Re:Tech From a 30-Year-Old Sears Catalog
by dhughes on Sunday September 01, 2013 @01:12PM
(#6311156)
From age 14 to 31 I worked for my uncle who had a coin-op business from what I recall the Dragon's Lair arcade game used the CED but it may have been a Video Laser Disc player I can't remember but I do know the thing was huge and never worked.
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It used a Laserdisc, the CED needle in a groove system would have probably worn out the media probably faster than the game's random access of scenes worse out the mechanics of the Pioneer players, which while industrial models didn't quite envision the extremes of games. E.g. probably more for teaching people how to repair stuff.
Wikipedia devotes quite a bit to the problems in keeping the games running: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair e.g.:
"The life of the original player's gas laser was about 650 hours; although later models had solid state lasers with an estimated life of 50,000 hours, the spindle motor typically failed long before that."
There was an NFL arcade game that used CED though http://www.cedmagic.com/featured/nfl.html