Home Page Forums MAME MAME Hasbro "Video Now" interesting for MESS?

maybe some of you know the "Hasbro - Video Now" movie player... it's a portable movie player with a 3" built-in screen. the interesting thing about this player is the video-codec it's using.
Video's could be bought on special cd's (which are smaller than normal cdr's) and the video's are stored as audio-tracks. you can rip them as WAV-files.

a guy already figured out the structure of this video-codec and even provided a filter for using with VirtualDub, so you could convert your own video's into this audiotracks and watch them on the "Video Now" (you have to modify the hardware, so you can put normal cdr's into it)


some informations about the video-structure and even the filter for VirtualDub can be found here:

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/123262-converting-video-formats-%28For-Hasbro-s-VideoNow%29-I-know-the/page17

and here:
http://www.videotechnology.com/videonow/

a video of this system can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J--JuLkHIc

if anyone is interested in maybe adding this to MESS, i can provide scans of the internal pcb of the player and i have also a couple of original "Video Now"-Discs here..

i know this is not really an emulation-thing, as it's only a movie-player...but it's worth to preserve it...

video-quality is something like those GBA-Video's...

It's possibly interesting. Go ahead and post the scans of the PCB and we'll figure out *how* interesting

here are some scans:

PCB_Back:
http://abload.de/img/pcb_back8qetc.jpg

PCB_Front:
http://abload.de/img/pcb_frontpod2a.jpg

Sample-Disc Front:
http://abload.de/img/vncd_frontf2irf.jpg

Sample-Disc Back:
http://abload.de/img/vncd_backicc4g.jpg


Sample-Disc WAV-Files (210mb):
http://www.sendspace.com/file/x3h8zq

every Track is an Video-Clip...except 1st and last Track, these are only needed for the Video-Now to recognice that it's an Video Now Disc.
This Sample-Disc was included with every Video-Now and contained some trailers of available series for this console and some full episodes of "SpongeBob" and other series...
the wav-files got ripped of the cd and i burned them on an normal cd, they play fine on my VideoNow player...

got now over 14 discs for this video-player...all are dumped.

but as no one replied, looks like nobody is interested in this system...

There's nothing visible in the PCB pictures that gives any confidence that it can be emulated, unfortunately. I doubt it's hard-wired logic, but I'm just not seeing any kind of MCU or RAM/ROM or anything.

there has to be some rom-data inside the gigastorage chip i think, as if you turn on the VideoNow without a CD inside, you get a video of an disc on the screen (loading-screen)...

but i think the more interesting part here is the decoding of the videos, which would be needed to get implemented.

Incorrect. It probably does the decoding at least partially in software, and I would rightfully be thrown off the team if I submitted drivers that just ran disc images through HLE codecs.

Err.....i know that this thread is pretty old but just in case anyone would be interested, i have dumped the three games (Scooby-Doo, Teen Titans and The Batman) and also a PVD of Winx Club that has a mini game on it. Someone else made a dump of Blue Clue's - Puppets and it is archived with my dumps.

Plus i have made copies of the Media Wizard and the VCamNow/Media Wizard cd's so it might help someone to understand the wav/video format. Oh and there's a lot of game systems manuals scanned.

To access the VideoNow archive, go here: https://archive.org/details/videonow

The original dump of Blue clue's: https://archive.org/details/VideoNowJr.BluesCluesPuppetsBC5

And two other dumps here:
https://archive.org/details/492581503520

https://archive.org/details/video-now-color-la-parodia-la-parodia-1

Oh and almost forgot, there's a zip files called "VideoNow - Tools" that i gathered over the years on the net, hopefully this and the rest will be helpful to emulate
the VideoNow (and maybe a dev kit (?)).

Have fun folks!

Thanks Sly. Didn't know this thing played games, apparently there's a bit more to it. Unfortunately I'm still not sure what that is from the PCB photos, we might have to send one to Sean Riddle eventually.

we have a big collection of these discs already done for redump.org! Including "Black&White"-discs / Color-Discs and the Batman-Game.
btw. the cd-dumping tool got the "Video Now" discs specially added, as these need some more attention for "correct" dumps! Dumping it the "normal" way get the offsets wrong!

The Games are basically also "only" Video's, where you can interact, which part will played next.