Dragons Lair on the Amiga - How a laserdisc game fit onto 6 floppy disks | MVG

[Music] it was the year 1983 and in America the arcade industry was in Decline Pac-Man Fever was well and truly over in games like Space Invaders Gallagher and Pole Position were well past their Prime and while new games were moderately successful they mostly followed a similar formula sure you had games like track and field one of the earliest button mashing games but the arcade industry needed something unique and different Star Wars would be one game that stood out with its full-sized sit-in cockpit you played several stages in a fully 3D Vector world to ultimately blow up the Death Star it would end up being atari's top selling 1983 arcade release and sold over 12 000 cabinets but even that would not be enough [Music] the industry would get its well-needed Boost from a game that was an interactive movie that ran on a LaserDisc the game itself was known as dragon slayer developed by Don Bluth an ex-disney animator and Rick Dyer the game was unlike anything else released in the arcades at the time it would use LaserDisc technology to stream in animation and audio assets as they were needed the LaserDisc was an essential part of Dragon's Lair as each frame was created by hand with tens of thousands of individual frames and over 130 megabytes of data filling up a single side of a LaserDisc it was a new experience in the arcades with amazing visuals and sound it puts you in the shoes of Dirk the daring the brave knight entering the unknown Castle in an effort to rescue the beautiful princess Daphne with many monsters and obstacles that want to kill Dirk with almost every passing moment of the game of course we now know that Dragon's Lair to be mostly a series of QuickTime events that takes repetition and muscle memory to get through the skill is mostly knowing when to react to the game and the right time and all said and done its end-to-end viewing time is approximately about 15 minutes in length but in 1983 Dragon's Lair was a Smash Hit the game does a great job of putting you right in the middle of an interactive movie and for its time it was unheard of by the end of 1983 it was the number one arcade game in the USA and turned around the industry grossing over 32 million dollars in Revenue if we think about LaserDisc games these days it's considered a bit of a novelty but it was completely new technology in 1983 and people would line up for hours to get a chance to play it the success of the game in the arcades meant that home computer versions were inevitable these would feature unpopular 8-bit micros such as the Commodore 64 ZX spectrum and amstrad CPC the problem however is how do you even begin to fit a LaserDisc game on an 8-bit micro was 64 kilobytes of Ram or less and the result is this a somewhat faithful reimagining of the original Source material but essentially a 2d game which is much more convoluted and confusing the same could be said about the NES version it essentially takes the QuickTime events but wraps it in a 2d side scroller and the result once again is substandard Dragon's Lair on the 8-Bit micros and consoles for the time are not very good sometimes games aren't even worth porting but all that would change in 1989 when Dragonslayer on the Commodore Amiga released [Music] come on the Amiga version takes the original Source material but uses digitized Graphics to come up with a pretty cracking port for the standard Amiga that retains the fluid animation and sounds of the arcade original it comes on six floppy disks for which at the time was unheard of most Amiga games of that era would come on a maximum of two but this was a LaserDisc game so six discs if my math comes out to be correct comes out to around five and a half megabytes of storage somehow the LaserDisc game was digitized and compressed down to fit on six floppy disks this was sorcery and the man responsible at the time was a 17 year old Randy Linden a name that you may be familiar with he would take upon the challenge to see if Dragon's Lair and a laser this game was indeed possible to run on the Commodore Amiga the story of how Dragon's Lair ended up on the Amiga is fascinating in of itself Grandy Linden for those that aren't familiar is a once in a generation type of programmer and with covered his works on the channel before including doom on the SNES and most recently the unreleased Quake prototype for the Game Boy Advance Linden however is probably most well known for his work on blame the very first commercial PlayStation 1 emulator bleam cast for the Sega Dreamcast Dragon's Lair is another of Randy's challenges he loved the game in the arcades and believed that the Amiga was up to the task so he set out to make it a reality he went down to some local arcades in Toronto to seek out a Dragon's Lair arcade machine he would ask the manager if he could buy the LaserDisc outright one of the managers then put him in touch with cinematronics the company responsible for the arcade original and he was able to order the LaserDisc and borrow a LaserDisc player from a local AV store when he browsed through the contents of the LaserDisc he realized that the entire game was there scene by scene completely unprotected from here the goal was to capture the entire LaserDisc frame by frame on to his Amiga but how would he accomplish this well the Amiga is a very versatile system with many features digitizers existed for both sound and video and Linden already owned an audio digitizer known as the perfect sound this was developed by a company known as Sunrise Industries who you may know these days with their current name as Roku Linden would then reach out to Sunrise because he had read in a magazine that they were working on a video digitizer known as perfect vision and the company agreed to sending him a prototype it was at this point that Lyndon flew to New York to meet with Sullivan Bluth and pitched the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair which they ultimately agreed to back at his home Linden would then scan every single frame of the LaserDisc using his digitizer to his Amiga 2000 which had a 40 Meg hard drive a huge amount of space back in 1988 this came out to tens of thousands of individual frames of video he would then contract 18 team of artists to help clean up the individual frames as well as audio Engineers to sample the audio tracks from the LaserDisc Linden would do the programming of the main game routine he built an internal visual scripting language known as cast short for cell animation sequencer tool to manage the video and audio frames and add in an event-based system on cues as well as joystick movements cast manages the entire gameplay loot for Dragon's Lair and it's only about 10 kilobytes in size on the disk thanks to the amiga's custom chips as Dragon's Lair is currently playing video and audio it's streaming in the next batch of video and audio from floppy disk in real time according to Linden this is quite possibly the earliest example of streaming on the amiga but speaking of floppy disks the game somehow needed to be compressed to fit and play off floppies and this would become the most important aspect of Dragon's Lair on the Amiga swapping discs would be inevitable so getting it right would be very important one interesting feature of the Amigas floppy disk drive controller is that it's quite versatile it's possible to develop a completely custom disc routine that could be happily read by any other Amiga disk drive on the market custom disk routines like this are not anything special but Linden was also very much aware of the ongoing piracy seen on the Amiga and wanted to ensure that cracking the game would be a challenge and he would come up with a clever copy protection method that not only reduced the number of discs that the game needed but he would also take full advantage of Hardware in a non-standard way to force crackers to effectively rewrite the entire diskloader for the game to emulate what Lyndon was doing with the hardware to go into some details first let's take a standard Amiga floppy disk when formatted it's 880 kilobytes in size this is because the disc is comprised of 80 tracks times 11 sectors per track and each sector is 512 bytes in size and don't forget that the disc is double-sided so when you do the math it comes out to exactly 901 120 bytes in size which if you divide by 1024 is exactly 880k Linden's custom format was able to provide an additional 160 kilobytes of disk space but the question is how was this accomplished well the earliest Amiga external floppy drives would come with a variable resistor on the drive controller board that would allow altering of the drive rotation speed Linden would take a screwdriver and adjust the speed of the drive so the disc itself would spin slower with the amiga's custom chips it's handled directly via dma without the CPU stalling for the the operation to complete so when writing to the disk the Amiga is demanding its data at the same speed however because the disk itself is spinning slower it's packing more bits into each track on disk so a single disk is approximately 160 kilobytes of additional space and across six disks comes out to an additional one megabytes of space quite the increase as we mentioned any standard Amiga disk controller can read many different custom formats and Linden's custom MFM format that contains much more data could be read by a normal Amiga floppy drive and it formed the bases of the copy protection coupled with the main code itself being highly encrypted and using the Amigas blitter being fed information from the copper list to actually perform the decrypting process the game would also contain checksums littered throughout the code these values effectively make sure that no routines can be tampered with and if a change is detected the game would simply crash when I asked Linden about the protection his that the game was developed with the copy protection in mind from the beginning Linden felt confident that his protection would hold up but he wasn't really sure just how long it would take before the game would get cracked and pirated so he left a hidden message to any would-be crackers on the first disc and it says the following no one wants copy protection all it is designed to do is give a program a fighting chance now we realize that there is a great competition to see which group breaks the game first however if you do break it please consider this if you let this game out early after release and there are a few sales it will be difficult to justify follow-up games of this type nobody benefits not the developers not the users and not the Amiga Community please reconsider holding on for a while and not letting the game suffer the decision is yours his words would matter little in the end the protection worked and Dragon's Lair took around six months to crack a lifetime in Amiga sales most games are cracked in a matter of hours but effectively the the protection in this instance would force a cracker to spend many hours trying to understand the protection and come up with a way to defeat it keep in mind this was also 1989 and the Amiga was at its peak with over 800 game releases that year many groups wanted to crack and spread a game as fast as possible and move on to the next one in the end the very first dragons their working crack took six months after the game's release and the crack itself took about a week and it was handled by a group known as ACU or Australian crackers United but as mentioned because the custom disk format needed to be emulated via software there was no other choice other than the cracked version of the game by ACU releasing on eight floppy disks now Dragon's Lair on the Amiga ended up selling very very well in stores with the six month window where games were sold in stores without any piracy going on whatsoever was pretty much unheard of at the time most Amiga games of that era were pretty much cracked and released the same day or within a matter of days at the worst so this was definitely an outlier and Randy Linden's copy protection paid dividends now the game did so well that a sequel was also released for the Commodore Amiga known as dragons LED 2 escape from singer's Castle escape from Stinger's Castle is an interesting release once again the main programming was done by linden the original game while spanned six discs does not contain all the sequences of the original LaserDisc so the game was effectively split into two parts sinja's Castle is more advanced than Dragon's Lair that runs faster and offers a useful feature that can be activated to help the player identifying the next move the game this time round runs on five floppy disks and does away with the MFM encoded disk format of the original this was done deliberately to make the game hard drive installable the copy protection was reduced down to a simple piece of red paper with many codes on it simple manual protection that was much more easier to crack and speaking of cracking I ended up talking to Legendary Amiga cracker Galahad from the group fairlight and I asked him about his perspective on Dragon's Lair and he said the following thing Dragon's Lair from a cracking perspective was a perfect storm it was interesting as a title and copy protection but the game was never anyone's must have and with a plethora of other games to crack and each group expecting others to do it it didn't become anyone priority to release and simply didn't get done until months later had Dragonslayer been a 1991 release for instance it would have been cracked and released in the first couple of days and spread like wildfire because in those two years since 1989 many more people upgraded to one megabytes murders were now faster and more commonplace and larger games were starting to get more frequent on the Amiga there was one more trick up the sleeve of Dragon's Lair on the Amiga that we haven't talked about yet and that has to do with memory if we look at the box of the game it says that it runs on the Amiga 500 or 2000 with one Meg of RAM and just to make my viewers aware in 1989 an A500 or A2000 would come with 512 kilobytes of RAM on board and you would need to purchase an additional 512k or more to get the game to run this was not cheap to expand your Amiga at the time but interestingly enough It also says that the Amiga A1 1000 only requires 512k so how is this possible the boot up firmware that powers the Amiga is known as Kickstart the early Amiga a1000 would load Kickstart from a floppy disk as 256 kilobytes of data into an address space that was considered ROM and could not be modified later Amigas such as the A500 and the A2000 had this Kickstart firmware embedded as a ROM chip on the motherboard Linden would discover a method to allow a stock Amiga a1000 with just 512k Ram to use the 256 kilobytes of the a1000s Kickstart ROM space as RAM effectively providing 768k of RAM on the a1000 and enough memory to play the game without an expansion in conclusion the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair was technically brilliant but as a game quite polarizing many reviewers praised the graphics and sound but didn't like the game due to its QuickTime event style gameplay but Linden's work on the game was incredible not only taking advantage of the amiga's hardware to offer an accurate representation of the original LaserDisc arcade original but also stopped Pirates dead in their tracks for months and gave the game every chance to be a success which ultimately it was Dragon's Lair as a game was quite limited but it's a work of art and one that ultimately many fans remember with great fondness so that's going to be about all for today's episode I want to give a huge thanks to Randy Linden himself for basically telling me the story of the game its development the copy protection around it his information and words were very very useful for this story and I didn't really want to make this video unless I was able to chat with him and also I want to give a huge thanks to Galahad from fairlight for offering up the crackers perspective and the mindset going into 1989 with so many Amiga releases and trying to crack a game like Dragon's Lair it must have been a very very daunting task and I definitely understand you know what was going on at the time so much better now but we are going to leave it here for this episode guys thank you so much for watching if you liked it please don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next video bye for now [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 320,708

Keywords: dragons lair, dragon's lair, dragons lair gameplay, dragons lair trilogy, mvg, modern vintage gamer, amiga, randy linden, amiga 500, a500, the impossible port, dragons lair amiga, commodore, 68000, laserdisc, floppy, floppy disks, retro, video games, 16 bit, don bluth, readysoft, sunrize industries

Id: dyiwHF67Gvg

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2022