Tiny CD-i MAME build and why look these images sharper than before?

Forget the last download link: Progress goes fast and this one is even newer: This is a ‘Tiny’ MAME build containing the CDi code from MESS as it is on 28th October 2009 using a fixed gamelist like MAME. Most games will lockup or crash at some point due to imperfectons in the emulation, a couple of them do however play well: Hotel Mario, The Apprentice (no sound), Dimos Quest, Alien Gate, Jokers Wild, Tetris and a number of others seem to be perfectly playable.

Digital Video titles won’t work because MESS doesn’t emulate the MPEG card. For most games only one revision has been added for testing purposes, while multiple revisions exist in the TOSEC dats. Non-games haven’t been added at all for now. I haven’t marked games as working / not working because most of them haven’t been tested far enough to make a good judgement on that, the main guarantee this tiny build gives however is that if your CHDs match the expected ones, you’re getting the same results as everybody else; something which is hard to know in MESS which lacks any kind of fixed set list. I (Haze) take no credit for the work here, I’ve just been converting images and testing them. The driver is mostly by ‘Just Desserts / Harmony’ and progress can be followed at the MESS forums. The CHDs used by this should be compatible with future versions of MESS. The package is provided as a ‘tiny’ package which extracts over a full MAME source. Have fun, I don’t personally want any bug reports for this, you’re on your own ;-)

Download

Is it me or do these screenshots look very sharp? Ofcourse, I'm used to play CD-i on a conventional CRT screen, and I'm suprised how good these games look!

MESS CD-i ported to MAME

Multi Emulator Super System (MESS) is an emulator for many game consoles and computer systems, based on the MAME core. Wikipedia explains it at follows: "MESS is not an actual version of MAME, but it has the distinction of being born from, and based entirely on, the same emulation engine as MAME. While MAME emulates several different arcade systems, MESS uses the same architecture as MAME to emulate several different home console and computer systems. In addition to selecting a system to emulate, it is also usually necessary to select a piece of sotfware to work in conjunction with the system."

Now Davind Haywood ported MESS with the 'CD-i build' over to MAME. David: "There are two diff files included, one patches against the current MESS cdi.c file (which you can grab from the MESS SVN if you so desire) This clearly shows which lines need changing to make it work with MAME. The other is a patch against current MAME, containing the current MESS code for the driver. There are still bugs, as expected (they exist in MESS too) but this allows people to see the progress at least, without having to figure out MESS. I take no credit at all for the driver, nor do I want any reports on the instability of the emulation in it! Have fun, and be sure to check out the MESS SVN and update / patch the driver yourself with the diffs included if you want more up-to-date code. Likewise, if you want to add extra games, you’ll have to add them yourself. I may decide to integrate more console systems from MESS into HazeMD at some point, but I’m not decided on that one yet."

Click here to read more (including the download link)

Kyocera CD-i knows what title you want to play

Interesting to see in this screenshot that the shell of the Kyocera CD-i player shows you the title of the CD-i that is inserted. I've never seen this in any other CD-i player!

The CD-i keyControl was not the first keyboard for CD-i

Another interesting bit of information posted on the CD-i bits blog today about the first (professional) keyboard for the CD-i. It's the first time I see this on a big picture! It was released in 1993 for use with the professional CD-i player. The later released CD-i KeyControl used a different protocol for transmitting the 'key events'. cdifan posted the background on why this was needed.

The latest MESS includes reasonable CD-i emulation

MESS version 0.135 is out and includes a very reasonable CD-i emulation (it is not bug-free but neither is CD-i Emulator).

MESS CD-i requires one of the following CD-i system ROM (a.k.a. BIOS) files:

cdi200.rom - Magnavox CD-i 200
cdi220b.rom - Philips CD-i 220 F2
This is because it only handles the Mono-I board and these are the only two CD-i players using that board.

You also need to have CD-i disc images in CHD (Compressed Hunks of Data) format, these can be created from CDI/2352 raw disc images with the chdman tool included with MESS/MAME. If you have disc images in another format (supported by CD-i Emulator), you can use the new CD-i File Extractor tool to convert them to this format; it can even invoke chdman for you.

Public beta versions of CD-i Emulator version 0.5.3, incorporating most of the compatibility bugfixes learned during the MESS effort, will start being released soon.

Thanks to cdifan

Do you want a portable CD-i 370 player?

This might be the best CD-i player after all: portable, replaceable battery, great design, including lcd screen. What do you want more? It doesn't require a lot of space either if you are a collector of retro consoles. The only thing is that these portable 370 players are very expensive. And that's because Philips never sold these on the consumer market (apparently except for a small amount in Korea, but who can confirm that!) which was in my opinion a big mistake. These portable players were unique in its kind and I would definately be interested at that time to pick one up. Oh well, look at this baby.

Keyboard control in CD-i Emulator 0.53

>cdifan just announced keyboard support to the upcoming CD-i Emulator 0.53: "Today I finally added keyboard support to CD-i Emulator, in preparation for the upcoming v0.5.3 release. You can now use the arrow keys and the numeric keypad for movement (the latter allows diagonal movement as well). You can use Space bar and both Enter keys for button 1 and the Shift and numeric keypad "+" keys for button 2; the numeric keypad "-" key acts as button 3 (both buttons simultaneously). I've tested a few games and it seems to work okay." More info here.

1993 press release of Link: Faces of Evil

Spoonman from Videogameobsession has updated his CD-i collection more; now including more contributions of his review time at CD-i World (1991). Read more here.

high res boxart of the Oldergames CD-i games

We've talked a lot about the CD-i prototypes that have been released by Oldergames/GoodDealgames back in 2002, but always without some proper scans of the boxart. Now, Thanks to Spoonman from Videogameobsession, more high res pictures of his CD-i collection are available.
Space Ranger Alpha

Plunderball
Jack Sprite vs. The Crimson Ghost
Go: Special Edition

K'Nex used Videotronic and CD-i to promote their products

There are far more professional CD-i applications compared to the amount of games on CD-i. This is an example of the K'Nex CD-i unit which was used in the Toys 'r US stores in the USA, provided by Videotronic.