CD-i 180/181/182 for authoring and development
>> Tuesday, February 26, 2008
This was Philips' all time first basic configuration model CD-i system. Developed in a joint venture in 1988 by Philips and Japanese Kyocera for Philips America. Not many were sold in the Netherlands, these cd-i players are very hard to find. Some employees of Philips took this home to work with it. The CDI 18x system was modular, only the CD drive CDI 180 with caddy-loader and the MultiMedia Controller (MMC CDI 181) were needed to operate.
The CD-I 182 module could be added for authoring purposes, featuring two floppy
disk drives, SCSI and parallel ports and an additional 1 MB of RAM. The system
could not be extended with a Digital Video cartridge.
This CD-I system works on 120 Volts - 60 Hz (Japan) and even it can play on Pal
television using the lines-switch (525/625) at the backside. To get it to work,
there must be a 120V to 220 Volts convertor for the Netherlands. And that's
easily done in getting a 220/380 Volts transformer. Connect 220 Volts to the
380 Volts side of the transformer, in getting 110 Volts from the 220 Volts side
of the transformer. No problems with 60Hz.
This modular system was designed as a low-cost editing platform for multimedia programs. It has an integrated graphical user interface, a navigator software package (like CD-i Paint, Sequence editor, Menu editor) for creation of title prototypes. It reads MS DOS formatted floppies!
Thanks to this Philips virtual museum