The LA itself produces whatever video and sound are on the disc, provides overlay capabilities, responds to specific commands from the PAC (play, stop, skip) and...I'm not sure it it can actually do anything else. All that stuff is built into every LD player, come to think of it. Somehow the PAC reads code from the LDROM2s/MegaLDs, but I'm not sure exactly how. That might actually just be hidden in the digital audio tracks and completely transparent to the LA itself.
The LA loads almost everything used during the game into it's digital memory and then overlays the video from that. There's a resolution difference when an LA games video is played back just as LD video compared to when played during a game since the stored digital memory outputs at a lower resolution. There's also a little digital video light on the front that indicates the digital memory is in use most of the time if you're playing an LA game where it has moving video. Generally speaking it's not actively streaming stuff off the disc, but is loading what's needed for the next 15 or so seconds into digital memory.
Two things:
1) My point of bringing up what is actually in the LA was the illustrate that while you think of the CDROM2 system as being more "true" or "normal" it was, honestly, a much larger upgrade, a bigger departure, from the standard PCE than the LA was. The LA's duties are almost totally analog. Everything important is in the PAC (including all the stuff normally built into the IFU), which is clearly a Turbografx. While the stuff in an LA certainly isn't in any other PCE accessory, its standard stuff in many many many LD players. My point: the LA basically just plays LDs. The CDROM2 systems don't just "play CDs" they do much more.
2) I'm NOT an expert on the LA or really even Laserdisc in general, but from the brief period time I've spend with the system I'm pretty sure you are misunderstanding the way it works. The digital memory used in the LA is basically the same as many (possibly most) LD players at that time. The reason its low res is because of the way interlaced video works.
I will use the POWER POWER POWER of Triad Stone to illustrate my example. Some games may work in a completely different way, I don't know, like I said, limited knowledge.
On any LD player that I've seen with digital field memory the player can only store one field at a time. This function was mainly used so that people could get still frames from CLV discs. On any player a CAV disc (30 min per side) would give a very good still frame, but CLV discs (60 min per side) would just give you a blue screen. The reason for this is that CAV discs store one frame (two fields) per lap of the disc, so to get a still pause you just keep the laser where it is and keep reading the exact same spot over and over. On a CLV disc the frames are all stored much more efficiently, end to end, so if you leave the laser parked you might get .8 frames per lap or 3.4 frames per lap. Therefore, to get a still frame the video had to be digitized and stored in memory. This was hella tech when it came out, quite expensive. There is a downside though, and that is that LD video is interlaced. Every field is only half a frame, every other line, and the digital frame buffer only grabs one field (ie: half a frame, every other line. This is why when you pause a CLV disc on any player (certainly most) you get a low res image, an inferior pause to a CAV disc.
This "crappy low res pause" is 240 lines in 8 bit color. The first player to have digital field memory was the psychotically quixotic and totally amazing
Pioneer LD-W1. I have one of these. I also have a
Pioneer CLD-99, which was a $2500 player made 2 years after the LA which contained variable noise resistance, 3D comb filter, and every other bell and whistle they could throw an an LD player. It isn't the best player made, but its up there, the last of the Elite line before they were forced to add DVD functionality into their LD players and everything went to shit. The reason I bring up all these other decks is that the crappy low res pause on CLV looks identical on the LD-W1, the Laseractive, and the CLD-99. I don't know from experience, but I'm assuming it looks the same on an HLD-X0, which is the best player ever made. Now, I do know that some LD players have more memory than others, but AFAIK this is either to increase the color depth, or to allow the 3D comb filter to work (since it needs to compare frames) or more horizontal resolution, or to help with the DNR. Every paused CLV frame is still low res though. The increase in memory from one player to another was still laughably small, like 2Mb versus 4Mb or something like that. Nothing like what it takes to store video, just a field or three.
PRO TIP: if you are just playing normal movies with your LA, for God's sake remove the PAC. The PAC, for some reason, makes it so that the digital field memory is used EVEN WITH PAUSED CAV DISCS which makes for crapy CLV-quality low res still frames. It also makes its own shitty overlays.
Now, onto LA games...
When you see the live action intro and the attract reel for Triad Stone the video appears to be very high quality, but when playing the game things get much grainier. Its in 240 lines. This isn't because the LA is queuing digital video ahead, as you suggest, but because (and IMO this is
brillient low tech innovation, IMO, very clever, the LA is only showing one field on purpose. Why not the other field? Because the other field is completely different video! There are basically two fields, two totally different video streams, and the LA is only showing one of them. This allows the video on LA games to be twice as dense, to take up only half as much space on the LD, and therefore to cut seek times (the bane of any FMV game) down by a considerable amount.
How do I know this? Remove any PAC from your LA and put Triad Stone in. Turn the green button off. The player now doesn't know that its a LA game because without the PAC the LA doesn't even know what an LA game even is. Its just an LD player. When you watch the Triad Stone disc you'll see things like the intro, perfect video, but when you get to the in-game footage you'll see an unfiltered version of what I just described, two video streams at once giving you basically unwatchable but recognizable garbage.
So, and again, I don't have much technical info on the LA, but I'm pretty sure there isn't anything like 15 seconds of video cache in an LA. In fact, there isn't even one second. There is 1/60 of a second, one field, the same as any decent LD player from that era, and even some VCRs. I'm not entirely sure that the video from the LA, digital or analog, is ever actually in the same piece of memory as the PCE/MD generated graphics. That is, I think they are mixed in a passive way, sort of like a 32X or the basic Play/Pause/Stop on screen display on all but the earliest LD players. There was very little, if any, new tech in a Laseractive. You could built the entire thing from whatever shit (a lot of it) they had laying around at Pioneer/Sega/NEC.
In short, while I might be missing something, I'm pretty sure that the LA doesn't do anything that any other LD player did other than have a PAC-sized hole in the front giving transport control and AV muxing capability to whatever you could put in there. It really just plays LDs, as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure the only reason why the digital field memory system is used at all is for the occasional still frame and the strategic de-interlacing, maybe for the overlays....I think that's all it CAN do.
CLARIFICATION:
Listen, the reason I typed all this isn't because I love the LA and want people to start hoarding LA junk with their stupid US collections. Its bad enough they had to pay $100 for a Darkwing Duck (aka "Cockwing f*ck" by the people that spent money on it) they don't need the LA burden. However, it seems, DragonmasterDan, that no matter what sort of Rube Goldbergian fortress of bullshit you build to define what is "standard" or "complete"...I'm just not buying it. You clearly just think the LA is...weird and stupid. And I agree, it IS weird and stupid (also, even for something weird and stupid, they could have done a better job) but that's it. There is no reason to exclude it from any complete collection of licensed US games unless you just think its not in the spirit of what you define TG-16 to be, and that's just illogical and dishonest and far too personal. It is this logical and anti-human incongruity that causes me to hammer home my point. I don't care what you advocate collecting, but here you are advocating that people basically stop thinking when they encounter something they aren't comfortable with, and that is a much bigger issue than games. The LA simply IS a TG-16, and the NEC games for the LA simply ARE TG-16 games. You can't make it not so just because you don't want it to be so.
Free yourself from the need for hard definitions and maybe you'll realize that collecting by region or going for "complete" anything is just dumb and self destructive to begin with. If people only bought the games they actually liked they'd be happier people with a much higher percentage of stuff worth owning and spending time with.
Also: I'd like to ban anyone who says "SHMUP". I'd also like to give them a hot foot and poor sugar in their gas tank, but the ethical thing would probably just ban them.
