My history with Dragon’s Lair and a mini-review of the new Replicade’s Dragon’s Lair mini cab!
Hello, everybody, this is Shane R. Monroe, you’re in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio is November 5 2020. And you are parked with me in a parking lot at the base of a mountain. Welcome to the show. So I’d venture out of the house today to take my son shooting photos for his photography class. And of course, he needs something that, like, Phoenix doesn’t have a ton of which is landscape pictures. So like mountains and trees and stuff. And of course, the photo assignment says, these pictures can’t have anything manmade in them. Yeah, so I headed north North Miss test marker. And so I managed to we got to the bottom of this hiking mountain, and he is hiking up the side of the mountain to get pictures. I was gonna go with him. But I haven’t felt the greatest in the last few weeks, to be honest with you. last about two and a half weeks. I just I’ve been very, very, very fatigued. So I’ve actually kind of been a little concerned about it. But I don’t have any like, other symptoms of covid. Really, I’m just tired a lot. So I don’t know, if I you know, if I had a fever, or I was coughing, or I had some other types of symptoms I might go in. But since I really don’t have I don’t have any real symptoms to speak of, they’re not going to give me a covid test without a fever, I’m sure. And so they’re just going to tell me Go home and rest so why bother going to the doctor, right? So yeah, so I decided not to hike up the mountain. I will get on the ark trainer later though, because I need something. But probably not. I’ll do like a 30 minute, sort of a light to medium sort of deal. So what’s going on everybody? I’m trying to think if there’s like anything really super exciting to talk about. I did get my replicate Dragon’s Lair, mini arcade replica of the arcade game classic Dragon’s Lair. And those of you who follow me on youtube have already seen I posted not one, but two videos with this amazing little piece of kit. And for those of you who aren’t really into that sort of thing. We’ll talk about it. Now, I think, give us some free time. He’s not even at the top of the mountain yet. So he’s uh, we’ve got some time before he gets back. We’ll talk about other stuff too, I guess. We’ll talk about the new Call of Duty got other stuff we got stuff we could talk about. So let’s start with Dragon’s Lair. So replicate is a company, new wave toys LLC, they creates like one six there. One six was a 1816 must be one eight. You know, there are 12 inch replicas of popular arcade games they’ve done like centipede they’ve done Tempest. And of course now Dragon’s Lair and Dragon’s Lair. Of course, those of you who know the show have been longtime listeners fans of the show. You know that Dragon’s Lair has a unique piece of my history attached to it. And for those of you have no clue what the hell I’m talking about. Dragon’s Lair is a LaserDisc based video game. It’s essentially one giant quicktime event. For those of you who know what that is, hey, Jeffrey doll is on. So, essentially dragons, there’s a 22 minute animated movie that you tap a joystick or a button to continue the movie in the right direction. So unlike a regular video game, where you use up down left and right to move Pac Man around a maze, you’re watching the video and at a certain time, you’ll have to tap up or tap down or tap left or right or tap the sword button in order to keep Dirk the daring, doing what he’s supposed to do. This could be you know, fighting the Lizard King, this could be writing a flying horse, it could be navigating fire ropes, pretty much I’m sure everybody who’s listening to this show knows what Dragon’s Lair is. But Dragon’s Lair came out at a time when you know, Video game graphics in the early 80s were in their infancy and well, we were a little bit above Pac Man at that point. You know, we were talking Donkey Kong, that sort of generation of graphics. So you walk into the arcade and you’re used to hearing bleeps and bloops and you know, little to two or three voice musical deities going On for some video game, and meanwhile, from the corner of the arcade is full, like orchestrated music and voice and, you know, it sounds like there’s a movie playing in the corner. And so you you wander your way over to the corner, there’s a stack of kids crowded around this video game machine. And all you can see is this beautiful lit up marquee that says Dragon’s Lair. And if you were lucky, your arcade had a big video screen. Hey, Margie. If you were lucky, there was a video screen on top or a TV usually on top of the Dragon’s Lair machine that allowed you to watch what was going on, on the screen that you couldn’t see because there was like 60 Kids packed around it. And so Dragon’s Lair, being an animated video game, like a cartoon video game drew a lot of attention, the audio is always cranked up. Sometimes or even two or three monitors around the arcade, showing off what Dragon’s Lair was doing the player that was currently playing Dragon’s Lair. And if you happen to be lucky enough to to jockey yourself a position where you might get to play, it’s gonna cost you 50 cents to take a spin at defeating since the dragon. And quite frankly, 50 cents did not last a long time. Unless, of course, you happen to have been taking notes and paying attention while the people in front of you had the opportunity to play because it really was a game of memorization and timing. And to go in cold there was no you didn’t happy there’s no skill set that you could have, right? Like if you were good at video games, and you sat down to play asteroids for the first time you might do okay, because there’s a video game skill set there. Dragon’s Lair, all about the memorization all about timing and moves, even if you knew the moves because sometimes they would put them in magazines, right? So it’d be like the the Lizard King, the moves are right, right, right, right, left, right, right. Forward, fire, fire, fire fire. So you have the moves, but you still don’t know the timing. So that 50 cents can blow through five dirts pretty quick. And usually it was three dirts. So there was a lot of money being made in that video game in Dragon’s Lair. And it was a huge phenomenon. It’s one of the few games as I recall that and Pac Man and I think which is that was it space wars. There’s like three video games in the main Smithsonian Institute of video where the video game sections are Pac Man. I think it’s space war, maybe Pong, maybe three or four of them in there. Anyway, Dragon’s Lair is in there to show its cultural significance. And so the game the machine itself was rather complicated. The though, of course, was a monitor, but it wasn’t like a raster monitor. It was like a television screen monitor. The control panel was a standard deal, one joystick, you know, to fire buttons, so you play left or right handed. And on the back, the back glass was an LED score, display a scoreboard. And it glowed because it was like it was an LED in it. It had those red digits like you might see in the old led watches of the time. But they were glowing and vibrant. And anybody who knows what I’m talking about remembers what that scoreboard looked like when you saw it. It of course, it was dark in the arcade. And these this red lettering would would would beam through the darkness at you. And of course, because it was led a used was eight or nine little wedges to actually display numbers. Just like an old, you know, an old led clock, same idea. But you could always see the segments that weren’t lit up even though you know even though they were not lighted, you could still kind of see them and there’s a there’s a memory dopamine hit when it comes to this the scoreboard because most video games had the score right there on the screen with it. There wasn’t anything really special about the scoreboard of a regular video game. On the other hand, Dragon’s Lair I mean, there was so much unique about the machine. It was a unique shaped cabinet. It was a unique looking video game because it was all animated. Had a unique scoreboard, it had realistic audio. So it was a whole bunch of things that made dragonslayer crazy and an important piece of history. inside the machine, though, there was a whole nother thing going on because right now you can easily I can easily store the entire Dragon’s Lair game in my watch, right? My watch has, I think four gigabytes of memory in it. I could compress the entire laser disk of Dragon’s Lair into my watch and play it back. But back then, you know memory you know, eight megabytes was a lot of memory. So In order to display 22 minutes plus deaths and all that have this animated masterpiece, animated by Disney former Disney animator Don Bluth, probably known from secret of them and American tale and Anastasia and Thumbelina, and all these other Listen, it’s Don Bluth, you don’t really need to be introduced. But inside that was driving that thing of course it was a circuit board that had ROM images on it for controlling the moves and things like good boy, he’s almost at the top of the mountain. So inside was a LaserDisc player. Now, some of you probably haven’t seen a laser display you probably I mean, most of my audience is older, but for those of you who are new, imagine a blu ray disc that’s 12 inches in size, huge, huge platter. all shiny like a DVD or a blu ray. And I think each side holds like 58 minutes of video, so you only needed one side to hold all the video. But inside was a LaserDisc player. And frankly, these things were intended more for home use. They did eventually have more industrial strength laser displays for running things like kiosks and things that ran 812 hours a day. In the early days, as I recall, Dragon’s Lair was equipped with not the best LaserDisc player. And because the game was turned on eight to 10 hours a day. And there was constant motion, the disk was always spinning. There was always a read write head jumping all over that disk to play the attract mode. And kids playing it of course, or people playing it. Those things tended to overheat they tended to break and these things weren’t cheap. I wanted to say I want to say and I don’t have these numbers in front of me, so forgive me. I wanted to say that the unit’s themselves were about five grand for a dragon slayer arcade cabinet. It might have been a little bit more. But the LaserDisc players themselves were kicking in at about a grant or something nutty like that. So when a LaserDisc player went out, if it was over 30 days or 60 days or whatever the warranty period was from the manufacturer. The he had to replace it, you know, and while Dragon’s Lair was making money hand over fist, you know, to dunk out 800 $900,000 to replace the LaserDisc player. Damn, it’s a lot of money. Over time, as I said, they started being able to replace the LaserDisc players with something a little stronger, but these sort of things are fleeting. And while Dragon’s Lair is immortalized in history is this this incredible video game phenomenon? That wasn’t the only LaserDisc game and my favorite the follow up also animated by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, with space Ace and I’ve talked a lot about spaces I liked. I love fantasy. And I’m not as big of a sci fi fan as I am fantasy. But there was something about space, there was a lot more speech in it, there was a lot more character building in it. There were more alternate paths and anything where you transform I you know me I love transformations. One of the things I think I dislike a lot about modern superheroes is the fact that you know, in the old days transformation was half the fun, right? Wonder Woman with her spin and the incredible hall with Bill Bixby you know, turning green and tearing out of his clothes. Now it’s like two seconds, it’s just there’s Mike Mark ruffle Oh, boom, there’s the whole you know, that that much in the transformation thing. The early Iron Man movies, you know, the suitcase Iron Man suit, that was pretty badass. But all in all, I love transformations, especially when you’re transforming from a little geeky loser into a big giant starring. That’s what we all want. We’re all nerds. And we wanted to go from nerdism to being Ace, you know, this big buff guy that was banging kimberli right. So they made a conversion kit that allows you to change the marquee and change the laser discount, put some new ROMs in there. And then you could have another Dragon’s Lair esque game, but it was called spaces. And there were a whole bunch of other ones. Once. Once they became you know, once it became a big fad, there was Firefox, which is used a hybrid mode where they had real video backgrounds, but they superimposed action graphics on top of it. This goes on and on and on. We could talk all day about LaserDisc video games, but Dragon’s Lair was the first. And it really it changed things and it changed people. People still remember it fondly. Digital leisure, who seems to own the perpetual rights to the home version of Dragon’s Lair. They, they know how to market and use that cash cow to their advantage. I don’t think there’s a single product that has a screen on it that has any sort of memory, or CPU or storage that does not have a port of Dragon’s Lair on it. I mean, Gameboy Color got a dragon slayer port for crying out loud. It’s pretty damn good. Nintendo DS, you name it. Everything’s got a dragon slayer port Sega CD. Anything that could hold enough video. The Amiga, right the Commodore Amiga had an amazing version of Dragon’s Lair, came sprawled across like 12 discs that that if you ejected it while it was reading and ruin the whole thing. But anyway, so dragon slayer is immortalized they’re still making new versions of it even now, like anytime a new system comes out I guarantee Xbox One X have Dragon’s Lair on it. And Dragon’s Lair has gone from a four by three square display running on the low definition LaserDisc all the way to a full blown, you know, 10 ATP 16 by nine blu ray edition, right. So it’s it’s moved on with the times it’s it’s moved along. But I know I’m circling my way back, I promise I’m going to get back to the to the Dragon’s Lair machine itself, this replicated tabletop version. So over the years, hey, turbo, what’s up? So over the years, I have become invested in the dragon slayer property. Right? So it was a dream. So the dream began when I got a Commodore Amiga, and on the cover of Amiga world and I don’t remember the month and year, I had the magazine somewhere on the front of an Amiga magazine was Dragon’s Lair, running on an Amiga and a monitor. So there was a there was a promise, right there was this implied gift on the front of this Commodore magazine? That Dragon’s Lair, the real thing? I’m not talking about what eventually came out for the Amiga? Or what came out for the Gameboy I’m talking about the laser disc experience was going to come to the Amiga. And that’s when the dream began. Will I ever get to play Dragon’s Lair at home? Do I always have to go to the arcade and drop 50 cents a hit? Could I play it on? I mean, yeah, remember what was going on back there? Right. And we were talking like colecovision Intellivision. That was that was what was in the houses at that point at a Commodore 64 I think I didn’t even have an Amiga at that time. But I had friends that did have an Amiga. So the concept the promise, the the golden Chalice, the brass ring, right, more DRock the brass ring was being able to turn your TV on at home and play Dragon’s Lair on it. And eventually that came to pass, right? I remember Sega CDs version of Dragon’s Lair being pretty damn good. I remember Philip cdis version of Dragon’s Lair being pretty damn good, right the full motion video cartridge in that. And time moved forward and dragonslayer continued to come to the home and the portable platforms and the consoles, the computers and, and November 1990 Amiga world thank you very much mark. I always I need a reference person. I need a producer do a to send me this stuff in the middle of the shows. Absolutely amazing. That picture right. I saw that I’m like, holy shit. Dragon’s Lair is coming to the Amiga. And I always remember trying to convince my mother at the time. She’s still my mother, but at the time I was trying to convince her that the Amiga was it This was the future because she would I would always show her video game. Oh my god, I’ll get to Daphne. But I remember showing my mother video game shots, right? So I was trying to get her to buy me games for my Commodore 64. And I remember specifically legacy of the ancients, which is my favorite RPG of all time. There was a full page spread on it, and I think it was compute Gazette. And I showed it to my mom Alright so I’m not sure this this picture I mean in let listen legacy of the ancients in the Commodore 64 look freaking amazing on the page opposite of that was like a snake picture a cobra. And I can’t remember what game it was for but it wasn’t the game it was box art right? box art always looked great the game itself well, not as much. And my mom looked at me and said Why can’t the computer Why can’t the games have those graphics? And I’m like mom, you lost your mind right now you have to sit and explain to your mom. What eight bit graphics were right. But when the Amiga started coming out and I started seeing ads for the Amiga and started seeing ads for Amiga games, I took it to my mom hoping that she would bless me with an Amiga for birthday or Christmas or all the years gifts all combined into one and I would show her these graphics like defender of the crown when you look at defender of the crown. You look at it now you know what the hell but you looked at it back then that was it. I mean defender the crowd it’s never gonna get better than that. And it’s all on Amiga mom I needed to make him see you always ask me. Why can’t the graphics look like this? They look like that. Now can I have the Amiga please? So anyway, I didn’t get an Amiga obviously until a couple of years into the Navy. That’s the first time I could afford a used Amiga 500 and of course Dragon’s Lair was amongst one of the first games I got which was all hand drawn. But it looked in played like Dragon Slayer. That was the first time I said whoa, like dragon slayer could could could come to the home and be somewhat decent, right? That’s gonna happen well along the way so that that also got me into Don Bluth as an animator and that’s when I started being interested in his his films and I got interested in the backstory of who Don Bluth was his the entire story of his of leaving Disney because he was pissed off that they were losing all of these master animator techniques. Right? You know the story I’ve told it a couple of different times you know Don Bluth went to the master animators and said listen, that the the shot of the broom walking over the bridge and Fantasia that water effect that that mirroring water illusion that the that the Disney animators came up with I want to do that how do I do that? And it was lost knowledge they weren’t they weren’t preserving anything and and he he’s a real diehard champion of you know the traditional animation and, and so he left and I’m sure there was other bad blood in there. You have to listen to my two hour Don Bluth interview to get all the story from that. But anyway, so I started learning about the man I realized holy shit secret of nipp Holy shit. He’s the one who did the animation and Zanna knew I knew that I knew that. And so I kind of got this love affair of Don Bluth. It’s like, you know if I could ever meet him. If I could ever just sit down and talk to Don Bluth. What amazing would that be? I could talk to him about dragons. I can talk to him about Zanna. dogtag about secret and nim secret a name is like the most gorgeous hand drawn animation I’ve ever seen. I need to talk to Don Bluth. And so my neat and Dragon’s Lair led me to that and led me to wanting to to meet Don Bluth and interview Don Bluth and ask him questions. And that in turn made me want to do retro gaming radio You know, there was a period of time when you know we started getting more connected there were gaming shows that you could meet these people it was like you know people going to Comic Con but we were going to you know, classic Gaming Expo. Holy shit Don Bluth is going to be at the classic Gaming Expo. I could meet Don Bluth but there were a lot of heroes like Don Bluth and Paul Norman and the Doherty brothers and and all of these people that were creating what shaped my life and my childhood and my ambitions. I got into computers because of computer games and wanting to be a programmer. So So Dragon’s Lair led me down an incredible path of of retro gaming radio meeting and interviewing my heroes and Don Bluth was like the brass ring man if I if I could meet Don Bluth and Paul Norman, my two heroes Paul Norman, by the way did Forbidden Forest if you didn’t know the fuck I’m talking about. Paul Norman, like the one man show as Tech Challenge Karen’s of Kafka Forbidden Forest Forbidden Forest blew my mind. I mean, I was looking for a place to start shoving in quarters. But so Dragon’s Lair is really the catalyst for all of this right? I mean, it it made retro gaming radio come to life. And over time as as digital leisure became involved With the Dragon’s Lair franchise, I don’t know I don’t know how what their arrangement is, I’d love to sit down and talk to them. David and Elizabeth Foster, the couple that runs digital leisure at some point in time, I’d love to sit down and interview them and talk to them about what that deal is and how did they meet Don Bluth? And how is it that they you know that they got all of these rights. And over time, I developed a relationship with digital leisure, because I was honestly upset that their versions of Dragon Slayer kind of sucked ass. I mean, listen, it’s Dragon’s Lair. Hi. So I remember I’m trying to remember the very first version of Dragon’s Lair that, that I was working sort of with them a little bit on, but I think it was probably the DVD version maybe? Crap, I don’t I don’t remember. But some one of the early disk base versions of it. You know, Listen, I’ve played so much Dragon Slayer. I’m almost, I’m almost positive that with a couple of hours of practice, I can play the whole game blindfolded. Because I know all the audible cues I know all the scenes. So I know what the hell I’m doing with Dragon Slayer and and Dragon Slayer. While it seems goofy and simplex in terms of the move, what you do is a movement, right, we talked about this earlier, it’s a quicktime event, you tap up to keep the movie going, you press sword to keep the movie going. But Dragon’s Lair, being not just a visual, but an audio feast as well. Your brain starts tying move movements and move windows with audio. So I became very attuned to what we call move windows. So there’s a couple of different for those of you who may not know the inside structure of this thing. So as you’re watching the video, and you’re getting ready and you’re getting ready to do an input, there’s a period of time where a valid move is accepted. Sometimes if you do an invalid move, you die. Sometimes if you do an invalid move it buzzes at you, but we’ll have to wrap this up soon, might actually get to the actual review. Um, so there’s a timeframe when a move is valid. And sometimes during that timeframe, there are multiple moves that are valid. Sometimes during that timeframe. If you move in correctly, a buzzer sometimes if you move in correctly, you die. In some cases, alternate moves are available, but only during certain time windows. So for people who are purists, or people who know this game inside and out the complaint, blindfolded, move windows are important. Because your ability to play the game is directly tied to these patterns, these movement patterns. And so in these early days, all they cared about really was getting the game to look as good as it could, right so MPEG one or whatever it was at the time and make it somewhat playable. You know, get you from A to the Dragon’s Lair. And that was it. But I started realizing that they’re not paying attention to detail here. It looks like Dragon Slayer, but it doesn’t really play like Dragon Slayer. These scenes are an order they’re not supposed to be in or they’re supposed to be shuffled. If you die during a scene, you’re supposed to skip over and go to the next scene. There’s all of these rules sets that are built into the ROMs of Dragon’s Lair. And they weren’t adhering to them. And so what they were giving us was casual. The second everybody wants my attention. So I reached out to them and they’re kind of like, yeah, okay, we were good. Okay, yeah, we’d love your help. Can you help us out? Let me let me let me put you in touch with our developer. And so I would help the developer out and start getting move windows. And so as time moved on, I started getting more and more involved with these home ports because honestly, I wanted the best version of dragons that are possible. I want a dragon slayer with all the deaths. All the alternate moves all the accurate windows I wanted. I wanted the definitive dragon slayer edition, right? And there’s always limitations. Well, this one was written basically in Visual Basic, so you can’t do this. You can’t do that. This one’s on a DVD. So we can’t do multiple branching. We can’t do this. We can’t do that. So it got to the point to where it’s like God, are we ever gonna now. Now we’ve got Dragon’s Lair at home, but we don’t have the Dragon Slayer, right? So I got involved, and every chance that I could every time so they would I got to the point where they would send me beta copies and they’d be like, Listen, I think we got to move windows, right? So why don’t you give it a try and so I would help out. In fact, I was so involved with Dragon’s Lair and so sort of not necessarily an expert but as a big voice in the internet community. I was reached out by a team that was doing the Nintendo DS port some of you may remember we talked about it on the show I’ve had pictures of website a little bit. And there they were purists they wanted the Nintendo DS version of Dragon’s Lair to be the definitive dragon slayer every move every alternate move every all accurate windows every single scene, every single death all squeezed into a Nintendo DS cartridge. Shane, will you help us do that? And dammit, if I didn’t help them do that. I had their I had their code and I had their version of it. Playing right next to an emulated version of it. I didn’t have an arcade cabinet but right next to the emulated version I was recording videos sending them move windows saying see Listen, you should be able to move here the dragon the Dragon King, you should be able to move right all the way till the almost brains, your ass. These are all accurate moves, and you need to be able to put them in there. And so they they wanted something accurate. The people who were financing them wanted something faster and cheaper. So what ended up happening is is they got the license pulled in some other company did it. Unfortunately, the version that we had was almost done and it was the definitive dragonslayer but it never saw the light of day. It’s happens. So again, I’ve been involved with you know, the Android version. I’ve been involved with the PC remakes over and over again so when it comes to Dragon’s Lair, I may not be the world’s definitive expert but when when something new comes out and people want to know is this the definitive Dragon’s Lair is this? Does this make Shane R. Monroe happy in terms of Dragon Slayer authenticity. And let’s be honest, the only thing that does that is Daphne which is an emulator that actually emulates a LaserDisc and emulates it uses the actual ROM set, just like any other true emulation it is as close to the arcade game as humanly possible. And so I’ve interviewed the the developers of that I’ve got Daphne on the PI I’ve got definitely on my PC. If I want to play Dragon’s Lair. You know, I played it on switch. I played it everywhere. But Daphne is it I mean, Daphne is the pure emulated version. And if you’re using the app, you can actually hook it up to a LaserDisc player. It’ll actually play Daphne off the LaserDisc dragon sir. But in this case, you play with video files, but you’re you playing the video files dumped right off the LaserDisc right. So it’s as accurate as humanly possible. And so over the years that has been my definitive comparison piece. So if I’m going to compare and send digital leisure, a differential video saying listen, you screwed this scene up, we need to you need to open this window up or close this window or need to add an alternate move. here’s proof that it works. There you go. Now they’ve got this whole thing in a database somewhere, right? So I don’t have to bother them anymore. They apply this database to whatever new versions come out so they’re pretty accurate. But when you see something like a 12 inch replica of Dragon’s Lair, coming to you for 100 bucks, that is supposed to be a realistic version and authentic version dragonslayer you got to roll your eyes a little bit go Yeah, okay. Sure it is sure it is. Yeah, whatever. I’m sure I’m sure it’ll look fine, but it’s not going to be real dragonslayer so when the Kickstarter started for this replicate dragonslayer Mini cabinet version. I started watching their Kickstarter, I started looking at their videos and I realized as I was watching this and I was doing my research on their other Tempest and other cabinets, the miniature cabinets. It’s like okay, these guys get it. But how? How dedicated are they right? Tempest, centipede? Benny Dragon Slayer. Right? You can you can slap together an emulator and put the ROMs in for centipede, tie it to a couple of controls and you’ll get an accurate centipede Dragon’s Lair. Totally different scenario, right. And so once I saw that these guys, these guys were purists. And they, they continued to update, update their product. They’re constantly refining it. Listen, we want this to be the best possible experience. So we’re, you know, stretch goals, whatever we’re, we’re gonna do everything we can to make this thing Ultimate Dragon’s Lair experience, not just the greatest, tiny, tiny, retro experience for Dragon Slayer, but this is the definitive dragon slayer regardless. So I backed it. And of course, you know, with COVID, and the delays and everything else, you know, it just started hitting kickstart backers this week, right. So I got mine a bunch of my friends who order there’s got theirs. But in the end, you know, it’s been a long frickin run. And so I got it yesterday. And I knew that I had to open it, evaluate it and look at it for the first time on camera, because that’s important. You needed my first my first input on it. And so I did a whole unboxing I showed you everything I could about it. I played it long enough to sort of get an idea. Go through the menus, did all that stuff. It’s all on YouTube right now. So if you want to see it, you want to see exactly how how it turns out, then it’s up there. And I also did a another recording a direct feed video output of the unit and played it all the way through to the dragon slayer both players and also recorded the scoreboard I put my webcam up, I put my little camera up to the scoreboard. So it’s overlaid onto the video. So I can actually test and see if the scores are accurate, according to Daphne. Right. So is this the real deal? Is this it? I mean, is this the Dragon’s Lair we’ve all been waiting for. And until I mean, I’ve played it all the way through front to back several times to the Dragon Slayer. Now without getting nitpicky, and actually doing precise move windows, I’ve done all of the I’ve done all of the move windows that people tend to mess up, right, the Lizard King, the ropes, the fire, ropes, all of everything that I could possibly think of. I’ve done my works not over yet. But based on that, based on my, my preliminary work. I’m pretty sure it’s running daphney I mean, I can find out for sure, but it’s emulated. And it’s emulated. Well, the only thing that I’ve The only thing that I can definitively tell you right now, that’s that’s not what I would consider 100% accurate is the power up. The power up, of course has some sort of a boot process that shows the new new toys, logo and all that. And you get a flickering of the startup sequence, not the attract mode, but when it runs through all of the possible screens, and certain to coins and certain extra coin blah, blah, blah. If you’ve ever seen dafni boot up, it’s probably a 10 or 15 second power up sequence, right, the post power up power on startup thing so that was cut off just to be like half a second just so you can you can see a little tiny glimpse of it and then boom the attract mode starts I would like that to be optional in terms of I’d like to be able to turn that on in the menu. If I want to see it if I don’t just like on Daphne because Daphne you can skip it too. But if I wanted to see it for whatever reason, I would like to be able to turn that on. Now of course that would have additional memory storage so maybe they were looking for things to cut. I haven’t found anything cut no scenes or cut no deaths or cut. There’s no alternate moves that are cut. Everything looks to be looks to be in there. And that’s more than most home ports are. Now what about the unit itself? What about talking about the quality of this build? The thing is frickin huge is 12 inches tall. It’s durably built it’s got a light up marquee it’s got a real working scoreboard that’s crazy talk. Real working scoreboards are something very difficult to see or get in any home version. But it’s it’s perfectly replicated. And there are little details that the true star the the true Dragon’s Lair aficionados would understand. There are little tiny attentions to detail that you’re going wow, that’s crazy. And one of the little attention to detail items is the there’s a little tiny manufacturers logo on the back glass I think it’s RDI or something like that. And you look at that and you go holy hell I can’t believe they included that. They could have left that off and nobody would have been the wiser. The cabinet itself the a lot of the areas are textured, which is crazy. It looks like t molding it’s the attention to detail is nutty, and it’s a it’s a quality build. It doesn’t feel cheap or flimsy. It’s an it’s an amazing piece of art forget about even if it never turned on, right if even if you could just flip the switch and the lights came on. And the scoreboard came on in the marquee came on and the little coin doors lit up which they Do you would go wow what uh, I want to put that I want to put that somewhere I want to display that because it’s that great. But that’s but but that’s that’d be it’d be amazing if it was a nonworking cabinet the the one sixth replica of the control panel. Perfect I mean it’s perfect. The side art perfect. The cabinet shape the marquee shape everything. The attention to detail is disgustingly amazing. You can even open the coin door, which is something you won’t see in my video because I wasn’t sure I was supposed to open it or not. But you can open the coin door. The back has a drawer for the LaserDisc. Yeah, there’s no laser disc in there. But there’s a little tiny miniature replica of a LaserDisc player, and a little tiny miniature replica of the Dragon’s Lair laser disc. It’s even it’s even accurate. The labeling. It’s unbelievable. The attention to detail is crazy. This is a passion project. And there are so many there’s so many facets of the Dragon’s Lair jewel to get right. To get most of them right would be amazing. The all of them right Forget about it. And that’s what this thing did it, it appears to have them all right. So outside of just playing the game, first of all, it’s big enough to where you can play, you know, those little tiny arcade cabinets that you get to target. And they play Sega versions of the arcade game, right? Yeah, like Mortal Kombat or whatever, Pac Man. It’s always the NES version, the Sega version, it’s not the real arcade version. And it’s not even playable. This the things are so small, they’re there. They’re set top pieces, you put them up in the wall so you have a background to shoot videos on. But this is actually playable, it’s big enough and comfortable enough where you can actually play the thing and that’s something special. It also has HDMI out so you can actually plug it into a television and play it from the arcade machine if you want to. And if that wasn’t enough, it’s got USB ports on the back which you can plug a controller into. It works with an Elite controller for crying out loud an Xbox Elite controller, you plug that in you plug it into your TV you put it up on your little Media Center and you can sit and play Dragon’s Lair Now listen st this isn’t 4k High Definition All right, and that my video will show you you’ll see that it’s it’s you know it’s compressed video it’s for it’s for ADP feeling it’s Yeah, let’s it’s not the best possible experience you can play on your television but it’s fully playable and it’s amazing the the speaker quality sound coming out of the of the the cabinet itself the little cabinet is amazing. It’s it’s just it’s an amazing piece of work that they they gave it more love than they should have. And it’s it’s very apparent there is a menuing system where you can change DIP switch settings how many lives you start with including unlimited so you play it all the way through in case you happen to be a little rusty like me. But difficulty most all this sort of there’s more things for me to explore to be honest with you. But you know first run first hour with the thing. It’s unbelievable. It’s you look at and you want to own one right so if you watch my video, they’re not crap. I’m gonna have to have one of those. You know, I could look at Tempest I could look at centipede. I could look at major habit I can look at you know, Spy Hunter replique I could look at these and go that’s really cool, but I don’t have to have one. You look at this Dragon’s Lair machine lit up playing the attract mode with the mark he lit up and you’re like son of a bit you have to have one of those. What is that? 120 bucks on Sign me up. It’s mine. Have to have it and you’ll want one yeah, listen, well even if you’re not a freak like me about dragons that you’re gonna look at and go oh God, I’ve got to have that I’ve got to have that sitting on my desk. I’ve got to have that on my shelf. And every now I’m not going to reach over and flip it on and listen to that attract mode every 30 seconds at least for you know five or 10 minutes I gotta shut it back off. But it is an amazing piece of work. Again, the the shipping box right then it came in is replicated inside the shipping box. That’s something I glossed over during my video I’m going to do a follow up video and show you all these things that I missed but because the box got dinged up in shipping there’s a there’s another copy of the box inside the box. So you get a perfectly a perfect replica of Dragon’s Lair in the most amazing box by the way it’s a retail looking box it can sit on a shelf of a store and it looks like it belongs there not some weird you know you know like the new like the quest to box looks like it was done by Bob and accounting not like by somebody who actually knows how to make box art. This looks amazing. And there’s little surprises all over the place. You know the stickers that comes with and, and the little tiny game tokens that it comes with. It’s just it’s unbelievable the level of love and effort They put into this thing and it’s like man, you know you want to reward that sort of thing. It’s like I want to buy another one. Keep it sealed in the box somewhere. And it is rechargeable so it does have its own power source built in you micro USB charger so you got a million of these things laying around the house. I don’t know how long the battery life lasts but it it looks great. It’s like a 4.3 inch screen. The screen quality Listen, it’s not gonna it’s not gonna win any awards. But look, listen Dragon’s Lair. Even for ATP looks amazing on a 4.3 inch screen telling you the colors are vibrant. It’s bright. It’s four by three right originally they were talking about putting a 16 by nine screen there and the fans would batshit crazy said they can’t do that. Come on. It’s dragonslayer is four three. And so they did they they made sure that they had a four three display four by three ratio. So anyway, it’s Listen, if you’ve been waiting around to see what the Shane R. Monroe seal of approval is. Right now unless you’re me. It’s the definitive dragon slayer and it still could be the definitive dragon slayer but I just can’t say it yet because I haven’t done everything humanly possible to test it but I will. So if you really, really really want to hang out and Wait for me to come up with my final final final solution. Then I guess you could do that. But I’m telling you right now. This is it’s I’m positive. It’s running back and positive it’s emulated. It feels emulated it looks emulated it behaves emulated the the the scenes shuffle the way they’re supposed to all that stuff so I’m I’m a huge fan and and i hope they sell a gajillion of them because I hope they got to get a space out of this. That’s that’s what we’re waiting for. We’re waiting for space right All right, guys. I’m gonna get out of here. I’m sure my son’s almost down off the mountain. So I’m gonna let you guys out of here. You had a nice long show. Sorry, was all about Dragon’s Lair. But listen, what do you want? I’m all excited about something and I’m gonna talk about it. Alright guys, this is Shane R. Monroe pastor. You see radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care everybody.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
