The newsletter Read Only Memo has an article stating that at last the Pioneer LaserActive, a laserdisc player capable of also playing games with attachments, has finally been emulated, by someone called Nemesis.
This is weird. This was around the time of the PC Engine and Mega Drive/Genesis, years after the short-lived laserdisc arcade game boom, but still within the period where some people (executives mostly) thought you could just just have a barely-interactive movie and it would rule the world. One of the attachments allowed it to play Sega CD (a.k.a. Mega CD) games, but it could also use its Mega Drive hardware to play special-made laserdisc games.
The hardware’s uniqueness, and the nature of the format, has contributed to the system’s resisting emulation. As the article tells us, laserdiscs are an analog format! So while it’s possible to copy a disc with a fidelity that would satisfy any human viewer, you couldn’t make an absolutely perfect digital copy even in theory.
The LaserActive bit is the lead-off for a substantial issue of the newsletter, which also contains news about a fan effort to translate a Cowboy Bebop game!
