ArcadeCab

Dragon's Lair

This page will describe how I got Dragon's Lair to work on my Windows 7 64-bit PC.  It used to work on my old AMD 1600 PC from 2002, but a newer OS coupled with the 64 bits meant Dragon's Lair did not work when I set the new machine up.  That just wasn't good for a DL lover like myself.  Sorry, these instructions are for Windows machines only.

1) The first step was to head over to the Daphne site and download the latest version.  This new version contains the code fixes to handle 64 bit OSes.

2) Create a new folder, Daphne, on C:\.

3) Unzip the daphne download from step one into this new folder, C:\Daphne\.

4) The next step is you'll need the framefiles for Dragon's Lair as well as the laserdisc image files.  The frame files are zipped here.  Download the zip file.  Unzip it under C:\Daphne so you end up with C:\Daphne\framefile\.

5) Now you'll need the laserdisc images.  They are here.  Once downloaded, unzip them to a folder named c:\Daphne\DLCDROM\.

6) I created a batch file that starts Dragon's Lair.  This assumes all folder locations are as described in the above process.  It is one line: "C:\Daphne\daphne.exe lair vldp -framefile C:\Daphne\framefile\dlcdrom.TXT -fullscreen".  It can be downloaded from here.  Just slap it on your desktop as a shortcut.

7) Now you should be good to run the batch file and enjoy Dragon's Lair.

1/2/2017 Update- You might also benefit from the roms. They are here.

1/19/2017 Update- I have now made available the entire Daphne folder from my machine to see if that makes life easier to people just wanting to get Dragon's Lair working with the minimum amount of fuss. Just create the folder named 'Daphne' on C:\, and unzip the contents of the zip file to it. The zip is here: here.

6/21/2020 Update- A couple people have benefitted from having the three original discs available: Disc One, Disc Two, and Disc Three.

1/24/2021 Update- Curt Bellotti emailed me with a couple tweaks he added to his commandline, and kindly passed along the details for future visitors. Thanks Curt!

"My custom made arcade cabinet has an upright monitor set in portrait mode. I had to use the -opengl option to make video work for the upright monitor. To stop the video from pausing/chopping up in scenes, I replaced the -fullscreen mode with xy resolution of the monitor (-x 768 -y 1024). I used the -fastboot option for quicker startup. I also set the options dip switches using -bank commands to create 5 Dirks/easy and 3 Dirks/hard games, although the easy setting is quite hard enough."

Here is my batch file command:
C:\Daphne\daphne.exe lair vldp -framefile C:\Daphne\framefile\dlcdrom.TXT -x 768 -y 1024 -opengl -bank 0 11011001 -bank 1 00100111 -fastboot

3 Dirks/Hard is -bank 0 10111010 -bank 1 10100111

The Daphne command line description is found here.
Dragon’s Lair DIP switch settings are found here