Dragons Lair on the Amiga - How a laserdisc game fit onto 6 floppy disks | MVG

[@BurritoKingdom]

Randy Linden, one of the greatest programmers of the 80s and 90s.

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

We salute you Mr. Lindon♥️

[@GetLostGames1]

The man is a genius!

[@carn9507]

Definitely. Millions of coders out there, many great, but you gotta pretty damn awesome and top-tier to do things others thought near-impossible and Linden proved he was that multiple times. :O

[@yellohammer8571]

Don Bluth...

[@BurritoKingdom]

@@yellohammer8571 Don Bluth is one of the greatest animators of all time??? That is for certain but this video is about the port from an Arcade Laser Disc system to an Amiga with 6 floppy disk. Whatever Mr. Linden did was a miracle.

[@franzusgutlus54]

Ah, the 80s...a time where a 17 year old could walk into the Arcades and ask for a laser disk, then the owner helps him get one from the company...also the time where a 17 year old can contact a company working on a next gen video digitizer and gets a prototype of it...different times...

[@andy5178]

You're absolutely right. Nowadays you might send a brilliant résumé along with your idea and not even be given as much as a formal reply. The web gives a fair chance to (almost) everybody, but companies have gotten much, much worse than they used to be. I'm sure there are several people as brilliant as Linden out there who will just never get a chance to prove their worth.

[@spectreman2532]

@@andy5178 You didn''t catch his sarcasm.

[@franzusgutlus54]

@@spectreman2532 there was none from my side.

[@stereozero396]

@@andy5178 A big reason is that, companies use Hiring Managers to pick their employees. And what ends up happening, is they only end up looking for the perfect unicorn employee, with the most prestigious College degree and a impressive CV.

[@rodmunch69]

If you presented yourself really well, and they knew you were a geek, and trustworthy, they'd do that. I still think you'd find plenty of people today that would do that for kids who give off that same vibe.

[@xadek821]

Seems insane to me that a 17 year old could achieve all that. Not only programing, but the many business decision he had to make aswell. That man must have been on another different level than the rest, what a legend

[@Optim121]

For real, some people are just born into greatness.

[@stgigamovement]

I was 17 when I wrote BWTC32Key, my file compression program after 4 years of effort

[@craigix]

Well since he was buying arcade machines and flying around the country I suspect he came from serious money.

[@chunye215]

@@craigix but even then... Like, having that mindset with 17, let alone programming skills. I started programming at 10 and with 17 my programs were still mostly dumb win32 spaghetti code, and I had no idea on how I'd ever approach a serious project, or any sense of how to turn anything I do into business....

[@mattpierce5009]

Different era. We don't make ourselves like we used to

[@BradiKal61]

My friend spent WEEKS watching other people play Dragons Lair and got all the moves down so well that the first time he put a quarter in he finished the game

[@MKR3238]

Randy Linden is up there with the likes of John Carmack, incredible genius

[@JJLCFC]

Galahad is also up there.

[@FrameRater]

Would be cool to see an analysis of how the Gameboy Color version was made, it's very impressive.

[@emmettturner9452]

That didn’t happen until ROM sizes were much larger.

[@ModernVintageGamer]

its an impressive port, ill cover it at some point im sure

[@emmettturner9452]

@@ModernVintageGamer I agree that it is impressive to fit into a 4MB (32mbit) cartridge but it came out during the era of the Game Boy Advance when they could shove two whole feature-length movies into a GBA Video cartridge. It just wasn’t going to make a big splash in the era of DVD and 64MB+ cartridges. Heck, they literally already had Dragon’s Lair for DVD players by that point… with a big fat “PlayStation 2 Compatible!” sticker on the shrink wrap! While Game Boy games in 1989 were only kilobytes the beauty of the Amiga version’s extra capacity and streaming tricks were that it made the experience more rich/impressive than even contemporary multi-disk games.

[@shalpp]

​@@ModernVintageGamer honestly what's impressive is how it's been redrawn with a good bit of detail considering the resolution Reminds me of how the sonic cd opening/endings had to be redrawn for the original megacd version

[@thebasketballhistorian3291]

@@emmettturner9452 What was impressive about the GBA port was that they actually re-drew all the animation and backgrounds to fit the GBA's screen resolution and color palette. It wasn't like the Shrek GBA movie (or other GBA video carts) where they just simply re-encoded it to a lower video quality.

[@luxdico]

dragon's lair and space ace, just watchin' those arcade games was like lookin' into the future. I do remember the buzz on the amiga. thx 4 your video.

[@ridiculous_gaming]

What a massive disk swapping experience, but I relentlessly played this on my Amiga 500.

[@SIRLAWRENCE79]

and hard as hell...

[@umrasangus]

you're the goat of retro gaming youtube, my man. And Randy possibly the goat of code, the man is a living legend.

[@PublicinSpace]

This took me back to my days at living in Texas. When I was a kid, Luther Jones Elementary School (Corpus Christi, TX) had this game on their Amiga computer. At the time I was four years old and I was complete rubbish (lol). Thank you for this video... it was a trip down memory lane I needed. Best, Patricio

[@LethalBubbles]

cleaning up all that digitizer dithering by hand for every single frame sounds like a monumentous task, jeez. They did a good job too.

[@witness1013]

I never understood if I was actually playing Dragons Lair, or just watching a cartoon, but it didn't stop me from dropping a bunch of quarters.

[@BearfootBob]

that game ate quarters like no other

[@yellowblanka6058]

You were "playing" a glorified "choose your own adventure" book.

[@sirmi9868]

Dood i never pass the entrance gate

[@billlyons7024]

@@yellowblanka6058 Yeah this barely qualifies as a game. But it sure looked great in an arcade cabinet.

[@Kalvinjj]

A different form of visual novel if I may call it that, really only Laserdisc could do it, if not done on the Amiga's art style.

[@Retro_Royal]

The Amiga scene ´89 was something special

[@NavajoNinja]

Its not the content. Its the way You tell the story. Awesome. Then again, You know exactly what subjects would make a compelling story. Well done.

[@JSmith-nu4bl]

This guy is the real deal, not a crappy journalist but a top dev and ex hacker

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

BLEEM! changed my life. I played Silent Hill on my PC at nights when I was 17 and I didn't have a Playstation. I have fond memories of that time!

[@Alien_Bob]

I find pretty much everything even tangentially related to laserdisc to just be utterly fascinating

[@th3cub350]

Liden is really one of a kind genius programmer, so many impossible ports and incredible programs under his belt, this is beyong amazing. Thanks for this retrospective MVG

[@TheRealDealDominic]

He did this at age 17? I am blown away!

[@psaunder1975]

Yeah insane must have popped out of the uterus and started coding.. 😁

[@doom5895]

I'm 19 and I'm jealous I can barely make a decent html page

[@natecw4164]

Yeah I was proud to know HTLM and Basic at 17 but I did nothing with it. Kudos to this kid for not wasting his teens binge drinking.

[@nomadic_shadow]

Randy linden is a fucking champ. I've been getting into programming and he's an inspiration to me.

[@buckeyechad1]

From someone who played DL in the arcade the first week it was out. And also, a huge pirate on C-64 & Amiga...that was absolutely fascinating. Thanks

[@jamezxh]

Lol pirate 🏴‍☠️ arrghhh!!!

[@TN_AU]

Yep, I had the pirated version of this game on my Amiga 1000 back in the 90's. I remember the ram expansion costed an arm and a leg here in Australia. Had heaps of fond memories of my A1000, I still have it tucked away somewhere.

[@RonnieBarzel]

You summed it up pretty accurately: This is wizardry! Maybe it’s the early hour, but the Amiga digitized animation reminds me of Dr. Katz.

[@RealziesCuts]

We had a neighbor on our street that had a laser disk player, It was wild the disks are huge

[@Bhavyo]

The Amiga port was the reason i wanted an amiga. I first saw Dragons Lair in an arcade in italy when we were on holidy. I was about 8, 9 years old and Dragons Lair totally blew me away. There was nothing comparable on the market, the graphics was lightyears ahead of anything else. To play the game was frustrating though. It was a unfair game, cause it was impossible to know many times what you actually should do. So it was also very expensive to play cause you died often and quick in this game. The game had a very special atmosphere though. The knight, think his name was Dirk, with all his hilarious facial expressions, the sound and so on. It was all pretty well put together.

[@FawadBilgrami]

Man I love the intro music! No mistakes were made there 😂

[@OperationPhantom]

Mainly remember the bad reviews and complaints about the hefty price tag. But I never really realized that there's a really impressive story and proper genius programming behind it all! There followed two more sequels and the two Space Ace games, so, yes, somebody must've been buying them!

[@bitdigital8052]

MVG always got something different to keep me entertained. Dragon's Lair was one of those games man!

[@antzpantz]

Absolutely FASCINATING!!! I had no idea this port existed and the amazing copy protection around it!

[@mash2481]

Blew my mind when I first seen it in the arcade. Played the hell out of it!

[@Reapergrim-kv2ps]

Another great Video, Dragons Lair was a Groundbreaking game back in the day and I could not believe there was a good version on the amiga.

[@liaml1694]

Before I even watch the video. I was literally JUST talking about Dragon's Lair to my mum a few hours ago which is a game I didn't even know about until yesterday and than now I've just hopped onto KZbin, I have 1 single notification and it's that MVG uploaded a video about Dragon's Lair! What even are these chances lmao!

[@MrMario2011]

Randy was doing that all at 17?! That man is a machine.

[@cristobalc5425]

Great nostalgia vid as usual. Really loved the Star Wars Hot Seat moving cabinet that helped paved the way for other flight arcade games like Afterburner.

[@maxalbe]

thanks for telling us such an amazing story. DL is a beautiful work of art still today.

[@ET_Videos]

TRON was my favorite arcade game from those days!!

I love when you uncover such stories. I've never thought that this game was such a technical accomplishment...

[@MortenSlottHansen]

wow - waited a whole lifetime to get the details for this one. Remember how this was a released on 8 disks back in the days and stories about the crazy "slow drive thing" was circulating - but no one really understod anything back then. Amazing insight - love it !

[@Hz-432Hz]

OMG I'd forgotten all about this game and I used to love playing it. Wow man, thanks for the trip down memory lane. Now I'm thinking about lots of other games I used to love playing on various ZX Spectrums. Happy contented smile at how much nicer and simpler life was back then.

[@iVTECInside]

Cool that you were able to talk to someone from the Fairlight group.

[@pcjohn0308]

Great video. Brings back fond memories of my Amiga days. I was a huge DL fan and this was the closest I had to playing it. Back in the arcade days I brought my Betamax into work and recorded the entire Space Ace laserdisc right off the machine. We didn't have DL at the time so I didn't get a copy of that.

[@torsteinraaby]

Thank you for this. I had a rough day today and this is soothing. I'm sure many others turn to content like this for comfort. Thank you.

[@ModernVintageGamer]

mean's a lot, thank you. I hope tomorrow is better for you

[@cubeflinger]

Dragon's lair on the nes honestly blows my expectations away but I still have no idea how you fit so much animation on a small bunch of discs. Mad.

[@JazzMartian]

I remember seeing the Amiga port of Dragon's Lair at computer/video game outlets like Electronic's Boutique, and being completely amazed! I had never seen graphics that advanced outside of the arcade before.

[@joseluki]

Whoever was around when Bleem came out know what a wizard this guy was. I went from playing Mega Drive games on my pentium PC to emulate full PSX games in less than a year, at the same time the PSX was being sold.

[@chumba421]

Doubt we'll ever see current gen console emulation that works that well ever again, once in a lifetime talent there

[@gamagama69]

@@chumba421 yuzu and ryujinx are available rn and have been for the last few years

[@stevethepocket]

@@chumba421 Current-gen consoles literally are just cheap desktop PCs, so the only thing stopping them from being emulated day one is obfuscation.

[@FamilyTeamGaming]

@@chumba421 CEMU was a pretty great emulator for the Wii U that came out pretty early into the scene. Pretty surprising too considering how unpopular the console was, as well

[@edgarfriendly4731]

Ultrahle was pretty impressive at the time too.

[@albemanc]

Amazing reportage, thank so much

[@MikeDest]

Randy Linden, John Carmack, Ken Silverman, and Justin Frankel are my boys.

[@FabledGentleman]

I remember when i bought this game, after being recommended to do so by my cousin who said he had never seen or played anything quite like it. And i also remember he told me that this game should not be possible, he said something like it being a marvel of design and engineering. Therefor, not just because the game itself looked good and was fun, it was like owning something truly unique, something extraordinary 😁

[@aleksazunjic9672]

And then in reality it was just glorified cartoon :D

[@chefjeff1366]

love getting Randy AND Galahad's perspectives on this - makes for a great telling of this story, indeed!

[@thebrimmreaper7488]

I actually worked on this Amiga port. Randy Linden was a good friend of mine in high school. I was one of the people he hired to clean up the digitized frames of animation. I specifically worked on foregrounds. We were limited to eight colours as the background artists got the other eight. Obviously I had to change some colours here and there to work in that limited colour palette.

[@Cmdr_Rhialto]

I owned, (and finished) Space Ace on the Amiga back in the day. I loved it. Now i have an arcade cab with several laserdisc games on it, i still like them because they look and sound spectaculaire.

[@bozimmerman]

What a cool subject, and story. Packing bits by slowing the drive on writes -- ingenious!

[@RH-xm5uk]

Brilliant story. Respect for your research. Was a pleasure to watch.

[@Sonicstillpoint83]

This was not only a captivating story, but incredibly inspirational.

[@LotoTheHero]

Such a brilliant programmer. I really love these detailed "impossible port" videos. Please keep them coming!

[@BMR86]

You see, this is an example of things I wouldn't care to learn for myself (that is of course if I had a vested interest in this game or the amiga), but since MVG puts out a very comprehensive video on it I'm actually learning something new about the gaming industry in the 80s, which is f*cking cool! Thank you sir!

[@brianhoward7277]

I remember playing video games on the computer with half a dozen or so floppy discs for each game. Simpler times

[@videogameobsession]

Rotoscoping! The same magic that was used on Capcom's Game Boy Color port. It's equally as amazing. Maybe more so. Worth checking out for sure.

[@paultucker3143]

Thanks for the insight. The first computer I bought with my own money here in the States was a used A500 with 1mb trapdoor and Dragon’s Lair among the software.

[@SS-hz4jo]

This is a great video! Thank you. I learned a lot of how my childhood was made.

[@kloroformd]

I hope many viewers of this video have either seen Star Wars arcade and Dragon's Lair in person. Especially Star Wars... it's stunning on a vector CRT.

[@spacechannelfiver]

It's also an actual game.

[@HybridAngelZero]

I had never heard of this port, and all I can say is WOW!

[@alpaykasal2902]

I was terrible at this game, but I loved showing off my Amiga with it. It was an incredible feat... I didn't know about that DMA trick on the drive, crazy! Thank you for this vid

[@notation254]

Fascinating stuff!

[@s.r.hadden525]

It was amazing for the time. I still remember the drum beat during the loading screen. The nintendo ds lite has an excellent IMO port If your a dragons lairs fan make sure you pick it up, it is amazing they captured the laserdisc version on a small cart.

[@GrayBlood1331]

How funny, I was thinking that the guy who did the SNES doom port could probably pull something like this off. And then bam!, my intuition was right. So I just checked out the doom snes video again and you talked about him doing this dragon lair port and I guess it was in my subconscious somewhere lol

[@deeiks12]

Stories like this are the most interesting IMO. Well done video, and well done programming by Randy. Pure awesomeness.

[@ComicConScott]

This was fascinating. Thank you!

[@pnvgordinho]

Randy Linden sounds like a person that should be doing games for the Amiga, today.

I bought Escape from Singe's Castle back in 1991 on PC for the equivalent of 60€, that in todays money would be a lot of more. It run perfectly in a 286 at 12 MHz with VGA, and for the time, it was very impressive. I finished it in a weekened, but played it a lot of times only to watch the entire movie that last 5 minutes. Great video, as usual.

[@alex73630]

With all those stories and contacts, I'm pretty sure that you could make some incredible podcasts talking about those game programming challenges and miracles! I'd guess that a ton of smaller tricks or even anecdotes aren't worth a full video by themselves, but an actual podcast or long format "interview" talking more about those developers experiences would be a killer concept! Much like the WAN Show concept from LinusTechTips, where Linus can use tech news to talk about his past and present experiences and his knowledge. I'm probably not the first one to talk about this but I do wanted to share my thoughts on this if it can help make even greater content down the line. Thanks again for all your work!

[@ParsnipCelery]

Great video. I was a bit too young for the Amiga but I always loved Dragon's Lair through the years growing up. Wow.

[@hhectorlector]

Watched this with my dad. Another excellent documentary. Great work!

[@laserdiscphan]

I had forgotten that I had seen a commercial for the Amiga back in the day featuring Dragon's Lair gameplay. It was so long ago and I had heard nothing else about DL on the Amiga since then, that I kind of concluded that I dreamt it up! Thanks for letting me know I'm not crazy!

[@patfer1189]

What I remember of Dragon's Lair arcade when I was a kid is that I never knew what exactly I had to do, but no matter the frustration I would try again right away again and later whenever I ran into the game again. And the same with other Laserdisc games such as Space Ace, Cobra Command, or Road Blaster.

[@S.Y.S.64738]

What I remember most about Dragons Lair is the input lag on the C64 and Amiga version. The game was a pain to play. Not that it mattered that much... It was revolutionary to be able to play this at home and I still enjoyed every frustrating second of it.

[@danielzen]

I remember buying a Matrox hard drive controller, a 20Mb hard drive and creating a partition specified to allow copying the 6 floppies onto the hard drive so that I could play the game directly off the hard drive of my brand new Amiga 2000. I still have that machine. Now I wonder if the game is still on it? Thanks for the video. It brought back memories.

[@tartgreenapple]

I bought the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair when it first came out. The load times were longer than the actual game sequences, but it was still remarkable. Plus the copy protection was genius, no cracking program worked (i tried, haha). I loved DL and I upgraded my Amiga 500 to 1MB just to play this awesome game!! Thanks for the memories!!

[@carlolalattacosterbosa5821]

this is the kind of videos i like the most! and most of all, Linden was my hero back when i was a kid (... a nerd kid) !

[@Chilliconcarnage]

Such pioneers these guys! It takes me back to the copy protection of "Leander" on the Amiga which I think was one of traveller's tales' first games. Really creative and sneaky protection.

[@redpheonix1000]

The founder of Traveler's Tales actually has a channel here on youtube where he explained how the copy protection of their games worked, and I think he made a video for Leander specifically, too! It's GameHut, if you want to look it that up :)

[@Chilliconcarnage]

@@redpheonix1000 thanks I have seen it!

[@perryuploads776]

So cool! He basically adopted the same technology as VHS tapes. You had SP (standard Play) and LP (long play). With LP the VHS tape writes and reads at a slower rate thus adding more Audio/Video on tape. He was at a good time to use the digitizer that came out. He only needed to write a engine to play frames and add gameplay to it. This guy is awesome!

[@haircafekevin]

Holy crap that is impressive!

[@hersnab]

Love these videos. Completely in awe of the ingenuity. Thanks for the presentation, MVG, really enjoyed this one :-)

[@Dazlidorne]

I played arcade games all through the 80's. They were not in decline. We did have the home video game crash after Atari, but the arcades were still very popular.

[@Obscusion2]

I never had an Amiga as a kid, so my first experience with Dragon's Lair was the CD-ROM version for DOS (also by ReadySoft, the precursor to Digital Leisure), but there's no doubt that this Amiga port is a true "miracle port". Absolutely amazing work done by Randy Linden, & my mind is just blown by how he did this at just 17.

[@andrewradford3953]

Thanks. Had an amazing time in Canberra in the late 90s. Had our own midi plug in we were selling. Still have them.

[@AmstradExin]

I remember cracking Thexder 2 on the PC 8801. To make a copy-able copy, it took hours because the disks had different sector sizes, track lengths per track on many disks. There was no other protection I think. I had to copy the raw data into the standard floppy format with a disk monitor and patch the loader with the same tool. Then you could copy the disks with any backup tool.

[@Zan_Jayna]

Great game, thanks

[@ChrisSkitch]

While I had heard much of this story previously the part at the end about the A1000 blew my mind!!

[@SerpentLightDrums]

Love this content, thankful to have lived my childhood in this golden era. The game itself was a pointless adventure* take a left, take a right, experience. Big Props to the North Star Fairlight Union.

[@CinemaStormz]

This is really awesome keep up the good work!

[@jadelor]

Love this. Thank you for the post-mortem!

[@TravisStamper]

Thanks for the video, always appreciate the information

[@friendlyninja5048]

This series is so neat! The resourcefulness of these developers to compress and optimize ambitious titles like Dragon's Lair onto such comparatively limited hardware is really interesting. It's fun to imagine what these developers must have been thinking at the time, in terms of what could be sacrificed and how to best preserve the original experience.

[@retropuffer2986]

Outstanding video. Exactly the type of content that makes your channel unique! Great work MVG.

[@ThomaniacsRetrogamingZone]

That was really interesting!

[@markholle3450]

Pretty phenomenal to see this on floppies. Linden's abilities have got to be admired.

[@fangerdanga]

Great video, I still remember buying this for my Amiga 500 at the time. I even tried to get my dad to buy an arcade mahine for me but those machines cost a small fortune in the 80's. I still play the game an occasion as I have the Series X version of Dragons Lair.

[@Midwinter2]

Okay, I was alive when all this happened, so here's some historical context. When Dragon's Lair first appeared in the arcades in 1983/1984, yes, it was spectacular - but we very quickly realised that gameplay was almost non-existent. You'd play it once - maybe twice - and then never again. It was terrible value for money. There were far better games in the arcades. We had far better games on our 8-bit computers at home. For the same reason, I never bought the Amiga version when it came out. Essentially, it was just a barely-interactive animation demo. There were tons of animation demos on the Amiga. I didn't know anyone who bought Dragon's Lair for their Amiga. The game that achieved what Dragon's Lair failed to do - i.e. allow you to meaningfully interact with an animated movie - was Another World. That game got the formula right. Bravo to the maker of this video - it's highly informative and interesting. My only (slight) criticism is that I would have liked to hear more about the techniques used to create the Amiga version. For example, they appear to have reduced the on-screen palette to 16 colours to save memory - is that right? Also, they took out all camera movements. And were the animated characters done as bobs (blitter objects) or was there a whole-screen animation player in effect, with compression routines to just store the parts of the image that change from frame to frame etc...? I'd love to know those details...

[@Sypaka]

This mad man just streamed the Laserdisc to his Amiga. Today, this would be the equivalent to capture every frame of a BluRay with a static Gameboy Camera.

[@4g1vn]

As a kid with an A1000, this game was a technical marvel and I never understood how they did it. It was pure magic to me until now.