Pioneer LD-V8000 LaserDisc Serial Commands

[AriX]

Hey All,

I haven't had too much time to work on Prevue stuff recently, but I did find one interesting thing: I got a serial adapter that connects the Pioneer LD-V8000 (the type of LaserDisc player Sneak Prevue used; I have one at my house) serial port to a standard RS-232 cable. This lets me send commands to the LaserDisc player just like the Amiga would in the real Sneak Prevue. I haven't gotten much of a chance to play with it, but I have explored the commands a bit (reference here: http://www.dragons-lair-project.com/tec ... vel1&3.pdf).

The LD-V8000 has a built-in character generator, meaning it can overlay text on top of its video output. Why, then, did Sneak Prevue have the Amiga doing the text generation? The answer is that the Pioneer player's text is quite crude; it is not nearly as elegant as the Amiga's output. It also takes up a lot more space... there is only room for 20 characters per line, with twelve lines filling up the whole screen. Here are some tests of the LaserDisc player's output: http://cl.ly/image/3t0T0Z0E0o3N http://cl.ly/image/2e3v1A1W0O1f http://cl.ly/image/0C0p0f0W170w

Another cool thing I can do is tell the player to play a certain part of the LaserDisc. For example, when run while my April 2002 LaserDisc is in the player, this command plays the brief Sneak Prevue promo on the disc: "fr367240se372800pl". This is actually several commands in one. Here's a breakdown:

fr - Set addressing mode to frame ("fr"). This is the most exact way to get to a certain point in the disk. Otherwise, running an operation like seek would be trying to seek to some amount of hours, minutes, and seconds.
367240se - Seek ("se") to frame 367240 (the start of the promo)
372800pl - Play ("pl") until frame 372800 (the end of the promo), and then stop

So, as you can see, it's not really too complicated. This is a command to display text as seen in the pictures above:
"4ra1ds
3pr
Sneak Prevue
10pr
Comcast Philadelphia"

Let's break this down too:
4ra - Set the contents of register A ("ra") to 4. Register A changes the text display settings; the value of 4 makes it display a user-specified value.
1ds - Set text display ("ds") to on ("1")
2pr - Print ("pr") to the 3rd line of the screen (the lines are 0-11)
Sneak Prevue - Print the string "Sneak Prevue"
10pr - Print ("pr") to the 10th line of the screen
Comcast Philadelphia - Print the string "Comcast Philadelphia"

This ends up printing the following: http://cl.ly/image/1Q2T2M1D3l3z

This doesn't mean too much, but I figured I'd post it in case anyone has an LD-V8000 around or is curious.

[tin]

Good stuff that I am sure will help us in future emulations