVID upended everything and the LaserActive went back into storage.

2024: 15 years after he'd first suggested emulating the LaserActive didn't seem like it'd be that tricky, set up in a new house with a new workspace, Nemesis finally vowed to finish what he'd started.

It was a year of whirlwind activity:

• Using the LaserActive's test mode and a custom firmware mod he developed to properly capture the lead-in and lead-out from every disc
• Rewriting the flaky USB capture code for the Domesday Duplicator's capture program to ensure error-free rips
• Expanding the program's capabilities to record more data about the disc itself, the player, and the signal quality
• Rewriting ld-decode's digital audio decoding, which had issues with drifting out of sync with the video, and finally making it possible to parse the TOC data
• Improving the video decoding to output full frame data, with all 525 lines of NTSC video and the VBI data

"With all these bits in place, I was now able to rip discs and extract the actual contents in a form suitable for emulation," Nemesis says. 2024 ticked over to 2025, and he began removing LaserActive games from the sleeves they'd rested within for decades undisturbed. Most of them had been bought new and never opened; for years he'd resisted the urge, not wanting to risk even a tiny accidental scratch until everything was ready.

After so many years and so many obstacles, the final mile was, at long last, an easy run:

"Most of the work reverse engineering the hardware I'd already done and published notes on over 13 years prior. I sat down and implemented the emulation code according to my notes, double checking things on the hardware as I went using the same testing program I'd written all those years ago, and filling the gaps in my notes for parts I hadn't fully mapped out. Space Berserker was quickly running, and after that, as more games finished decoding most of them worked on the first try, with no issues. Since I'd set out to emulate the complete hardware, with all its quirks and unusual features, whatever a game tried to do, it should just work. A few games flushed out some things I'd missed here and there, but mostly it was just fixing bugs in my implementation, until after a few weeks, everything was fully working in the emulator, just the same way it did on the hardware."

Nemesis decided to write his LaserActive emulation as a component of multi-system emualtor Ares, partially out of respect for its late creator, Near. Its existing Mega Drive support made for an easy starting point, and current Ares maintainer Luke Usher had actually done some ground work to support the Mega LD in the future by creating a "skeleton" that defined it in relation to the Mega Drive and CD.

"It was all sitting there, just needed the actual code to be written to emulate the LaserActive hardware," Nemesis says. "I'd never touched the Ares code before, but having this delivered to me is what allowed me to get the basics of drive control to have Mega CD games booting in days, from work over a few evenings. Without that, there's a good chance I wouldn't have started when I did."

There's one final wrinkle to LaserActive emulation, and that's the disc image files themselves. Basically, they're huge, in the dozens of gigabytes range. And that, again, is because the way LaserActive games utvi makes them allergic to compression. They may want to jump to specific frames in an instant, play backwards, or interleave frames, all of which means a specific moment in time needs to be a keyframe, not a compressed, modified frame that only contains the small amount of data that's changed from the frame before it, which is how video files are greatly reduced in size. You could still compress a LaserActive game to about 10GB per size with every frame preserved as a keyframe...

"That still isn’t suitable though, as heavyweight video codecs are too intensive to decode alongside emulating an entire Mega Drive + MegaCD in realtime without involving hardware decoding," Nemesis says. "In order to keep everything running at 60fps, you have to be able to do everything in under 16ms per frame. Using hardware decoding would take decoding burden off the CPU, but the video mixing with the graphics output from the Mega Drive now becomes more complex, and you also now place specific GPU requirements on any system that’s going to try and play these games."

So they stuck to a lossless format that preserves quality and takes the pressure off the CPU (and puts none at all on a graphics card). Any system that can currently run Ares should have no trouble with the LaserActive, with the caveat that you'll definitely want to have these mondo files on an SSD rather than an old spinning platter to avoid any issues with read speeds.

Ares v146, released on August 26, marked the first time a Mega LD game has been playable on another system. And it represents a milestone in game preservation that could've easily been missed — due to indifference, the literal string of inventions it took to make it a reality, or the inexorable march of time.

"There are other titles I don’t have access to at all, however I’m in discussions with a number of people who have offered to loan discs to help complete the dumping efforts," Nemesis says. "It’s been great to see people step up and offer to help. It’s vital this is done now, because Laserdisc titles don’t last forever. I have one disc in my possession that was a new, sealed copy, pressed in 1994, which is suffering from laser-rot. It’s likely that eventually, all Laserdiscs will be rendered unplayable, so we need to ensure these games are preserved now, while we still can."

He's now looking into the prospect of preserving the PC Engine PAC, which will — fingers crossed — not be too much more complicated than plugging Ares' existing PC Engine CD code into the new LaserActive code. But that's a story for another day.

For now, the emulation code being out in the wild represents relief most of all. "It was a long journey, with a lot of false starts and wrong turns getting to that point," Nemesis says. "A lot of it was work and time which nobody else had been able to see. I don't keep a blog. I don't tend to share the various steps I take to make something or get something working, I only tend to reach out when I have something to share or when I'm asking for help from other people.

"A lot of my time and energy had gone into this system over the years, and it was good to finally be able to show something for all that work."

2. Let's kick the beat: a Cowboy Bebop video game in English at long last

If there was any anime game you'd think had a sure shot at being released in English in the early 2000s, how could it be anything but Cowboy Bebop? The breakthrough "not every anime is Dragon Ball Z" series was a huge hit on Cartoon Network, channeled the American jazz of Art Blakey, and even saw a then-rare theatrical run for its movie spin-off. But neither its PlayStation 1 or PlayStation 2 games ever made it out of Japan.

*Hard bop drum roll*

...Until now! I'm delighted that translator Sonicman69, along with an anonymous hacker, has brought the PS2 beat 'em up Cowboy Bebop: Tsuioku no Serenade to English players to celebrate the game's 20th anniversary. Regular ROM readers may remember Sonicman69's translation of a Detective Conan PlayStation 2 game featured last year, both prime examples of a period when games based on popular anime were still far from a sure thing localization-wise.

Well, for Conan that may unfortunately still be the case, as I don't know if the boy-sized genius has ever really made it in America. But I'm pretty sure a Cowboy Bebop game released in 2025 would be targeting English-speaking audiences even before Japanese ones. As I theorized earlier this week on PC Gamer, Tsuioku no Serenade's developer Bandai merging with Namco right around the time this game was being released may be the culprit — the ensuing corporate chaos of layoffs and reorganizations could easily have killed it in the cradle.

I haven't had a chance to play Tsuioku no Serenade myself despite being lucky enough to track down a (seemingly somewhat rare, now) copy, but general consensus is it's an okay brawler but quite a nice little Bebop sidestory with some handsome late-era PS2 graphics. And there's original Yoko Kanno music, so, like, what else do you really want?

I reached out to translator Sonicman69 for a bit of insight into the translation effort, who first watched Bebop around 2014 and learned later that the game had never been released in English. "From that exact moment I felt like I could be the one to do it," he said. "Keep in mind at this time I knew maybe three words in Japanese and was still in high school. Big expectations. I figured someone else would get around to it eventually."

But they didn't, so after off-and-on attempts to learn Japanese and gaining some translation and editing experience contributing to the Conan patch, he set sights on Bebop with the aim of finishing the patch by the game's 20th anniversary:

I'd say the most challenging thing that people don't really think about is how often text would be reused at different points in the game. Trying to figure out a translation for a sentence that works in one context that also has to work in another — Conan had this a little bit but it was a lot more annoying with Bebop and frankly I don't think I nailed it. Aside from that the interstitials between scenes are poetic and I'm still a Japanese novice and have no poetic ability at all so I had a tough time at those and I think they came out kind of bad.

I am admittedly a little apologetic about the quality of the translation, I've received unanimous praise so far but I know I could have done better if I studied more but if I didn't translate the game now it would have never happened at all. What I'm most proud of aside from the fact we actually got it done and released it in time for the 20th anniversary? People keep telling me I did a good job writing the lines for the characters in a way that stays true to how they talked in the English dub of the show. I'm hesitant to accept that since I'm pretty critical of it myself but if I really was able to capture the characters then I did my job."

Sonicman69 also argues that the game is "not a simple button mashing beat 'em up due to how deep the combat actually is," but some annoying tutorials and the language barrier made it easy to write off. Take it from the person who's beaten it a dozen times: it's worth playing. "As far as how well the story captures the vibe of the show I think they did a pretty admirable job, but obviously it's never going to get anywhere near the best scenes from the show. Any Bebop fan who wishes there was just a little bit more to chew on should at least enjoy the game a little bit. Especially the bonus mode you unlock after completing the game on normal but I don't want to spoil too much."

You can find the English patch on Github and throw a few bucks to Sonicman69 on Ko-fi if you appreciate getting to spend a little more time in the Bebopverse after all these years.

Patching In

Sometimes emudev is all about fixing a texture issue in Colin McRae Rally 2005 – I always try to look into random Github commits with names I don't understand to see what they're all about, and sometimes PCSX2 being update to "Handle texture shuffle with pixel reversals" is just about adding some code to ignore when a game is flipping pixels horizontally and then flipping them back again because it screwed things up. Specifically it screwed up the roads in Colin McRae Rally 2005, and seemingly only Colin McRae Rally 2005.

bsnes updated with latest version of SameBoy – I think it's wonderful that Near's Super Nintendo emulator is still being maintained, and this is a nice update. bsnes uses an integrated version of SameBoy for accurate Super Game Boy emulation, but it was out of date with that emulator's continued development. No longer! All synced up.

Deeply customizable PC emulator 86Box hits 5.0 – If you want to create a virtual PC down to the motherboard, sound card, and BIOS you had on the family PC back in like 1996, 86Box is your jam. And it's just gotten its first meaty release since September 2024, with version 5.0 including a lengthy list of additions and fixes plus "a preview for one of the most requested 86Box features of all time: an integrated machine manager to organize all your emulated setups." Other highlights: "much smoother" mouse input and display output on high refresh monitors; support for CRT emulation shader effects; new systems including some early Japanese PC-compatibles; and dark mode support on Windows.

Core Report

Call me Mr. Turbo CD + Graphics – The MiSTer's PC Engine / Turbografx core just got a notable update with work from contributor David Shadoff that's been gestating for the last few months: support for CD+G, "a special audio CD that contains graphics data in addition to the audio data on the disc," according to Sega Retro. "The disc can be played on a regular audio CD player, but when played on a special CD+G player, can also output a graphics signal. CD+G is most commonly seen used for karaoke and slideshows."

The MiSTer's Commodore 64 core now also notably supports writing to Easyflash carts and "Waterloo Structured BASIC and BMP-Data Turbo 2000."

Surprise! (Attack) – Jotego dropped a core for this Konami arcade sidescroller for MiSTer and Analogue Pocket this week, along with a bit of deserved braggadocio about nailing some specific graphic effects that aren't correctly emulated in MAME. Sweat those details! Also, I'd just like to point out that Surprise Attack has some absolutely sick flyer artwork.

Translation Station

Sword & Sorcery & English – You might think Bebop would be a big enough deal that the Translation Station could take the rest of the week off, but nope — trains are still runnin'! Hit the link for a making-of at great fansite Sega Saturn Shiro from one of the contributors to this project for the 1996 JRPG. Note that it's an in-progress patch, rather than a finished one you'll want to leap to play right now; this is more of a "get excited" mention (and a fun read) which I'll no doubt circle back to in the future.

Psychic Killer, Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa – It's a Shiro two-fer this week! This translation of Psychic Killer Taromaru is a 1.0 you can grab on Github and was cranked out in just a month using Saturn emulator Yaba Sanshiro. It's a sidescrilling action game in which you, a ninja, "fire psychic energy at demons to save a kidnapped girl in feudal Japan," says Shiro. The translation was inspired by this video from Dungeon Chill, who called it a hidden gem. Well, it ain't hidden anymore. You can see it right here. Not very subtle, ninja.

If you ever wanted to play Clock Tower on the WonderSwan... – Then here's a translation for you. This patch ports the Aeon Genesis team's translation over to the WonderSwan release of the original Super Nintendo horror game. Maybe it's scarier in low-res black and white?

Good pixels

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