> Thanks for the update. I've monitored discussions in past. Is emulating the hardware > the problem or is it waiting for the Vatican sanctioned capture? > > Thanks x 2
As far as I'm aware, it's just a matter of getting the right kind of capture, but to do that, it's a matter of finding the right kind of person with the right kind of hardware.
There's supposedly a specific type of LD player which has hardware where it's (reasonably) easy to tap into its circuitry right after the just-read sample has been converted from analog to digital, as well as a bit indicating whether or not the conversion was successful.
If that's the case, then getting bit-perfect dumps should be as simple as hooking a logic analyzer up to that specific type of player in that specific spot in the circuit, and then running as many copies of the same disc through the player until there are no samples for which the "sample valid" bit was not set.
Honestly, it kind of pisses me off that there's been no movement on this front. People have been doing shit way more technically involved than that for MAME for literally years at this point: Just look at what Sean Riddle's been doing in this thread on the Bannister forums. I bet there are a lot of people who think Dr. Decapitator and Caps0ff are the only people who have been doing decapping work. Uh-uh. So it's infuriating and baffling to me that nobody seems to have picked up this info and run with it. Maybe it's that the few devs who know that this can be done aren't sharing the info in the right place, or don't know the right people to do it?
In any case, getting bit-perfect LD dumps seems like something that should be perhaps not trivial, but at least not the insurmountable task that so many people appear to think it is. I wish the people with access to the right kind of LD player, and access to the LDs themselves, would get together and stop twiddling their thumbs, because the LDs are just bit-rotting away while we're going in circles. All the pieces are there, someone just needs to put them together.