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!
