Thursday, July 16, 2009

Dragon's Lair laser disc players

I may have talked about the Dragon's Lair laser disc players before, I'm not sure. I purchased a Philips VP835 on German eBay a couple of years ago, with the intention of using it for my European DL cabinet. According to this article, it's very similar to the laser disc player originally used in Dragon's Lair, called Philips 22VP932. In fact, both the VP835 and 831 can be used in a DL cab with just a small interface board, described in the same article.

It's quite a beast! It may be difficult to see the size from these pictures, but I would say it's like a quite large desktop PC cabinet.

Anyway.. I was able to track down an original VP932 from an operator not far away, and he finally sent it to me a couple of months ago, after having asked him to sell it for years.
However, it turned out that both the power supply and the laser was removed, thus the player can't be used in its current condition. There's a bunch of loose wires in there, after the parts have evidently just been cut out.
That's why I was wondering if I somehow can combine the two laser disc players, utilizing parts from the 835 in the 932 or vice versa. However, when I opened them up, they were quite different. Maybe it's because the 835 was a consumer model, but it had an extra board, which I presume was used for RF out.









Also, there is a ribbon cable coming out from the 932, which I wouldn't know where to attach on the 835. So, does any of my 2-3 loyal followers (are there that many??) have any experience with laser disc players? I am thinking... No.
I may post this question over at the DL Forums and hope for the best.





I fear that I will end up being forced to scrap the 932 and use the 835 with an EuroDL interface board after all.
The absolute worst case would be gutting the 932 and putting a PC inside, and letting the DL mainboard communicate with the PC, retreiving the requested frames from a video file.
That would require some moderate programming skills, which I am definitely not comfortable with, but it would at least look original inside the cabinet, and it would be quite robust compared to a laser disc.

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