Hello, patrons of this patron-only post.
In The Pirates of Penzance, there's a scene where all the pirates are trying to sneak into Major-General Stanley's manor in the middle of the night, so they sing a song about being quiet, but since this is a comedy, they sing loud enough to rattle the windows across the street from the theater.
And what do they sing? "Let's vary piracy, with a little burglary!" You know, normally we do this one thing, but tonight we're mixing it up a little.
I've orphan thought that Gilbert and Sullivan would probably roll their eyes a little whenever they hear the stealing of software referred to as "piracy," because really, it's got nothing to do with overtaking ships on the high seas.
Anyhow, here's some stolen shit.
If you want to play with DirkSimple but don't have a copy of the Dragon's Lair footage? I got you covered. Here are builds for various platforms, with the Ogg Theora file included. It's about 340 megabytes download, total, per download. Just download, unzip, and double-click the executable and it should work.
ALL DOWNLOADS ARE BEHIND A LOGIN. THE USERNAME IS dirksimple AND THE PASSWORD IS borf. "Commander Borf" is the big bad in Space Ace.
These are just the standalone apps, not the libretro core. If you need a different config or want to mess with RetroArch, build from source code, please.
If you want the movie file and don't need the prebuilt executable, that's here.
If you don't want to install anything, there's even an emscripten build you can play in a web browser! It needs a keyboard or game controller, so you probably can't play it on a phone at the moment.
On your desktop, click here for that.
As one last bonus, there's some dude that pushed all the laserdisc games he could through some AI upscaling thing to turn them into crisp 4K videos, and I took the time to download all 60 gigabytes of it from mega.nz, and convert just the Dragon's Lair bits to Ogg Theora, as a drop-in replacement. It's 3.5 gigabytes, and I think the person that did the upscaling messed up the colors a little, but if you want something less blurry, here it is.
Note that the libretro core converts each frame to RGB colors on the CPU, and then passes it around as pixel buffers in RAM, instead of just passing the decoded YUV data directly through to be processed in a shader...so unless you have beefy hardware, you might want to not use the 4K video with RetroArch, as it might not keep up. The standalone app doesn't have this problem (but I'd probably still not try it on a Raspberry Pi).
Lastly, if you want a "legal" copy of this footage, go find a DVD copy of Dragon's Lair from Digital Leisure, and use it with DaphneLoader. They have an arrangement with Digital Leisure where it will check the disc and then extract the video for use with Daphne or whatever. Beyond also allowing this tool to exist without legal trouble, Digital Leisure has said publicly they don't care if you use Daphne (etc) with their data, as long as you bought a disc from them. So if you find your conscience is bothered, that's the solution.