Daphne: the First Ever Multiple Arcade Laserdisc Emulator

Daphne, the First Ever Multiple Arcade Laserdisc Emulator is a program that lets one play the original versions of many laserdisc arcade games on one's PC.

The official website for Daphne is http://www.daphne-emu.com.

As development for Daphne has stopped, this repository is intended as something of a continuation until the author decides to do something official.

Compiling Daphne on Linux

These instructions will work to get Daphne built on a machine using an amd64 processor. I'm not sure anymore how to get Daphne compiled for 32-bit Linux.

cd src/vldp2
./configure --disable-accel-detect
make -f Makefile.linux_x64
cd ../game/singe
make -f Makefile.linux_x64
cd ../..
ln -s Makefile.vars.linux_x64 Makefile.vars
make
cd ..
mkdir -p ~/.daphne
cp -a pics sound ~/.daphne/

Missing libraries?

Cutting and pasting the following in a Debian GNU/Linux system (or derivative), will install all prerequisite development libraries.

sudo apt install libsdl-dev libglew-dev libvorbis-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev

Laserdisc images and ROMs

The laserdisc and game ROMs necessary to play a game are not included here. You'll need to buy those from Digital Leisure and copy them into ~/.daphne/vldp_dl/ and ~/.daphne/roms, respectively.

If you do not install them, you'll get an error message like:

ROM dl_f2_u1.bin couldn't be found in roms/lair/, or in ./roms/lair.zip

SINGE based game files

Game data using the singe plugin should be copied into ~/.daphne/singe/ within a sub-diretory name matching the game title.

The primary .singe and .txt framefiles should also match this naming convention within the game sub-directory.

~/.daphne/singe/maddog/maddog.singe
~/.daphne/singe/maddog/maddog.txt

Running Daphne or SINGE

This version of daphne comes with simple command line frontends:

./run.sh lair
./singe.sh maddog

SINGE games may utilise mouse control.

For a list of all possible keys, please see the daphne wiki.

Why a new frontend?

Daphne is highly dependent on a front-end for ease of use. Unfortunately the standard front-end is closed-source. I've been working off and on to create a new graphical front-end. In the meantime, I've provided a shell script that works for most of the games: run.sh. It looks for stuff in $HOME/.daphne. Footage and audio for Space Ace, Dragon's Lair 1 and 2, and Thayer's Quest are found in $HOME/.daphne/vldp_dl. The others are found in $HOME/.daphne/vldp. This script takes care of those differences. The reason for this weirdness is how the old front end set things up. It would download the footage and audio for those games if you inserted a DVD of the same title and store it in vldp_dl/. Other stuff it downloaded went into vldp/.