https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L-Ogac8XDE

At around the 11 minute mark on this video, they show a challenge on Space Pirates. But the HUD looks quite a bit different to any version of the game I’ve seen! You have unlimited shots, there’s an energy bar with 8 segments, and after being shot once it drops to one segment remaining. There’s also a death animation that I haven’t seen before, featuring a spinning skeleton over the ‘warp’ background (though the vision mixer cuts it off rather quickly). At the beginning of the ‘hostages’ area, the energy bar actually drops 2 segments when the door opens! It could well be that the game footage has been edited for time so as not to show the first death.

In the wide shots of the cabinet you can see the front is all opened up, and the Amiga and LD player are visible with wires everywhere. Is this a prototype or early version?

Just wondering, with the CRT TV now essentially obsolete, what will happen when the one in Time Traveler breaks down and you can't repair or source replacement parts? How difficult would it be to install an LCD or Plasma TV in place of the original and still have the 'hologram' work?

I'm also concerned about whether the different black level of an LCD would affect the illusion, and also whether viewing at the angle created by the parabolic mirror would cause contrast issues. Has anyone tried an LCD TV in the cabinet yet?

Obviously all the other things must be taken into account such as the TV remembering it was powered on, auto-switching to the AV channel and of course being set to 4:3 mode so that the images aren't distorted.

Ok, we know that the laserdiscs in arcade games (including GT6 games) can be unreliable. The discs can suffer from 'laser rot', and the players need precise maintenance to keep going. The Galaxian 3 Project Dragoon I used to play at my arcade started having problems with its right screen - the player would keep jumping back to the beginning of the segment or even to the beginning of the disc!

What I was wondering is, since all the footage has now been captured to AVI, would it be possible to replace the LD players with a PC and hard disk? The PC could TV-out the laserdisc footage to the game board, and respond to the serial commands from the board so it still 'jumps' when necessary.

The game would still be running normally - in fact, the game ROM would think that it's still controlling two laserdisc players  but without the reliability problems caused by the players.

You'd need to program a simple interface that would cause the video to jump around when a command was received over serial, but I think the serial commands are well documented. It would make it a lot easier to switch between English and Japanese soundtracks, for example, as well as not worrying about the discs wearing out!