Interactive Dreams

CD-i Emulator 0.53 beta versions expired, waiting for an update

2012-01-11T11:29:00.000Z

The CD-i Emulator website reports that CD-i Emulator version 0.52 is currently the latest version available, because the 0.53 versions all have date limits, which all expired January 1st. Cdifan reports:
"Because these are beta versions, cdifan included date limits.
Version 0.5.3-beta1 no longer works as of 2011/01/01.
Version 0.5.3-beta2 no longer works as of 2012/01/01.
The same goes for version 0.5.3-beta3 (not public).

It was my intention to release beta4 over Christmas, but it has been delayed due to other demands on my time (work, family, etc).

The new beta will be there within a few weeks, but expect no big new features. It will have better support for some exotic CD-i player system ROMs, a screen snapshot feature, and the MPEG support is much less buggy but still not really "working" for most CD-i titles.

At present there are no functional beta versions (public or otherwise) working for anyone. If you really need it, you can (temporarily) reset the clock on your PC. "
[Thanks, cdifan]

Lil' Champ CD-i Arcade Machine, now with a CD-i 450

2012-01-08T22:09:00.001Z

We had a 'Lil Champ' CD-i arcade machine on Interactive Dreams in 2009. But it's a different one because this one was using a Magnavox CD-i 210! What interests me about these Lil' Champ machines is that there aren't any coin mechanisms. I wonder if perhaps it was used at a daycare, or in some kind of youth group. It looks like a user-made, custom built setup to me, but as I've seen more of them, I doubt that it's a custom made, hand crafted cabinet.

[Thanks, Austin]

CD-i Reader Rating: Creature Shock is worth a 7,8

2012-01-08T21:54:00.001Z

In the following months (years?) we let you decide what each CD-i game is worth. We like to know how you would rate every single CD-i game. Keep an eye on the polls in the right column to see if a new game is up. We'll come up with lists once we have some input. Thanks for your vote!

Creature Shock was rated with a 7,8 in total (10 being the highest/best). That means we have a new number #3#! Search the site to find more info on the game. From today, we start with Dimo's Quest; the top down puzzle game made by the guys behind the excellent The Apprentice. Check out the label 'Poll' to read all previous entries in the CD-i Reader Rating. The top 6 until now is as following:

1. Burn: Cycle (8,7)
2. The 7th Guest (8,3)
3. Creature Shock (7,8)
4. Atlantis: The Last Resort (7,7)
5. Brain Dead 13 (7,1)
6. Accelerator (3,9)

The Kyocera Pro 1000S CD-i player

2012-01-08T19:58:00.002Z

It's since 2007 when we had a closer look at a Kyocera CD-i player, now another one popped up on ebay and was bought by Austin. I have never seen one for real. Kyocera was one of the co-developers of Philips for the very first 180 players.

Austin: "It cleaned up very nicely and it really feels like a tough unit. Games seem to load fine, and the menu interface for the system isn't too bad (although not quite as nice as the Philiips one as I saw some say in older posts). It's also tiny, which is great. The downer: There's no DVC in this thing. It's an interesting little system though. Manufactured in Japan during May 1994 from what the bottom of the system says. Built like a rock from what I can tell, and it uses 1/8" jacks for it's audio and video-out. It also has an I/O port, plus the Mic port for the Karaoke stuff (no karaoke options built into the system though, so I guess this was done through external software or on a karaoke CD). It also has a "video-in" port, which is the most-interesting feature."

[Thanks, Austin]

Le Monde du CD-i and Philipscd-i.com domains disappeared...

2012-01-08T19:20:00.000Z

A long time back I told you about the promising return of Le Monde du CD-i with all its old glorie and content. We also had the promising new start of Philipscd-i.com (not to be confused with Philipscdi.com) - Unfortunately with the start of 2012 both website engines disappeared and they now relink to a different site of the same owner. Theworldofcdi.com now links to DJKoelkast's own Retroforum.nl and Philipscd-i.com now relinks to Scarecade.com. It's a last sign of the end of both projects. Too bad!

Why is CD-i support in MESS Emulator limited?

2011-12-29T19:27:00.000Z

It seems we don't have to expect big updates on the MESS CD-i driver, because the author struggles to understand the system. It's a very complex system and if CD-i Fan wasn't around to help there would probably no CD-i MESS driver at all. A few paragraphs to display the current situation. Why is CD-i support in MESS Emulator limited?

"Because to work on the current CD-i driver any further [is very difficult]. I'll be happy to look into it if anyone ever procures dumps of the internal ROMs for the various peripheral MCUs that correspond to the specific CD-i board revision that MESS currently emulates, but beyond that I'd just be piling even more hacks on top of what is already a hack." ... "From what I can see the games for the system are designed in a fairly abstract manner, near enough an old style sandbox, designed to survive hardware changes because Philips designed it as the ultimate 'future-proof' multimedia system (however foolish that ended up being). There are probably a few key bugs in the implementation causing the vast majority of the problems. It's an impressive driver, don't get me wrong, but from my own study of it I don't feel it actually *needs* the internal ROMs to improve compatibility, afaik the standalone CDi emu does fine without them."

"To be quite honest, it is a very simple system, at least the Mono-II. The real problem comes from the abstraction that you mentioned above. By virtue of all of these different games going through the same core I/O functions that are supplied by the BIOS, there is an enormous lack of test cases. I have a bunch of CD-i games that all hit the hardware in more or less the same way."

CD-i Fan: "I have no more chip documentation then you do, in fact I originally had less since I worked on a different board (MiniMMC, it uses the (at the time) undocumented 2xVSC+VSD chips instead of the documented VDSC). My only "plus" is some years of headstart and a very good familiarity with the system as a developer. It does make me wonder where MESS CD-i would be without me; I think both emulators ended up better as a result of it. All of that aside, I sincerely believe that most current emulation bugs (in either emulator) would not be easily solved even with the contents of the internal ROMs; these bugs are probably only peripherally related to the contents of those ROMs."

"By contrast, I see the CD-i as a crap console that has only gone unemulated in an open manner for so long because people care so little about it. It's not a coincidence, in my opinion, that both more-popular and less-popular consoles and computers have been emulated in MESS. That both more-complex and less-complex systems have been emulated in both MESS and MAME. I was interested in emulating the CD-i because despite not knowing the ins and outs of all of the different CD-i platforms that you have emulated, I sincerely doubt that any of them are more complex than the Nintendo 64, so it seemed like a pretty simple target to hit until I found out that nobody ever bothered to leak any significant amount of register-level programming documentation."

CD-i Fan: "On the technical front, it's inherent in emulating CD-i. It's hard to get accurate low-level emulation with the amount of undocumented hardware in the system; reverse engineering and HLE is the only way that functional emulation can be achieved for a reasonable cost (time or money). I know that HLE is not the MESS way, but in this case it can't be helped. CD-i as a system is certainly way below the complexity of modern or even many older consoles, which makes it all the more challenging to get it properly emulated. That little register-level documentation was ever leaked is a consequence of the basic design of CD-i as a software API; to me as a software engineer it seems a better way then just fixing the hardware as so many contemporary consoles did. At the quality level, I think that the current CDIC emulation in MESS is essentially identical to that in CD-i Emu; there are still some problems in both emulators but I currently have no more ideas about fixing that then you do. I do not think that the CPU, VDSC and SLAVE emulations in either emulator have other then minor problems."

[Thanks, CD-i Fan, Just Desserts, Haze]

How Philips had a small hand in influencing every game... ever

2011-12-27T07:20:00.000Z

Interesting trivia news posted by GamesTM about 'the company behind the CD-i'... They talked about Syd Mead, a "visual futurist" and concept artist. He is best known for his designs for science-fiction films such as Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron. He actually did a lot of designs and concepts for games and movies for big studios including Hollywood, it's impressive to see his work when you type his name in Google. The link to Philips is because he actually worked for Philips for a long time. In 1970, he launched Syd Mead, Inc. in Detroit, Michigan to accommodate the offers he received, most notably from Philips Electronics. As the principal of his newly formed corporation in the 1970s, Syd Mead spent about a third of his time in Europe, primarily to provide designs and illustrations for Philips of Holland. His work for international clients continues to this day. Syd Mead was actually legendary and a big inspiration source to various game and movie studios. But with the link to Philips Design, the influence of the company in his work and thinking is interesting, as well is his influence on the designs of Philips of that time, which takes up including the CD-i start in the 1980's.

Happy Christmas!

2011-12-20T19:25:00.000Z

This is it, the end of 2011 marks the end of the sixth year of Interactive Dreams and all I can say is: We did it again, together with you, having our small active community with a small dedicated CD-i scene, 20 years after Philips introduced the system to the market. Our archives are still very valuable when I look at our daily statistics. It's been a quiet year again, perhaps it will never be different anymore. The years of Black Moon and Le Monde are way past us, unfortunately. You'll never know what will happen in 2012 on the CD-i front but I can assure you Interactive Dreams will do its best to continue our seventh year reporting all the CD-i news and stuff we dig up.

We at Interactive Dreams wish you a very happy Christmas and thank you all for your support.

Philipscdi.com back online!

2011-11-30T19:38:00.001Z

Philipscdi.com owner Mathias has renewed the Philipscdi.com domain which means we can access all the great resources again, thanks to Mathias who found time in his busy life to get it back online: "How about putting that site back up? Yeah, why not. Two kids, a wife, a house, a few companies and a hell of a lot of guitars later, I think I'm ready to get back into the best system that has ever been made! It's actually the version of "The 7th Guest" that came out on iPad and the version of "Myst" for iPhone that made me want to get back into the CD-i Scene. And well, it feels good to be back!!"

Welcome back Mathias!

The Lost Ride CD-i @ 10 years of Blender Art

2011-10-29T19:03:00.001+01:00

NeoGeo made under the name of Enji the 3d Graphics for the hit CDi "The LostRide". Unique video footage of 10 years of Blender Art; the software tools that the game was made with.

Also watch the end world in this video: http://youtu.be/vx-TQL9i0NQ

What's New at the CD-i Emulator Home?

2011-09-19T20:39:00.000+01:00

CDifan added a CDI180/37 picture to the Hardware section of the CD-i Emulator homepage and he added CD-i 180 emulation screenshots here

[Thanks, Cdifan]

Alien Gate plays best with the CD-i mouse, because it was developed on one

2011-09-18T21:05:00.002+01:00

The fact that Alien Gate plays so good with the mouse is because it was developed on one, I think the touchpad / gamepad didn't exist yet and SPC certainly didn't have one. They did have a roller ball controller though, which is reportedly the best pointing device for playing Steel Machine.

[Thanks, Cdifan]

One reason why touchpad/gamepad control is often so flakey

2011-09-18T21:01:00.002+01:00

These devices don't send simple "left/right/up/down" information but they encode it as relative cursor movements (3 pixels to the left, etc) which the ROMs translate to absolute cursor positions and the game then has to translate back into directions, occasionally having to reposition the cursor to take account of screen boundaries.

These information packets are sent serially at 1200 baud, which gives a polling rate of at most 1200 / 30 = 40 Hz as each packet is three bytes long. That is already slower than the usual frame rate of 50 or 60 Hz and as real-time processing of this information is expensive cpu-wise it is often polled at the frame rate or a whole divisor thereof which adds to the complexity and unresponsiveness. There are ways around this but they are complicated and probably used seldomly (it requires driver call interception at the system level).

[Thanks, Cdifan]

CD-i 180 emulation now possible

2011-09-17T18:09:00.003+01:00

For the first time in CD-i Emulator; No pointing device or disc accesses yet, though. Cdifan: "It's running, yeah, but I can't do much with the physical thing. I haven't got a working pointing device (yet) and without that I cannot click "CD-I" to get a disc playing. There's also no serial port. I've thought of ways to remedy both, though. "
Cdifan has posted his 'adventures' with his CD-i 180 set on his blog, here. "Over the last week I have been playing with the CD-i 180 player set. There’s lots to tell about, so this will be a series of blog posts, this being the first installment. The CD-i 180 is the original CD-i player, manufactured jointly by Philips and Sony/Matsushita, and for a score of years it was the development and “reference” player. The newer CD-i 605 player provided a more modern development option but it did not become the “reference” player for quite some years after its introduction."
[Thanks, Cdifan]

A unique gaming experience with the CD-i Mouse

2011-09-16T06:40:00.004+01:00

Austin made a very interesting about the CD-i Mouse and how you can control CD-i games with it. With CD-i, all controllers, including the peacekeeper gun and the trackball, are compatible with all CD-i titles. I'm impressed to see how accurate controlling CD-i is while playing games like Alien Gate or Tetris. You can't do that on other consoles! Austin: "[After posting the video,] I was expecting it to be trolled pretty well, as a lot of videos are there. Interestingly, it has been getting some positive feedback in relation to the CD-i itself:
"Wow a CD-i related video that didn't talk about how much it failed. Nice."
"Nicely done review. Never knew how good that mouse was."
"that mouse isn't half-bad looking, and i'm impressed by philips's mandate to require all software to be compatible with all peripherals, thanks for this educational review"

[Thanks, Austin]

Whack A Bubble and Thunder in Paradise reviewed by Video Game Critic

2011-09-11T11:06:00.003+01:00

Almost a year ago Video Game Critic posted a new CD-i review and yesterday they published another two: Whack A Bubble and Thunder in Paradise are reviewed this time. They say about Whack A Bubble:
"There's enough variety but the controls leave much to be desired. Your paddle moves slowly and the collision detection is unforgiving. The graphics are cheesy but it also has a few interesting elements like a two-player mode, a high score screen and a handy continue bottom."

About Thunder in Paradise they say: "The video quality is excellent, the gun is pretty accurate, the shooting is shallow, replay value is questionable but it is a surprisingly entertaining trip back in time."

[Thanks, Trev (for the tip), Videogamecritic]

CD-i Emulator progress: MPEG decoding, save/restore points, ROM-less emulation

2011-09-08T11:38:00.002+01:00

A lot of work has been done on CD-i Emulator in the last month. Cdifan recently posted a very detailed report of his progress, which you can find on his cdibits blog. I've filtered the interesting parts for the blog. Be sure to read the Cdibits blog for the details: It's a tough job to shrink the text into a small size!
Cdifan: "Last January an annoying date-checking bug was found which forced me to release beta2 somewhat earlier than anticipated. After that I did no further work on CD-i Emulator. I resumed CD-i related work in early August. First I spent a few days on Walter Hunt's OS-9 port of gcc, what could be useful for homebrew activities: it's a much more usable C compiler and I intend to use this for ROM-less emulation validation some day.
After that I had another go at the Digital Video cartridge emulation. At the point where I left off last year the major stumbling block was the presumed picture / frame buffering logic of the MPEG video driver. I decided to once again attempt to get "CD-i Full Motion Video Technical Aspects" working. I had previously tried to run this disc on CD-i Emulator, but it always crashed for an unknown reason that I attributed to MPEG device emulation problems. Now that it's fixed some other titles have probably started working but I haven't tested that.
You might think that all of the difficulties are with the MPEG video decoding and that is indeed mostly true. There is currently just one known problem with the MPEG audio decoding: the audio isn't properly attenuated as specified by the driver. This causes little audio distortions at some stream transitions and when buffers run out. During testing, I often have to do the same exact sequence of mouse actions to get a CD-i application to a problem point and this is starting to be annoying. The obvious solution is a full emulation state save/restore feature, which I've given some thought and started implementing. It's nowhere near finished, though. During the MESS collaboration I spent some time investigating the MESS save/restore mechanism. If at all possible I would love to be compatible for CD-i emulation states, but it turns out to be quite hard to do.
I also made some progress on the ROM-less emulation front. First I spent some time reading up on the internals of OS-9 file managers. I need to implement cross-module calling first. It's not really hard in principle, the design has been done but there are a lot of little details to get right. When cross-module calling is working, I have to find some way of integrating it in the user experience. You could always start over without any NVRAM files, but I'd like to have some way of migrating files between the two possible locations without having to run CD-i Emulator with weird options.
I did some work on saving CD-i IFF image files for each emulated video frame. The motivation for this was to bring full-resolution real-time frame saving into the realm of the possible. The data is written out fine, but it's still too slow. That being so, I am not really very motivated to extend the CD-i IFF decoding. So there is still a lot of work to be done, but it's all quite interesting and will provide for some entertaining evenings and weekends in the coming weeks or possibly months."

[Thanks, cdifan, CDIBITS]

Zelda's Adventure - A complete game or a failed project?

2011-09-03T20:19:00.004+01:00

Seb has a great story about Zelda's Adventure. He started to rip the music of the game. Now there is barely any music, but Seb decided to take a look anyway. "I haven't ripped the files yet, but I did take a look at the voices too. This proved to be very interesting. There are A LOT (like 30%) of audio clips that I'm sure are not present in the game itself. Now I'm sure some that I have never heard are found in the game by talking to some NPC's again for example, but there are a couple that suggest that there were more features planned for the game and were taken out.

For instance, there are some sound clips of NPC's that get angry at Zelda for striking at them with her wand. You can also hear references to items that I've never found in the game. For instance, Irene gives you the flute in the game, in different audio clips she also offers you a different instrument and says you can only take one and later trade for the other if you want. Speaking of instruments, there is also talk about a trumpet and one NPC asks 20 rupees for it and it's supposed to make something happen somewhere in the world.

There are also references to training sessions with Sir Bazel where Zelda has to strike him as he raises his sword. There is also a training session with the bow with some female NPC. Another training session seems to be held by Shumac in the art of magic. She explains about attack magic, which is stored in a book, and also about defense items, which defend again certain magical attacks. Finally, it seems bosses also had more dialog and dungeons were supposed to be more involved. For instance, you can hear Lort, the boss of the first dungeon, talk more about jewels. In the game he says you took his jewels, but you never do. I believe that initially you had to take them or something. There is a soundclip where he goes counting them.

Overall I thought this was really interesting and it opens up the question, was this really a finished game? Or was this just a failed project due to hardware limitations and quickly fixed into something that is playable? I've always found that the game is really poorly paced. Items seem to be placed at random, dungeons are pretty much always a straight path to the end and there is barely any consistency in the story line and what NPC's say. It gave me the impression of a very sloppy rush job. Hearing the soundclips now, I'm starting to believe that they did have some great ideas on what to do with the game, but that hardware limitations they ran into, destroyed the initial design ideas.

I'll be sure to rip all the soundclips soon, so everyone can listen to them themselves. For now though, I'm curious about what you guys think and believe. What is your opinion of the game in general and do you think it's a complete game? Or do you also think that it's a weak result of destroyed design dreams?"

I think Viridis was set up by a couple of young inexperienced guys, made a plan about about a Zelda game, sent it to Philips. Philips granted them money, and they started to code. I believe in their mind the game got bigger and bigger, and they had to cut it somewhere.

Interesting that at the same day today Briana Dawson posted on Interactive Dreams: "Chris and Lee were total mess-ups. They ran Viridis into the ground. I was there. I remember Randy very well, so damn hard headed. I remember Janet the office manager, Leticia, wow everyone. I remember the nights we spent in the rooms playing Doom beta on the network. But Chris and Lee, lol they spent so much time eating lunches at nice places and blind as to what they really could have been doing with Viridis, instead of thinking employees were embezzling because of a silly budget printout for a game for a Major studio Producer, non CDi, viridis related. Ya..and i never was thanked for being the first to the office at 3am after a Major Quake to secure the place. Those guys were awful and too concerned about their hair and polo sweaters. "

[Thanks, Seb, Briana Dawson. Pictures thanks to Quebec Gamers]

Joe Guard CD-i video review and then try it yourself (!)

2011-08-21T19:30:00.004+01:00

It's been a while since Seb (Halfblindgamer) made a CD-i video but today he finished his video review of Joe Guard. You can learn more about Joe Guard here. Watch the video review here and find out how you can download and try the game yourself too!

Myst CD-i Beta version offers the ability to warp to all locations

2011-08-16T14:47:00.003+01:00

It's one of the first times I hear some benefits of a beta CD-i disc. We've seen a lot of 'Testing Phase' and 'Beta' CD-i discs but most of the time it's about 99,9% the complete retail version. In Zelda's Adventure we were able to spot some unseen arrows to guide the road a little more, but it seems that a testing disc of Myst offer you to warp to all locations. A great way to quickly explore the world of Myst. It's ofcourse a logic addition so the developers were able to test the game rather quickly. Seb knows more: "I've got a beta/test disc of Myst. It's a great way to just experience the game atmosphere a bit, as it lets you warp to all locations. It's been a good while since I booted it up, but I believe it has an options menu which offer the ability to warp around. The disc also allows you to see all the scenes and there is an alternative transition option when going to different screens in the game I believe."

[Thanks, Seb]

The Secret Name of Ra: Rare or unreleased?

2011-08-16T14:27:00.003+01:00

According to an issue of cd-i magazine (issue 2 I think) back in 1993, this game was only released in Germany. However, I've never seen a copy for sale on e-bay or anywhere else. Suddenly a "Testing Phase" version popped up and we even have some screenshots of the game in the future available here on Interactive Dreams. So what is The Secret Name of Ra? It's an adventure game (base case title) which was talked about a lot in the past years, but nobody owned the game, nothing was available on the internet and nobody knew if it was actually released or not. The Secret name of Ra: "An interactive adventure through an ancient pyramid tomb. The year is 3000 BC and the player must enter the mysterious pyramid, full of secret tunnels and chambers. Here there are many strange and fascinating characters who will test the player's courage, skills and intelligence. The ultimate quest is to discover the Secret Name of Ra, the great sun god of Ancient Egypt, within a single night of exploration. Definately not a game for the claustrophobic!"

BeaglePuss and mrmark0673 shared some info on the game: "Another CD-i collector informed me that they too had heard the game had been released in Germany, but that there's no real record beyond some hearsay. I can tell you that my copy plays in English, and I don't think there's any sort of language selection in the game (from what I could tell that is).

This is what I can tell you from the little I've played:
- The game begins with Ra informing you of the secrets of his tomb.
- The basic concept behind the game (the first level at least) has the player examining ancient pillars within the tomb. Each pillar has a question about ancient Egypt. If the player correctly answers a question, they receive a key. There are four keys, but only one of the four is the correct key for exiting the temple.

I'm sure the game is complete or darn close to it. I thought I had beat the game, but was informed by King Tut that I "Had not achieved enough points" and was sent back to the beginning of the game to get more points. No, I'm not joking. Napoleon also makes an appears in the game, and it's far more than a cameo.

The game requires you to constantly answer questions regarding the history of Egypt. So much so that I'm sure there would be some sort of Atlas packed in with it had it been released.

We will have more info on this game including screenshots in the near future, so stay tuned!

[Thanks, BeaglePuss, mrmark0673, Alan]

For 'true gamers', CD-i is terrible. For some, CD-i is interesting

2011-08-16T11:11:00.005+01:00

Cut to the chase: I appreciate CD-I for its technology, the history behind it, for being ahead of its time. It marked the beginning of CD based gaming, it was the start of the Playstation. It deserves a place in gaming history. The story below marks a general feeling of gamers. In gaming perspective, the CD-I was bad. Let’s hear Protoman85:

"I consider Philips CD-i to be one of the worst consoles of all-time. I don't agree with the bashers, I do like the CD-i, but I don't think it can measure to almost any other console, really. Amiga CD32 or Apple Bandai Pippin could maybe be considered worse, but they, especially the Pippin didn't have any time to even try to be good. CD-i had several years. CD-i isn't worthless and some games are decent but overall the enjoyment I get from it is to laugh at it, not with it. I like the FMV shooter games, because of the 90s estethic and laughable acting. But the games themselves can't hold a candle to Time Crisis or Virtua Cop. The best platformers on CD-i (imo) are Christmas Country and The Apprentice, but if those were on Super Nintendo they would pale immediately to the competition, I mean they are nowhere near as good as Super Mario World for instance. Secret Mission is a good point and click adventure on CD-i, but PC adventures like Monkey Island, Police Quest, King's Quest etc are definately better. I find a bunch of games are good or very good on "The CD-i scale" but when compared to real competition, they fail. Mutant Rampage Bodyslam is a good beat-em up, but Turtles In Time or Streets of Rage are way better. Then the CD-i of course has droves of edutainment titles and stuff, which only drag it down. Nintendo DS did that too actually, but CD-i still suffer more from it. "

Seb (Halfblindgamer) posted a very good perspective on this: “I see no need to 'defending' anything. There is a difference between defending and appreciating. The CD-i is a terrible games console. It lacked developers, and it was also technical incapable compared to true gaming machines. The system was however initially never intended to compete on the games market. For a new type of VCR like apparatus, I think it did fairly well when it came to games. They have DVD and Blu-Ray games now too, and they are nowhere near as sophisticated as CD-i was.

Apart from that, I appreciate the technology in general. It was the start of CD gaming and it stood on the forefront of many exiting technologies that came after it... like the PlayStation. I think it does deserve a notable spot in gaming history. Not for being a great gaming platform, but for advancing technology in the field and open doors for more capable parties to improve upon.

I also totally disagree with you on edutainment dragging it down. Yes, it's not for us 'true' gamers, but put a child in front of a CD-i and let them have an interactive 'clicky' adventure, and they'll have a great time! CD-i is one of the best systems for kids to get into contact with gaming in my opinion. Apart from that, some of the adult edutainment titles are also more fun than reading a book or even view a docu DVD. Having you actively interact with objects enhances learning and I still like that idea and find that unique in the CD-i format.

As it stands, everything is subjective though. Is CD-i the worst console out there? For many it probably is and as far as games goes, it's pretty low on my list as well. But I still do appreciate and enjoy the technology behind it."

[Thanks, Protoman85, Seb]

Pictures of Gobliiins CD-i

2011-08-16T10:58:00.005+01:00

Attached here are pictures from ADI CM2, featuring the 1st unlocked level of Gobliiins after study, and the other 7 levels available. Also, some screenshots of the game in general.

[Thanks, Alan]

How original is Hotel Mario on CD-i?

2011-08-16T10:39:00.004+01:00

I never knew about this, but there's a game called Looney Tunes Hotel developed in 1983 for the Atari 5200. According to this source it is in prototype status only, but it's very interesting to see the same concept of this game ten years before the release of Hotel Mario on CD-i. We always called Hotel Mario's concept very original...

[Thanks, Trev, Calavera]

Some rare CD-i titles from Shrooman's collection

2011-08-16T10:37:00.006+01:00

Including a Thunder in Paradise prototype version, several professional CD-i titles, foreign encyclopedias and reference titles.

Paul Clarke about Atlantis: The Last Resort on CD-i

2011-07-31T18:30:00.002+01:00

It's a sad fact, but almost inevitable that the last wave of games on any console are technically superior and criminally overlooked as the next generation of hardware swings into view. Released in 1997 well after many considered CD-i commercially dead, 'Atlantis' proved the black box still had some life left in her. As a first person shooter it surprised many with fast paced action and a nifty 'CD Swap' feature allowing you to play any Music CD through the CD-i whilst hammering away at the game! Requiring little persuasion from Black Moon the chief programmer Paul Clarke describes his time raising Atlantis...

If you work in and around Philips and CD-i then you will uncover a lot of really fantastic people. Philips as a company, and an endeavour like CD-i in particular, attracts and gets the most out of great, talented, people. Johnny is a good example of that, though there are many, many others. Although I left Philips in '99 I still keep in touch with lots of Philips guys, though I had lost touch with the ADS boys. I meet up with the rest of the research group I worked in from Philips Research Labs, Redhill each year. There are lots of great CD-i tech-heads there, though they are working on other things now of course.

Soon after joining Philips Research I developed a Non-Intrusive Real-time Debugger (affectionately known as the NIRD, pronounced "Nerd"). This was a really cool piece of kit and software that allowed us to debug CD-i titles (mostly games) in real-time by snooping the expansion bus of the player and understanding what was going on. So for a while I worked researching the feasibility of doing this, then developing the hardware, on-board software, and PC host software to make the system fly. Then I got into refining it and using it at CD-i title developers in UK, Europe and US - helping high-profile titles get to the market on time. The NIRD became a product from Philips Media that they sold to development houses and used themselves. Through doing this work I got right into the detail of how CD-i worked and it's most intricate levels; for example knowing which memory areas operated fastest, how to make every bus cycle count, etc.

In our spare time, usually friday lunchtimes, we played games. This was considered okay as we were in the Interactive Systems Group of the labs, and understanding what people do in their homes and with what kit was really important. It also fitted with our research work around set-top boxes, digital video recorders, virtual reality user interfaces, artificial intelligence, etc. One of the games we played was of course Doom on the PC, though Philips also bought us each new console as it came out to play with.

I got into creating a few Doom levels with the public domain level editors, and the public specs of these allowed me write a utility to extract Doom graphics out of the WAD files. As a coder interested in putting together and refining game engines, the most frustrating thing is often the rubbish graphics that we can produce. By borrowing the Doom graphics I could make the demo 3D engine look cool too, and this ensured I got some attention from Philips Media. I also wrote a utility to allow me to use the public domain Doom level editors to lay out level designs for my engine, rather than have to write a level design tool. Simple hacked utilities like this meant that I could focus on the tricks I would need to do to get reasonable playable performance (15 - 25 fps) out of the engine, rather than work on graphics, sound or level designers like most game developers have to.

When Philips Media agreed to publish a game, I started working with the ADS boys. I could write a lot about this but Johnny has already said a lot. They were a good bunch of guys, really committed to the art of getting the best game play, graphics and performance possible out of CD-i. It was gut wrenching to see the team pulled apart as we learned that Atlantis would be the last game they produced.

Regarding the DOOM demos I put together, I need to be clear. I wrote my own 3D engine that had a number of tricks / compromises to allow it to run at over 15 fps to get playability right. I'll cover some of these below, but it meant that actually, in terms of game comparison, the Atlantis 3D engine was weaker than ID's Doom predecessor Wolfenstein (ie there is no height element, no stairs, no lifts, etc, just a flat world). At that time the Doom code wasn't public domain, and we would never have been able to get it running fast enough if it had been, so to be clear Doom never ran on CD-i. What we did have was a custom 3D engine allowing you to run around a world filled with Doom graphics, wall textures, yes the baddies, and status bar. That's what Johnny meant. It allowed me to concentrate on the code and produce demo's which looked cool. Years later, when the Doom code was made publically available by Id, we did port it to some experimental Set Top Boxes, and that was really cool. Doom on a big TV with descent speakers was just great.

When we were deciding what to do with my 3D engine, I did discuss with Dave Mac (mentioned by Johnny) about talking to Id about a Wolf3D port. However, we put gameplay first and this meant a number of tricks (yes I'm coming to them) that meant it wouldn't have worked. I did produce a demo of my engine with Wolf3D graphics to illustrate the point but we didn't take it further.

3D Engine: The 3D engine itself is a fairly standard "ray caster" that effectively uses a map data structure as a data source together with the players position and orientation, and produces a data structure across the width of the screen showing for each "column" of the screen the distance to the wall (which drives the height of the wall to render), the texture ID (which directs you to the correct texture bitmap tile to render) and the texture column (which is the vertical slice of the texture tile to render). Yes, it was written in C, optimised to hell, and had assembler inserts in a couple of places. The NIRD was used to validate that every cycle was optimised - but fortunately the C compiler for CD-i used together with the right types of variables (to drive 16-bit or 32-bit data access) produced tight code.

Attack of the N.I.R.D: The ADS team paid tribute to the power of N.I.R.D in this touching credit screen from Arcade Classics. The definition of N.I.R.D is Non-Intrusive Real-time Debugger! Rendering and tricks: This is the area which makes or breaks a game, and where the vast majority of CPU time is spent. The key reason why you can't just port Wolf3D or Doom to CD-i is that the 68070 processor on the CD-i player just can't write full screens made of textures and sprites to the screen fast enough due to simple math around the processor and the amount of video memory required to be accessed, read (textures) and written (video).

Version 1 of the rendering engine worked at about 1 fps, which is clearly unusable. Through experimentation and optimisation I ended up with a solution that gave playable game play above 15fps. To do this we used the two video planes of CD-i. The background plane is used to display the wall textures, plus ceiling, plus floor. We used the power of the CD-i hardware to mirror the ceiling with the floor around the mid-point of the screen. So, you only write the top half of the screen, and the CD-i hardware mirrors it down onto the bottom half of the screen. That means that you are now only rendering half the amount of video memory which takes half the time. We also ran that video plane at half resolution (again assisted by CD-i hardware). So actually, we were rendering just quarter the height of a full video screen, and half the width. The pixel doubling took it back to half height and full width, and the mirroring made it full height and full width.

On levels where we had horizon detail (such as the first level with the monuments in the background), and on others where we graduated the floor or ceiling to give the illusion of light, we changed the palette on a line by line basis, which is something that the CD-i system does in hardware for free from a CPU perspective. The foreground video plane was used for sprites, status bar, etc and ran at full resolution to ensure the baddies, bullets, etc, were as high quality as possible. Optimised renderers were written in assembly code for both background and foreground to get the speed up.

I believe it is these tricks using the video hardware such as pixel doubling, mirroring, palette changing, and transparency between planes that Dave Mac was alluding to in the magazine. They cost no CPU power at all once set up at the start of the level, and reduce the amount of time the CPU needs to spend rendering per frame. However, as the walls are mirrored top to bottom, we could not do games like Wolf3D. The demo we did produced predictably odd swastika's and Hitler wall tiles. Fun, but wasn't going to go anywhere.

Memory: Different memory banks work at different speeds, and in particular the expansion memory on the DV cartridge ran faster than the rest of the memory. We used this carefully for certain things, such as rendering code (run often) and textures (read often during rendering). Monster AI: I wrote a language (Sprite Behaviour Language, or SBL) to express monster AI in, and a compiler to convert it to optimal machine code. This allowed us to express actions as keywords that were easy to read such as look, shoot, move, etc and get a richness of AI.

Sound: A great guy called Chris Thorne wrote all the music and did all the sound FX. I was part of his interview process that brought him and other designers into Philips as we sought to break ground in design around all sorts of home-based technology. You should track him down as he is an interesting guy. We had good video and audio studios at Philips Research and Chris augmented this with additional kit and software that gave him what he needed. There was talk of an audio CD to accompany Atlantis (as with Burn:Cycle [which was debugged with the NIRD]), but it was decided not to follow through with this. Chris did produce a demo, and it was fantastic, but it never got released. I have a copy, but don’t see how I can share due to copyright reasons. Shame, it is really really cool.

Cyber-chute bonus levels: While on holiday in Cyprus, in the middle of game production, I was lying in the sun wondering how to improve the game. All of the levels have orthogonal walls, but the rendering engine itself could render curved walls as all it needed to blit the screen was a data structure of wall texture IDs, distance (to scale the wall), and column number of the texture. Whilst CD-I couldn’t work out these details for a curved world in real-time it struck me that there might be a way of doing this offline for bonus levels. I might have been a bit of a spod then, but even I didn’t take a calculator on holiday. So, in long-hand and a touristy notebook I worked out in long-hand a way to do the bonus chute drops between level themes. Basically I found a way of cramming the “view” of a drop chute at so many positions across it (can’t remember how many) in a real-time stream of data from the CD at so many fps. So, the CD-I can stream 75 2k sectors per second from the CD. Effectively it streamed off all the data the renderer needed to know for so many positions across a drop chute in real-time. You then know the user’s position across the width of the cute, and constrain how this position can move per frame, and you have the means to have an interesting segway level. With my notes in hand I hacked some data and wrote the renderer the day after my leave. I had a clever student working with me (Jain Shah) and got him to write a PC tool to do all the offline tool work to build the real levels and associated data structures, and the scheme worked really well. It works a bit like the really old chute drop games. You’re moving inexorably downwards through a complex shape and have to miss bumping into the walls to gain max points.

The experience: Working on RamRaid (the online version) and the Atlantis were some of the most enjoyable work days of my life. With little design brief the creativity in the team ran free. The ADS guys were crazy guys committed to the art of game design and game play. Paul Reid, mentioned in Johnny’s interview, was a great guy absolutely committed to the team. Andy Morton and Tom Drummond were very odd but amazing game guru’s who were kind enough to accept me into their world. Johnny was amazing, and brought my 3D world on CD-i to life. Fire up your CD-i player, and just look at the graphics that he produced, and enjoy the DV clips that we did with Rak. In particular, look at Johnny’s sprites, and savour their animation frames, especially their death sequences. Every frame is a joy.

In another parallel universe the investment in CD-i and its successors continues and ADS is thriving, with the lads and myself happily hacking things to blow peoples minds, give them a thrill, and make the more technical wonder how we do that.

Many thanks to Paul Clarke for his statement & With KUDOS to Johnny Wood for the fantastic artwork submissions. This is part of The Black Moon Project

Interview with Marty Foulger - Lead Designer on Super Mario's Wacky Worlds

2011-07-31T18:29:00.005+01:00

Merijn: Hello Marty, could you tell us about yourself and your career as well as your work for Novalogic.

Marty Foulger: I have a BS degree from Oregon State University in Technical Journalism, with a Minor in Computer Science.

I started my game design career as a writer for Advanced Microcomputer Systems in 1981, but soon developed a talent for game design. I designed games for a variety of platforms, including handheld vacuum-fluorescent games (Reactor & The Ewok Adventure), raster graphics arcade games (Zzyzzyxx & Sprockets), and a proprietary system developed by AMS called the Fantasy Machine. FM eventually morphed into a home laserdisc game playing system (much later to become the Halcyon System by RDI), and it was in 1982-93 that we developed Dragon's Lair, the first laserdisc arcade game. I was one of three game designers.

DL was quite successful, and in 1983 I left AMS to work for Sega Enterprises, the American division of Sega Japan that was developing all of the next generation of arcade laserdisc games. We completed the pre-production phase of a Star Trek laserdisc game, when the arcade laserdisc bubble burst in 1984, and the project was cancelled (an annoying theme in my career). I continued as a game design consultant to Sega until 1985, when the division was sold to Bally-Midway, then finally folded.

In 1987, when the initial CD-i specification was released by Philips, I helped start a company called Tiger Media Inc., that was founded to develop interactive titles for the new CD-i standard. As supervising producer at Tiger, I designed and produced the first CD-i disc manufactured in the US in 1988, a demo disc called "Parties of the Posh and Pampered" (I'll bet you never heard of that one!), but delays in the final CD-i specification pushed pressing of POTPAP into 1989. In 1988 I began production on a title called "The Case of the Cautious Condor", an interactive detective mystery intended for CD-i, but ultimately only published for the Fujitsu FM Towns (an early CD-ROM computer), Commodore CDTV and IBM-PC.

I left Tiger Media in 1990, and became a design consultant to American Interactive Media, the US division of Philips created to produce titles for CD-i. I worked on Hanna-Barbera's Cartoon Carnival, and a prototype of a children's detective title. The VP at Philips I was working for was in charge of all the children's titles, and I found I had little talent and even less interest in the genre, so I left Philips.

In 1991, I joined Novalogic as a game designer, and worked on a cart for the Sega Genesis called "Captain Planet & the Planeteers" a worthless license of a politically correct cartoon series that eschewed violence and practiced earth-friendly crime fighting. Just perfect for video games. In early 1992, I began development on SMWW, which ran until June of 1993. I also contributed to Ultrabots and Comanche: Maximum Overkill and a CD-i adaptation of Novalogic's Wolfpack, a submarine game that was never published.

I left Novalogic in 1993 and became a producer with Paramount Interactive. I was developing games based on Star Trek: Deep Space 9, a driving game based on the TV show Viper, and a basketball game based on the Coach Pat Riley and the New York Knicks (Paramount owned Madison Square Garden). When Viacom bought Paramount in 1994, they consolidated four game development units into one, and Paramount Interactive was no more. Once again, my projects were cancelled. At that point, I retired from game design, and now live in a house overlooking the Kenai River in Alaska, where I can pursue my interests such as fishing and skijoring.

Merijn: What did your role as designer on Super Mario's Wacky World's (SMWW) involve.

Marty Foulger: I produced a complete game specification document based on the outline that had been proposed to Philips. This entailed creating all the worlds, and lands for each one, as well as the mechanism for travel between them. Then I began laying out individual levels on computer drawing package that was marked off in a grid matching the background tiles. The creation of enemies and environments was up to me, and some of the levels went very quickly, while others I slaved over to create game mechanisms that were within the capabilities of CD-i, yet fun, challenging and visually appealing. These designs were output on paper, and handed off to the artists for rendering on a graphics workstation.

I worked closely with Nina Stanley (and I think another artist, Rod Parong, also worked on SMWW) to implement characters and backgrounds that would work with my designs, and I was never disappointed. She is so talented, and always exceeded my expectations. We had a lot of fun creating the various worlds.

After the art was complete, I used a graphics editor John created to set the surface characteristics of all the surfaces in the level, and then John integrated it into his program. I would test each level on a CD-i emulator with a 2 gig hard drive (enormous in those days!). Sometimes we had to massage the background or make some changes to the game mechanisms to fit the physics of John's program, but for the most part, everything worked pretty well together.

Merijn: How were you influenced by Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario World (SMW) and in what ways were you going to improve upon the original.

Marty Foulger: Our goal was to clone Nintendo's Super Mario World with new characters and locations, but use the interactivity familiar to SMW gamers. The CD-i hardware imposed some severe limitations, but we identified the core game mechanisms that we thought we could implement, and designed a game around them. We used one of the SMW cheat books that diagrammed all of the levels and mechanisms in the original. Some of them we adapted, and others we created new mechanisms altogether. The improvements over SMW would be more depth and variation in the backgrounds and characters due to the large capacity of the CD, and more flexibility in game music and sound effects that were stored on the disc, rather than synthesized.

Merijn: SMW was a massive game with various sub levels that you could spend countless hours playing and still never fully explore the game. Considering the short supply of staff dedicated to SMWW including one lead programmer, one designer and one artist working on the actual game it must have been a fairly limited production. Were there any plans to hire more staff and expand the depth of the game?

Marty Foulger: I was not involved in management decisions regarding resource allocation, but from my perspective, it appeared that the intent was to produce the title with the smallest expenditure of resources as possible. Philips was spending an enormous amount of money on CD-i titles at that time, and Novalogic used SMWW as a cash cow to fund Comanche and other internal titles that they intended to publish themselves at a greater profit than development-for-hire titles like SMWW. In fairness, they were no different than dozens of other developers that stuck their hat under the Philip's spigot to make some easy cash.

Merijn: The design of SMWW was quite diverse from the Ancient stages of "Greek", "Egypt" and "Aztec" to the outlandish Wacky levels including "Neon City", "Geometropolis" and "Land o' Plaid". How did these designs come to be and where did you get your inspiration for these designs?

Marty Foulger: The concept was for six worlds with different themes. Each world had three lands with a related theme, and each land had several variations with increasing difficulty level. I have forgotten how many total levels were planned, but it was around 60-70. When I came on to the project, there had been some graphic development done on Ancient/Greek, and the proposal to Philips had outlined some other planets, but I expanded it to six broader themes that allowed for more variations. I also designed a puzzle mechanism for transporting between the levels and from one planet to another.

A lot of the ideas came out of thin air, just contemplating the six themes of the planets. For example, Ancient World; I wanted to have three different variations on the ancient ruins theme, but they had to be stylistically unique, and have some individuality from a standpoint of game play and features. I chose Greek, Egyptian and Aztec because each had mechanical elements that could be incorporated into game play, as well as graphic elements that are easily recognized by the gamer. As for Wacky World, I fused my experiences with recreational pharmaceuticals with my devotion to Warner Brother cartoons, and let my imagination run wild. Land o' Plaid is proof of that, right? I also had a lot of input from my fellow team members, who were equally twisted and I welcomed their off-beat and creative input to the design.

Merijn: The prototype was shown at a Classic Gaming Expo last year held in Las Vegas to a select few. The reaction was always shock and excitement as it was never believed such a high quality game could be recreated on the CD-i let alone exist. Do you have any insight into the story lines planned for the game and any plot twists. Were favorite boss encounters like Bowser ever scripted for use in SMWW and maybe a return of Yoshi?

Marty Foulger: Yoshi was discarded early on because of technical limitations. John Brooks worked miracles just getting CD-i to make Mario move like the original, and adding the complications of a running, jumping dino to every level was pushing it too far. We also created our own bosses for each level, but once again, we were limited by the hardware. Usually, instead of an animated character like Bowser, I would use a big mechanical feature, like the giant rolling stone head in Ancient/Aztec (yeah, I know, stone heads were actually an Olmec artifact, but if I didn't mix a few metaphors, what would the game groupies have to chat about decades later?)

As far as the story lines or plot twists, y'know what? I don't even remember what the over-arching goal of the game was, Mario was collecting something, or saving somebody. I have to plead Alzheimer's on that one, one of the details that are lost to history.

Merijn: The early alpha stage prototype of SMWW does stay faithful to SMW and takes care not to destroy the simple addictive nature of the gameplay. An example of a series translated to CD that springs to mind is Sonic in Sonic CD for the Mega/Sega CD, which crammed as much detail in just because they could with the wonders of CD and it really destroyed the basis of the game. Do you believe SMWW could have been a product that lived up to SMW and persuaded fans of Mario to CD-i as presumably Philips desired.

Marty Foulger: We knew that the value of the Mario license lay in the devotion of the fans to the games they knew and loved. Our intent was to use familiar themes and mechanisms combined with creative new environments and characters to create a new game that would appeal to the same fan base. It was not the best use of CD-i, in that the hardware was never intended to produce a sprite-based game; however, we had been charged with the difficult mission of making a Nintendo-style Mario game, and through the incredible technical work of John Brooks (and I think Jerry Bennett did some programming on SMWW, but I may be wrong), it was well on the way to achieving that goal.

Merijn: In the SMWW prototype it is noticeable that a scrolling backdrop is absent. Were any features dropped due to limitations of the CD-i hardware? Examples include using the turtles shell as a weapon and mushroom power ups to give Mario new strengths both lacking from the CD-i prototype.

Marty Foulger: The scrolling background was certainly included in the game spec, and John was working to achieve it. I saw several demos of it in action, but it still had some bugs that had to be addressed, so that's probably why it wasn't on the demo disc. And what Mario title would be acceptable without bouncing turtle shells and mushroom power-ups? They were on the list of things to do, although it was a delicate dance to get everything moving onscreen without over taxing the hardware and causing the graphics to fall apart. We had to carefully script how many moving objects were on screen at one time to avoid problems. Also, we couldn't do the large Mode 7 animations used in the Boss sequences on SMW, so we had to find some CD-i friendly alternatives. We created some multi-segmented Bosses that moved like snakes that worked pretty well.

Merijn: John Brooks the lead programmer on SMWW commented that you had some interesting puzzles and worlds for Mario to explore, could you shed some light on what you were planning.

Marty Foulger: He did? Well then, they must have been really good! Honestly, without my documentation, I don't recall many specific puzzles. There was one in Ancient/Egypt that involved sliding stone blocks inside a pyramid that required the player to time running and jumping to avoid being crushed. Another one in Ancient/Greek was set in the Trojan Horse, which was beautifully rendered by Nina Stanley. We also had some dynamite underwater levels that use CD-i features to create an effective underwater effect. Haunted World had a cool ghost ship, a la the Flying Dutchman, and Jungle World had a huge tree house like in Swiss Family Robinson.

Merijn: Do you know of any specific involvement of Nintendo in the game? Were there any guidelines for gameplay mechanics, use of characters etc? Would you describe Nintendo's role as active or passive in the development of SMW.

Marty Foulger: I have no knowledge of Nintendo's involvement in the game, that would have been between Nintendo and Philips, though I would have thought they would be very interested in maintaining the integrity of the Mario license. We had the Philips producer onsite several times, but I don't recall any Nintendo representatives, nor was I ever advised about changing any characters or game levels.

Merijn: How would you describe the role Philips (the party owning the licence) played in the production of this game. Were Novalogic and Philips in regular contact and if so on what level and what was their involvement?

Marty Foulger: The Philips producer on SMWW was Steve Radosh, and he came to Novalogic several times for milestone reports and to monitor development. Steve was a friend of mine from my Sega days, when we were both game designers there. Novalogic president John Garcia was not pleased that I had such a close relationship with the Philips producer, and it showed every time Steve came to visit. An interesting side note, Steve Radosh is now the Supervising Producer for the TV gameshow, Hollywood Squares, and can be heard whenever host Tom Bergeron appeals to the judge named "Skippy Trebek".

Merijn: Do you know of the circumstances that led to the start of the project and ultimately why it was cancelled?

Marty Foulger: I was not included at the management level at Novalogic, so I can't speak authoritatively to the genesis of SMWW. I know SMWW had already been proposed to Philips when I started at Novalogic. The final proposal was apparently accepted in early 1992, as I began work on it at about that time.

The circumstances around the cancellation of SMWW are less murky. The staff on the project was becoming more and more disillusioned with the low priority the project was receiving. I recall that technical resources (emulators, monitors, systems etc) that were being used on SMWW would be commandeered when ever the producer from another publisher came to check on his project. They would be set up as though they were being used on his project, so that he could see a dog and pony show. It was a shell game to keep the cash flowing in, with the least amount of resources being expended on any one project for an outside publisher.

John Brooks and Nina Stanley both accepted offers from Electronic Arts in spring of 1992, and Jerry Bennett also left for greener pastures (Interplay? Virgin? Brooks would know). I was the only member of the team left, and in June, John Garcia cancelled the project and laid me off. He had little choice; with Nina & John gone, the outlay to bring another team up to speed would have eaten up too much money. I called Steve Radosh at Philips, and he was unaware his project had even been cancelled.

Merijn: There are rumors abound of a link between Super Mario's Wacky Worlds and the CD add-on Philips and Sony were supposed to produce for Nintendo's SNES console. (Which was ultimately cancelled leaving Philips with the Nintendo characters license). Do you have any insight in these rumors whatsoever?

Marty Foulger: Can't help you there, I am unaware of any targeted platform besides the Philips CD-i player.

Merijn: What interesting behind-the-scenes stories or anecdotes can you share with us?

Marty Foulger: What? You want more? In addition to his programming skills, John Brooks was a flipper god on the "Adams Family" pinball game, which we played almost every lunch hour at the fabulous Corbin Bowling Alley on Ventura Boulevard. Nina Stanley's dad is Augustus Owsley Stanley III, Merry Prankster and chemist to the Grateful Dead. I am related to Wendell on Petticoat Junction.

Marty Foulger was interviewed by Merijn

Interview research conducted by Merijn
Interview material scripted by Devin and Merijn

Interview with John Brooks - Lead Programmer on Super Mario's Wacky Worlds

2011-07-31T18:29:00.004+01:00

Merijn: Could you describe to us what your job as lead programmer on SMWW entailed?

John Brooks: I primarily programmed the graphics engine, game code and tools. I also worked with the artists and designers to make sure generated data would work in the game engine.

Merijn: The game engine you developed for SMWW was described as pioneering work from a source close to the project. Could you describe why this engine was crucial to the projects development and did you encounter any problems coding for the CD-i?

John Brooks: This project was extremely demanding technically, with problems that I don't believe were solved by others either before or after SMWW. There were 7 critical problem areas in doing a high-quality Mario platform game on CD-i.

1) No tiled graphics or scrolling hardware, which made platform games extremely difficult.
2) No sprite overlay hardware.
3) No audio mixing hardware (combining sounds effects with music).
4) OS-9 made hardware access difficult and caused performance spikes, which interfered with 60hz performance.
5) Sound effect lag due to audio decompression (ADPCM) buffering.
6) Input response lag from the wireless remote.
7) Matching the extremely high quality feel of Super Mario World.

Problems 1, 2 and 3 were overcome with innovative programming solutions, some of which were extensions of work that I had previously done on Rastan Saga (Apple //GS). Problem 4 was minimised by writing low-level OS-9 drivers. Problem 5 was minimised by using 'A stereo' ADPCM mode which had the least latency through the audio chip. Problem 6 was a hardware issue with no known solution. Problem 7 was an on going problem for me. I painstakingly explored, tested and refined the game feel to match that of Super Mario World. Although I only partially implemented them, I was thoroughly impressed by the subtlety and intuitiveness of the Super Mario control, animation and movement models.

Merijn: There was even talk of negotiations with Nintendo to wangle a conversion contract, presumably from the CD-i version of SMWW to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). The main negotiating point being your game engine, would you care to elaborate?

John Brooks: I have no information on this.

Merijn: At the time SMWW was being developed, Nintendo were creating an ill fated CD add on unit for the SNES, apparently planned to be cross compatible with the Philips CD-i. Do you have any further insight into the Philips/Nintendo agreement and did SMWW have a role to play in this?

John Brooks: I don't have any definitive information on this. A rumour that was circulating was that in addition to working with Nintendo on the SNES audio chip, SONY was making a SNES CD add-on called the Play Station. At some point, SONY decided to make there own game machine (Play Station X?) instead of a SNES CD add-on. Nintendo then went to Philips for CD techology and in return they licensed their characters for use in CD-i games.

Merijn: How did the project start and what was the nature of the contract between Philips, Nintendo and Novalogic for the development of SMWW?

John Brooks: I do not know. In part it may have been because I had done technically demanding games on other platforms in addition to a previous CD-i game (Jigsaw). Few studios had done CD-i games at that time.

Merijn: Throughout the project did Nintendo have much influence over its development?

John Brooks: Not that I was aware of.

Merijn: What was Philips involvement in the project (if any?).

John Brooks: My primary interaction with Philips was with their technical support group. I don't know the extent of their involvement.

Merijn: Which of the 3 parties involved (Philips, Nintendo and Novalogic) decided to cancel the project in the end, and do you know of the reasons why?

John Brooks: I do not.

Merijn: From experience playing an early prototype of SMWW the similarities to Super Mario World on the SNES is unquestionable even using the same music. Do you have any commnets on this and what was the direction for the project as a whole in the Mario series?

John Brooks: The development team had great admiration for the Super Mario games and wanted to create something that would feel natural to players of Miyamoto's masterpieces. Our design goals were to bring high quality graphics and sound into the Mario world, along with diverse themes and creative gameplay experiences. The huge CD was hundreds of times larger than rom cartridges of that era. The nearly unlimited art and audio content allowed great variety within each level (256 colour bitmapped graphics and high quality audio streamed off of CD), as well as great diversity between levels (6 distinct worlds with 6 levels per world). Marty Foulger, of Dragon's Lair fame, was a prolific designer who created unusual puzzles and worlds for Mario to explore.

Merijn: The prototype version we know is version 0.11. Do you know of any other (later) versions than this particular version?

John Brooks: I do not.

Merijn: Thank-You for your time.

John Brooks: My pleasure.

John Brooks was interviewed by Merijn

Interview research conducted by Merijn
Interview material scripted by Devin and Merijn

Original CD-i cabinets still exist

2011-07-31T17:59:00.004+01:00

Philips marketed CD-i heavily, mainly in local video stores and libraries, as movies and reference/educational titles were a big part of the starting CD-i business. Philips gave away lots of these CD-i kiosk systems; a cabinet with built-in TV and CD-i player while the catalogue is presented on shelves underneath it. With a big Philips CD-i print on top of it, these cabinets I saw literally everywhere. They were used in supermarkets so the kids could play Sesame Street while the parents were shopping. They were used in libraries to show of the Compton Encyclopedia. They were used in warehouses to show people the latest entertainment. I loved these cabinets. The top always was above anything else in a store/place, so you could see from far away that a CD-i kiosk was there. After CD-i had gone away, our local video store still kept the cabinet to present other kind of games and videos. He did that for a long time. Apparently, now it is time to move on. This is your last look at this cabinet. Shot on camera to never forget.

Chaos Control: Vivid visuals,passable shooting but easy to finish

2011-07-31T09:25:00.011+01:00

Chaos Control is one of the prettiest CD-i titles to look at -- and unlike other beauty-contest CD-i discs, it's also fun to play. The game puts players in the cockpit of a space-fighter, desperately trying to punch through an invasion fleet and... of course... Save The Earth. As flying games goes, Chaos Control is of the ''railroad tracks'' ilk, meaning you fly through the same terrain the same way every time. The ship flies itself, you just have to shoot. Fortunately, that assignment will keep players plenty busy.

As you fly furiously through cityscapes, through space stations, etc., you'll come across alien ships, ''mobile-suits'', tanks, etc., some stationary, some flying. Moving your cursor on to them and pressing the button fires your guns. But to keep things interesting, you can only fire so often before overheating your guns -- as a practical upshot, success depends on making quality shots.

As the alien mecha returns fire, a shield guage on the bottom of the screen diminishes. When it runs out, the game ends. There's no way to replenish it -- no ''1ups'' or recharges to pick up -- short of finishing the entire level. One other thing to watch for: the cursor turns yellow when it's pointed at a friendly object, such as one of your squadron members. Try not to shoot them!

In Chaos, the same alien ships show up in the same places at the same time in every game. That's because of how the game actually works -- the terrain and the alien ships are pre-recorded digital video being unspooled from the disc. The CD-i superimposes a target and the various shots (yours and theirs) on top of this video. When you hit a ship, an explosion and smoke is drawn on top of the ship until it disappears off the screen.

In its execution, Chaos most closely resembles the Namco arcade shooter Starblade, which also offered exactly the same game every time. Starblade gets a point for actually removing exploded ships from the screen, but Chaos gets many more points for being faster, better looking, and generally more fun. (Note to Infogrames, though: if you can animate the explosions, vary their size, and have them track the moving objects, couldn't you have just put computer-animated ships in random locations and opened up the game more? Or is that too Rebel Assault?)

Chaos is also distinguished by a faux-anime storyline that is played out in animated sequences between the action sequences. The heroine who you're playing is ace pilot Jessica Darkhill, whose wingman and One True Love has been killed in an earlier battle with the Kesh Rahn, an alien fleet that's come to conquer the Earth. Jessica must first punch through the front lines to get to a base in Manhattan, destroy a computer virus in a virtual-reality world, then take a prototype ship into space and destroy the alien mothership.

It's nice to give the game a narrative angle like this, and making the hero a woman is an interesting idea. Anime fans will also notice a variety of borrowings from franco-japanese animation. Still, every now and then, the voice acting isn't up to the task, and some of the scenes border on camp. (to some, of course, that makes it even more authentic anime!)

The look of the game elements actually show the title's strongest design skils. The larger Kesh Rahn ships are appropriately creepy, bulbous behemoths with pointed spikes. They're backed up by robot-like mobile-suits, serpentine ''boss'' mecha, etc. The flying is at times claustrophobic, dizzying, and desperate. All of this has been rendered by supercomputer and when replayed in full-motion video, it's a sumptious shoot-em-up.

The game comes from France's Infogrames, who designed last year's feeble Kether. That game's sole highlight was its sweeping flying sequences, an idea developed further here. Having said all that, Chaos Control has two significant game-play flaws that prevent it from achieving true greatness. The first is simply that the level designs don't live up to the potential of the game-engine. The first level, in which you fly past the Statue of Liberty and into the wrecked urban corridors of Manhattan, is easily the best, and even it seems to go on aimlessly near the end.

After that, you fly a ''virtual'' fighter through a computer landscape, to destroy a virus that threatens the attack mission. The real rush of the first level, the sense of flying through a real-world landscape, is obviously lost here. Flying around a circuitboard is too obviously artificial to provide the same rush. The third and fourth levels, in which you fight off aliens around a space station and take on the mother ship, are better. But...

They're just too easy. The first time I finished the second level, I proceeded to destroy the flagship and win the game. This after maybe five or six games, tops. A feeling of victory is great and all, and replaying the first level is still nominally interesting, but a $50 disc shouldn't be beaten so quickly. Ultimately, the best thing about Chaos Control may be that it could open designers' eyes to new kinds of games using the digital video cartridge. Instead of tacking video interruptions onto an otherwise boring game (e.g., Mutant Rampage), Chaos uses the fast-moving video to overcome the difficulty the CD-i would otherwise have animating so many objects and backgrounds. Aside from the obvious use in shooting and flying games, you have to wonder if there are camera crews shooting first-person perspectives for CD-i racing games, adventures, and other kinds of titles. Chaos is a good enough game in its own right, but it could be the start of something even better. (7/10)

[Thanks to Chris Adamson, Devin, Black Moon]

The CD-i page @ Videogameconsolelibrary is ready

2011-07-24T20:21:00.005+01:00

Terry posted that he finished his CD-i review/page. In 2008 we let you know the start of the CD-i section at VideogameConsoleLibrary and he has upload a lot of info/stuff about CD-i, including reviews, pictures and a lot of specifications. Visit it here:

Philips discontinued CD-i officially 15 years ago

2011-07-05T11:38:00.003+01:00

15 Years ago Philips announced the plan to close Philips Media and to discontinue CD-i as a platform. Philips mainly was about to stop any content related business. In 1986 Philips Media began its life as American Interactive Media (a combination of the formerly known Delaware and Polymedia). In 1992 the name was changed to Philips Interactive Media Corporation (PIMC), in 1995 it was changed to Philips Media. Every title being produced after may 1995, was showing the new introduction movie of Philips Media (the zooming blue philips logo), replacing the old one (the philips logo changing into a silver disc). In November 1998, the whole Philips Media business was handed over to Infogrames (known nowadays as Atari). Philips owned about 40% of it in 1995.

The process of closing down Philips Media took more than a year. Philips announced it to the press as following: "Philips Media, an operating division of Philips Electronics N.V. based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, today announced that it has signed a letter of intent to transfer its multimedia software publishing and distribution activities to Infogrames Entertainment. Infogrames Entertainment, based in Villeurbanne, France, was already the European leader of interactive publishing and becomes with this transfer of Philips Media's activities, the strongest European entertainment company in interactive publishing an software distribution. The combination of Infogrames Entertainment talents in publishing and development of interactive software titles and Philips Media's strength in European distribution will create a major company in the interactive entertainment industry. Philips Media and Infogrames Entertainment have been partners for many years. They have jointly developed and produced many successful international interactive software titles, such as International Tennis Open, Chaos Control, Asterix, Marco Polo, Shaolin's Road. Philips Media became a major shareholder of Infogrames Entertainment in 1993 and has a seat on the board of Infogrames Entertainment. At the end of 1996, Philips Media has a 13.2% stake in Infogrames Entertainment. After completion of the current agreement, Philips will increase this minority stake in Infogrames Entertainment. Richard de Lange, President & CEO of Philips Media stated: "We are now in a position to align ourselves with another strong European company. We have successfully restructured our US and European publishing organization last year and we have built up our distribution strengths by acquiring Bomico (Germany), Ecudis (France) and Leisuresoft (United Kingdom). This transfer of our assets is a natural extension of a very successful relationship with Infogrames Entertainment, which has matured over the past decade. Philips is pleased to contribute to the creation of a company that will be a major player in the fields of interactive multimedia worldwide." According to Bruno Bonnell, Chairman and CEO of Infogrames Entertainment, "With this transfer Infogrames Entertainment strengthens its unique position in creation and publishing of interactive titles and is able to develop a pan-European distribution strategy. The long and rich relationship with Philips Media taught all of us to work together which is a guarantee of success."

CD-i Reader Rating: Burn:Cycle is worth a 8,7

2011-06-24T20:01:00.005+01:00

In the following months (years?) we let you decide what each CD-i game is worth. We like to know how you would rate every single CD-i game. Keep an eye on the polls in the right column to see if a new game is up. We'll come up with lists once we have some input. Thanks for your vote!

Burn:Cycle was rated with a 8,7 in total (10 being the highest/best). That means we have a new number #1#! Search the site to find more info on the game. From today, we start with Creature Shock; the 3D first person shooter featuring full motion video, but how do you think that worked out on CD-i? Check out the label 'Poll' to read all previous entries in the CD-i Reader Rating. The top 5 until now is as following:

1. Burn: Cycle (8,7)
2. The 7th Guest (8,3)
3. Atlantis: The Last Resort (7,7)
4. Brain Dead 13 (7,1)
5. Accelerator (3,9)

"We want more CD-i video reviews!"

2011-06-24T19:52:00.002+01:00

Just when I thought why my favourite Youtube channel (HalfBlindGamer) didn't put up any more CD-i video reviews anymore, I saw this:

Philipscdi.com offline

2011-06-21T06:43:00.002+01:00

It's been around five years ago Matias started Philipscdi.com with extensive information about all CD-i software, hardware and peripherals but it seems like the domain has expired. Matias hasn't updated the site for years anymore but it was also a great reference site. Hopefully Matias pops up soon enough to save the content or allow us at Black Moon to host it. The list of dutch CD-i magazines is safe though: The magazines are already hosted at Black Moon (we just have to sort out a list of the shortcuts!). More news when it develops.

Tox Runner CD-i: a 'quickie game' and a schedule of 6 months

2011-06-20T18:46:00.000+01:00

I was asked by Regis Bridon (head of studio) and David Mullich to come up with a "quickie game" project which would have a budget of $90,000.00 (I think) and a schedule of 6 months. So, working with my best friend and writer, Terry Ray, we conceived of the idea that would be called "Tox Runner". We both were big fans of "Mad Max" and those types of movies and decided to create an apocalyptic motorcycle race game. The story was about a lone rider that would go to the aid of a small outpost town in the middle of the wastelands. This place had a well/spring of clean water that got tainted by the baddies. The player would need to brave the dangerous roads of roving baddies on bikes who would attack, much like "Road Rash" and dodge debris in the road as well. The goal was to get to the town and save it with the antidote you're carrying throughout the game.

Well, I can say that all the artwork got done on time. The storytelling/cinematic artwork was all hand painted using acrylic paints and then scanned in. I hired freelance artist, Micheal Coy, a fellow Art Center grad friend of mine to help me paint these. Once scanned in, the parts were cut up and a moving slideshow was created with the parts. All the in-game artwork was created as sprites and various animation states and scaling was created similarly using Photoshop 2.0 and EA's sprite software, Studio 16.

The problem came when we had to engineer this. With "Video Speedway", the roads lay flat and didn't have to roll up and down. In "Tox Runner", the roads rolled up and down and simulated little dips and hills in the road. Yeah, that proved far more difficult than what either the engineer or the system could handle. My memory is a bit hazy here, but I'm not sure if the inability to pull this off or the ultimate demise of PiMA and the system killed this title, because it never got released and I got laid off around this time.

[Thanks, Devin]

Dutch CD-i article at Gaming Only and Bonami

2011-06-15T18:51:00.003+01:00

The Dutch website Gaming Only went for a visit to the Dutch Bonami game console museum, and they wrote an article about the CD-i. With nice pics and detailed (sometimes erroneous) info, a nice link to follow. And no, that Apple PowerCD is NOT a CD-i player, but a re-batched Philips Photo CD / audio CD player. But it seems like this is the place if you want to play with the Bang & Olufsen CD-i Television Set. Looks like I'm going to visit them anytime soon!

[Thanks, Gaming Only, Bonami]

Unlock Gobliiins levels by studying French on CD-i

2011-05-29T21:45:00.004+01:00

Alan posted a while ago (actually, 1,5 years already) about the classic game 'Gobliiins' appearing on the French cd-i discs 'ADI CM1' and ADI CE1'. 7 levels are available on each disc. The first level is available straight away, but you need to unlock later levels by studying! Alan confirms that to unlock later levels, you need to gain 20 points, which doesn't take too long at all. As long as you know your French!!
[Thanks, Alan]

CD-i and DCC articles on online dutch streaming channel

2011-05-11T11:10:00.008+01:00

For our dutch readers: Tonight at 18:16 PM (Timezone Amsterdam, Paris GMT+1) you can watch on the dutch themed streaming channel "Geschiedenis24" (History themed stream at www.geschiedenis24.nl) a new edition of "Hollands Glorie". This edition is dedicated to the 120th anniversary of Philips Electronics and therefor is about the history of Philips including attention to inventions like DCC and CD-i. For those interested in Philips in general and CD-i specific, watch tonight on Geschiedenis24. In fact, this channel is dedicated to Philips the whole week to Philips, find here lots of programs they will broadcast about the company history.
[Thanks, Aart]

Philips 120th anniversary this week

2011-05-11T11:04:00.004+01:00

The Philips company is 120 years old this week. It surprises me there's zero attention about this. For us it's a memorable week as Philips is the mother of CD-i and lots of videogaming facts. It's also a bit sad to realize all references to its multimedia history are disappearing, even more now Philips intends to close the Redhill Research facility and move the remaining departments to Cambridge. Philips Research Redhill was the centre for a lot of CD-i developments.
[Thanks, Aart]

RAM Raid Online & Atlantis: The Last Resort Video Review

2011-04-20T06:50:00.002+01:00

In this review you can find gameplay footage of RAM Raid, the online first person shooter on CD-i, and its offline version: Atlantis: The Last Resort.
[Thanks, Protoman85]

Mario and Zelda CD-i press announcements in CD-i Magazine

2011-04-07T19:17:00.002+01:00

Philips CD-I launch advertising brochure

2011-04-06T06:44:00.006+01:00

I remember ICDIA to host JPG files of a few CD-i brochures, here are a few offered on the internet.

first pictures of the i2m CD-i card in the wild

2011-03-13T20:28:00.008Z

Early 2009 we posted some coverage on an obscure way to play CD-i on your PC. I said I've never seen a CD-i to PC card myself, as they were expensive and rare. Suddenly, someone showed some pictures of it. So here are a few rare close pictures of the i2m card. Read more here.

[Thanks, jinxwad]

UK CD-i Magazines now in Comic Book Reader format and no cut offs

2011-03-05T21:43:00.004Z

The UK CD-i Magazines are updated to the Comic Book Format and without any cut-offs we saw the last time. Issue 3 is now available here.

What to do when your CD-i player won't spin discs?

2011-03-05T21:32:00.004Z

What to do when your CD-i player won't spin discs? First you have to turn off your CD-i and open the case of the CD-I by unscrew the screws on both sides (left and right side wall) and the screws on the back of the CD-I. Then open the case. Next you open the CD-Drive by pushing the piece of plastic with the yellow sticker on it forward.

Open the CD-Drive if you haven't before to get to the dish. So, here you can see the dish which causes the problem and won't spin the disc.

The red arrows point at the dish, so you can see it better. Try to spin the dish with your finger / hand and you maybe will see that it's maybe hard to spin.

Now take 2 flat screw drivers. Put the first screw driver on the left side in position and the other on the opposite side of the dish. Then GENTLY push the screw drivers against each other = in the middle of the to screw driver now is the dish. You have to push the screw drivers against each (so to dish is between the screw drivers) other and while doing that you have to lift GENTLY the dish (don't be afraid that maybe the everything around/under will move too by lifting the dish everytime a little bit more). Everytime you think it's ok -> plug in the power cable (don't touch the open CD-i when it is turn on or the power cable is plugged in! -> Safety first ). So pay attention to the dish or if you insert a CD -> if the CD spins a little bit -> if the CD won't spin at the beginning after trying to lift the dish = don't give up! Maybe use next time a little bit more power for the lifting but GENTLY (but first don't forget to unplug the power cable before giving it a new try)!

You could also do that by using one of the screw driver to hold against the dish so it won't spin / turn -> and the other to lift the one side of the dish little bit up, then turn the dish in one direction and lift again on a new position of the dish. DON'T let the screw driver go UNDER the dish! -> Maybe you are thinking that will accelerate the lifting process -> maybe you could damage the dish or the surrounded parts by doing that! It's not necessary! Take your time and try to lift the dish a little bit everytime and check out the result = if the dish will spin everytime a little bit more and more than you are on the right path!

The whole process took me about 10 minutes to fix the problem with the dish . btw: ignore the ERROR Message (!) -> when the dish can spin more and more easy -> and it will spin without any interruption or stops when you have a Disc inserted -> than you have fixed the problem and the Display will show the Information about the CD -> Congratulations!

I hope this small walkthrough could help somebody who has the same problem with the "My CD won't spin"-case and also want to save / rescue / resurrect his CD-i like i did by doing the above mentioned steps.

[Thanks, CDi-Dude]

3D polygon model of the Philips CD-i controller

2011-02-06T21:47:00.011Z

At 'The 3D Studio' you can buy 3D objects of all kind of things. A few days ago member 'Blazer' finished his 3D model of the first CD-i gamepad. Ofcourse I'm curious why anyone would need this, but the preview pictures are very nice, it's a nice recreation of the gamepad.

From the site: "Original controller for the Philips CD-I System. Four different versions are available: (1) Maya 2011 with Maxwell Materials: Includes all input graphs so the amount of smoothing can be changed by you. Everything is polygons except the the cord that is SUB-D"s and can easily be modified. All materials are Maxwell materials, and the scene is ready to render. (2) Maxwell Scene: Smoothed version with all materials, ready to render. (3) Obj: Unsmoothed version, all polygons. (4) Obj: Smoothed version, all polygons. The polygon and vertices-count is for the unsmoothed Maya-version excluding the SUB-D-cord." You can buy the 3D object for 20 dollars at the 3D Studio.

[Thanks, Blazer, The 3D Studio]

CD-i Emulator 0.5.3-beta2 released

2011-01-31T06:18:00.002Z

The bug that was reported in the beta limited edition version of CD-i Emulator has been fixed in version 0.5.3-beta2 which is available for download now.

A reason why controls in CD-i games are often bad/slow

2011-01-30T19:29:00.004Z

CDifan just posted a quote which sounds like a reason why controls on CD-i games is a though job. "One of the requirements of Philips was that "every CD-i title should be playable with every CD-i pointing device". Although originally a very hard requirement, this was quickly softened somewhat, especially for games. Technically, all pointing devices behave like a mouse to the CD-i software; there is no way to get "direction" signals from e.g. the joypad (except by detecting them in software, of course): all you get from the system is an X/Y coordinate pair and two button bits. This can produce some control lag if the detection is not quite right... "

CD-i Emulator bug is fixed and updated tomorrow

2011-01-30T08:32:00.003Z

CDifan fixed the bug in CD-i Emulator 0.53 that was reported January 15 and posted here on Interactive Dreams. CDifan: "It's generic and not related to Windows version or x86/x64 issues. There were some leftover vestiges from date-limit checking in earlier versions that erroneously started triggering earlier this month. The problem is fixed and I will release a new beta tomorrow (have to do a little cleanup in the development version first)." We'll let you know when any updates arrive.

'What was CD-i', according to other sites (1)

2011-01-30T07:05:00.006Z

Alan posted a link to a 'What was CD-i' article on the web, this time on a wordpress blog named 'The Magic Robot'. I always enjoy to read about what others have to say about CD-i: You can read it here. CDifan rapidly responds that, while the article states "The Philips CDi was the next step on from VCD", which is factually wrong, as CD-i predates VideoCD for several years.
I have to add to another quote from this article, "“typing” an eMail one letter at a time with your remote control on a virtual keyboard made it more of a novelty than a useful tool", that the writer obviously doesn't know about the CD-i KeyControl.

PS, I tagged the title with a (1) because I thought it's a nice start of a series on Interactive Dreams to find out what the web thinks of the CD-i, so let's find more 'What was CD-i' articles on the web and post them in the comments, on the forum or by email. Thanks! [Thanks, Alan]

CD-i Mouse compatibility list?

2011-01-30T06:51:00.004Z

There are some basic rules for CD-i which are not always clear to newcomers: For example that the CD-i is region free and all CD-i titles of the world will work on any local player (with a few exceptions). Another thought frequently asked is if the Mouse is exclusive to certain titles. That's not true, the CD-i Mouse is really just a pointing device just like the gamepad. It is basically compatible with every single CD-i title, but it's true some works better than another. For example, you don't want to play The Apprentice with a mouse, do you? You'd be rolling the ball constantly.
Titles which use a pointer on screen are controlled well with a mouse, like shooting games and point&click adventure games. It's not about if a title is compatible with the mouse, it's just that you make the choice what will work the best for you. Also the Peacekeeper Gun is basically compatible with all CD-i titles. It just doesn't work when you play Micro Machines with the Peacekeeper Gun, if you know what I mean! Good titles to use with the Mouse: Escape from Cyber City, Burn:Cycle, Mad Dog McCree , Mad Dog II, CD Shoot, 7th Guest, Myst, Creature Shock, Thunder in Paradise, Lemmings, Inca, Chaos Control, Solar Crusade, Defender of the Crown, Voyeur, Who Shot Johnny Rock?, L'Affair Morlov, you know any more?

CD-i Magazine (UK) now at Rapidshare, margins cut off?

2011-01-30T06:42:00.003Z

CD-i Magazine (UK) issue 3 is now available here, and member 'some stupid japanese name' uploaded them to Rapidshare for a more convenience download without an Underground Gamer account. Download Issue 2 here and download issue 3 here. It's not all good news unfortunately, as SpoonMan reported in the comments: "I hate to say anything bad about it, but after viewing these I noticed that everything on the right margins of the mag is cut off quite a lot, making it nearly impossible to make sense of those reviews. :(" We hope k1ngArth3r and SpoonMan can work together to get a complete scan. Anyway guys, thanks a alot for all the efforts!

CD-i Emulator 0.53 not working on Windows 7?

2011-01-29T18:20:00.003Z

A few members reported problems with CD-i Emulator 0.53, like Luigiblood: "I just changed my PC, with better hardware, and with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and for some reason : I can't start anything. Not even the BIOS. .I have three BIOS ROMs, two of them used Mono-I boards (i think, but at least one of them uses it).
And CD-i Emulator says i've exceeded the time limit, AT 00:00.04 ! Which is obviously wrong."

The problem has been confirmed by someone else using Win7 x64 and today new member NaoikiS reports that it doesn't work on x86 either. CDifan is currently looking into this! We'll post any updates as soon as we get them.

From DIMA to Codeglue

2011-01-24T21:06:00.003Z

Gamesauce recently visited game developer Codeglue in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Codeglue is running by Peter de Jong and Maurice Sibrandi, who you heard of before five years ago on Interactive Dreams, when we posted our first article about Creative Media.

"Back when De Jong and Sibrandi were just starting with their technical engineering degrees, the Dutch company DIMA (‘Dutch Interactive Media Associates’, red.) paid a visit to our department and gave a presentation about internships to make games. “Maurice and I had similar interests, so we quickly decided to both do it,” De Jong recalls. “There was no Dutch game industry back then. There were some studios making CD-i games, that was it.” Already making games themselves on their Amigas, De Jong and Sibrandi didn’t have a breakthrough by themselves yet. In 1993 both decided to take on that internship and work on CD-i titles.
After graduating from university, the duo continued to work at DIMA. Back then the company became well-known for producing some of the more popular CD-i games. The studio’s main objective was to produce low-budget CD-i games in relatively short production times. While at DIMA, de Jong and Sibrandi worked on titles such as Family Games, Christmas Chrisis and Christmas Country. The studio would later go independent and rename itself to ‘Creative Media’ after Philips pulled the plug from it’s CD-i production." Read more here.

[Thanks, Gamesauce]

Quizzard CD-i Arcade Machine

2011-01-19T11:36:00.000Z

CD-i Magazine (UK) issue 2 available as PDF

2011-01-17T19:47:00.004Z

CD-i member "K1ngArth3r" started scanning the UK CD-i Magazines as PDF files, just like Mathias did five years back with the dutch CD-i magazines (available here). He just finished the first PDF (Issue 2) and it is available for download here. More updates on his scanning project of all the UK CD-i Magazines you can find right here. K1ngArth3r: "The project was put on hold until now due to various reasons. I've currently started scanning and completed Issue 02 so far (Only took a couple of hours because the magazine is quite thin. I have 2 other issues with me at the moment which I plan to scan this week. The other magazines should be scanned by the end of February with a bit of luck, however I'm still missing Issue 01. Unless the magazines can be hosted here I will upload the first 3 magazines at the weekend to underground gamer."

'The Black Moon Project' in 2011

2011-01-02T18:37:00.004Z

Our longest running CD-i website (since 2001) is sleeping since July 2010 but as always it will return also in 2011 with some great articles. First coming up is an in-depth article about Tox Runner on CD-i, the follow-up to Video Speedway CD-i created by ISG Productions. Devin tracked down the creator of the project to tell us more behind the progress until the cancellation and the reasons for stopping it. Here's a first glimp of this unreleased CD-i game:

In 2010 a new direction was chosen by re-creating reviews on CD-i games made pretty by Devin, originally written by Chris Adamson. Expect more reviews from Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, Burn:Cycle and many more to be published in 2011 on The Black Moon Project.
Further on more steps are made uncovering grand unreleased CD-i games including Star Wars: Rebel Assault and Discworld. I can tell you this is big stuff for our websites and I'm sure more than enough to keep the old workhorse 'Black Moon' interesting in 2011.
But first, you have to wait before the website awakes from its beautiful dreams...

No new compatibility reports yet published on CD-i Emulator 0.53 website

2011-01-02T18:12:00.000Z

Considering the low reception of the 0.53 update on CD-i Emulator it is perhaps expected that an updated compatibility report list is long in the making. Unfortunately no updates has been made on the CD-i Emulator 'Title Support' page since the 0.53 release October 10, 2010. The way to report compatibility issues has never been easier though since cdifan implemented a menu system on the cdiemu site right here. In this page you can easily share your experience with any title and it will pop up in a (hopefully) large list to show you how complete the emulation is.

If you haven't started yet emulating CD-i, read the tutorial on how to get it running on your PC in this article. If you have any problems/questions, don't hesitate to drop here a question or go to the CD-i Emulator Forum.

Pete's new CD-i game to use RotR code as a base, developed on CD-Ice

2011-01-02T17:59:00.005Z

I think most of us marked CD-Ice being dead for years, but it is the first time Pete showed more of it than just Rise of The Robots running on it. On December 31st we showed you CD-Ice running Frog Feast and according to Pete CD-Ice was able to run games like Micro Machines, International Tennis Open and Striker Pro as well. You can't download CD-Ice anymore as far as I know, but Pete's version was further in development than the RotR crippled version we got anyway.

Pete: "I didn't (don't) really have any intention of resuming development [on CD-Ice]. [...] The process handling could all do with a rewrite now that the info is available and I can probably fill some gaps in some other things but I doubt it's really worth it so I think it's best to mark CD-ice as permanently dead. [...] But as I am intending on coding a new CD-i game I thought why not use my own emulator to develop it on. I think until the latest beta version cdifan's emu didn't run RotR and as I'd be using the same code as a base it wasn't going to be very helpful. My current dabbling with the emulator is just to check how compatible it is (was), just out of interest because I couldn't remember. As you say, only the RotR crippled version was ever released. btw, that just checks which file is the "boot" file on the cd and if it's not rise_cdi it wont run."

It's hard not to get excited on a new CD-i game in 2011, based on existing CD-i code from Rise of the Robots as it automatically makes me think about Pete's Digital Video version of Rise of the Robots. Remember Rise of the Robots on CD-i was supposed to be a Digital Video title equipped with drilling backgrounds and visual enhancements. Together with Charles Doty that would be excellent stuff for Frog Fighter CD-i!

Dinosaurs in a CD-i commercial

2011-01-02T17:49:00.004Z

Digital art as created for use in a three spot commercial for the Philips CD-i. Can you guess what titles it is used for?

CD-ice (resurrected) running Frog Feast

2010-12-31T16:32:00.003Z

Pete Dabbs, the creator of of the first working CD-i Emulator and the developer of Rise of the Robots on CD-i, managed to finally track down some long forgotten CD-ice source code and after fighting with Visual Studio for a bit he got it building (and fixed a couple of problems it found along the way). Pete tried it with Frog Feast which to his surprise ran without any problems. Speed is wrong thanks to cheapo (free) screen capture software.. Pete: "I was digging around old hard drives and PCs a couple of days ago and came across some source code which after an hour or so struggle I got compiling with a new version of dev studio. Might be some useful stuff to help in Cdifan's current direction with the emulation.. Also shows those clever know it all folk on certain forums that it wasn't a one trick pony! After having a quick run through a few game ISOs I'd got I can say the compatibility isn't (wasn't) great although from what I remember from all the way back then there are only a couple of significant things stopping it running a lot more games.

The main one I've come across today (and remember fighting at the time) is all to do with the multi process stuff (loading a process from another one, running it and then Exiting, a lot of games did this type of stuff to play the bumper or their own intro anims). That might not be that hard to fix as looking at it with fresh eyes I can see some mistakes in how I handled stuff. There's also a couple of screen drawing problems eg Flashback runs great but tends to draw crap all over the screen outside of the game/movie area (probably should just be not displaying screen there and I'm ignoring an LCT instruction or something).

I'll probably have a play about with updating it myself first then decide what to do with it later. I might have a surprise on the game front for 2011, writing a new CD-i game has been on my "todo" list for a loooooong time and I've got a few ideas for what I'd like to do."

That would put CD-i back on the market in 2011, but Pete rumoured the same message one year ago, so fingers crossed!

Happy Christmas!

2010-12-24T19:32:00.007Z

It is a small tradition to post a 'Happy Christmas' note on the blog to wish you all a happy christmas, thank you for all your support and wish for another informative CD-i year next year. With both the forum and the blog reaching over five years in existence, we think our little websites are very much needed to keep CD-i a little alive. 2010 was the year that we finally saw a big update on CD-i Emulator. That was probably the biggest CD-i news this year, along with some new title discoveries. Behind the scenes we were able to track down more developers behind the CD-i projects 'Rebel Assault', 'Discworld' and 'Tox Runner' but it is still too early to show you more of this so we'll keep it as new stuff in 2011. So, there will be plenty again to look out for in 2011! See you next year!

CD-i Reader Rating: Brain Dead 13 is worth a 7,1

2010-12-14T17:46:00.005Z

In the following months we let you decide what each CD-i game is worth. We like to know how you would rate every single CD-i game. Keep an eye on the polls in the right column to see if a new game is up. We'll come up with lists once we have some input. Thanks for your vote!

Brain Dead 13 was rated with a 7,1 in total (10 being the highest/best). Search the site to find more info on the game. From today, we start with Burn:Cycle; the 3D future cyber punk adventure from TripMedia, showing full motion video is possible on CD-i without the Digital Video Cartridge, but how do you think that worked out on CD-i? Check out the label 'Poll' to read all previous entries in the CD-i Reader Rating. The top 4 until now is as following:

1. The 7th Guest (8,3)
2. Atlantis: The Last Resort (7,7)
3. Brain Dead 13 (7,1)
4. Accelerator (3,9)
5. ?

Video of Making the Grade on CD-i

2010-12-14T17:41:00.002Z

Making the Grade is a very rare simulation game for the Philips CD-i. It was developed by 3T Productions for British Petroleum. The purpose of the game is to build and manage a polyethylene plant over a period of time. This is the introduction and explanation of how the game and the interface works. You can read more about Making the Grade here.

[Thanks, Shroo-Man]

Discworld CD-i was converted by 'Divide by Zero'

2010-12-14T16:35:00.000Z

As I think we were beginning to suspect, the conversion of Discworld to CD-i was not handled by Psygnosis, Teeny Weeny Games nor Perfect Entertainment! Instead it was handed over to an external studio called 'Divide by Zero' based in Nottingham, UK. This is not a very big studio from what I can gather from Google but they did however work with the publisher Psygnosis between 1993 and 1995 on a couple of games. So a link did at least exist! The product manager for the PSX conversion of Discworld had limited exposure to the CD-i conversion and he is pretty damned clear that the game was in a 'playable' state when he left TWG. He made a special trip to gauge the conversions progress so this information in context appears to be good and accurate! More when it develops.

New website features: Pageview statistics and popular posts

2010-12-14T15:05:00.000Z

Small update to let you know that as of today, Interactive Dreams offers you a small peek in our kitchen by showing you some statistics of our website. You can watch how many times our website is shown on a screen worldwide in the last week, and if the website gets more popular over time (=more pageviews). You can also see the most popular posts of the last month.

RSP say they worked on Donkey Kong on CD-i

2010-12-13T19:52:00.006Z

I always wonder how far Philips could eventually have stretched the use of Nintendo characters in their games. If the Zelda and Mario titles met the quality/popularity of their SNES counterparts, would Philips have started making sequels? How far could this have gone? What if a game like Lost Ride had a Donkey Kong theme? Or what if Atlantis had a Metroid theme?

However, Johnny Wood once told us that Philips could've made an unlimited amount of games about Zelda and Mario. He was very eager to get his hands on the license but the American division of Philips Media became very protective about releasing it to a European developer. Imagine what ADS could have done with this franchise! Also, Donkey Kong wasn't on the agenda, according to Johnny the license only covered Mario and Zelda.

But, development on a Donkey Kong CD-i title appeared in the work of Adrian Jackson-Jones, who worked in 1992-1993 at RSP (USA based independent studio founded by former Atari programmer Mike Riedel in 1984). Here, he worked as a "Super Nintendo and CDI Programmer". He worked on games including: Steven Segal: The Final Option (SNES), Tom & Jerry (SNES), The Hunt for Red October (SNES) and Donkey Kong (CDI). He aided in game engine designs for the Super Nintendo products Steven Segal: The Final Option, Tom & Jerry, and The Hunt for Red October. He designed and implemented the game engine for the CDI system game Donkey Kong. According to his Linkedin. Definately worth investigating.

[Thanks, CRV]

Nintendo on CD-i: A gentlemens agreement

2010-12-13T18:28:00.000Z

"I asked the Nintendo question and do you know what, the whole deal was a gentlemens agreement! The President from Nintendo of America and Philips Media simply shared a vision for the medium, so that is why Philips were allowed to use Nintendo characters. At least that is what the man says! I believe originally the vision was for use in educational wares however that was perverted towards video games later. That's my supposition anyway and 'Nintendo takes America' did sound like a kids title from the outset. Investigated CIGAM a little bit but unfortunately the studios creator Howard Greenspan died last year."

Interactive Dreams: 5 Years Online!

2010-12-05T07:55:00.002Z

We open the champagne at Interactive Dreams to celebrate our fifth anniversary: We're actually five years here to give CD-i a little more attention it deserves! Thanks (again) for your support, visiting us again and again, and let's go for at least another five years. Happy Birthday!

CD-i Quizard Arcade Games, emulated by MESS/MAME

2010-12-01T20:55:00.000Z

The team that worked on the MESS CD-i driver has made a lot of progress in emulating the CD-i based "Quizard" arcade games, produced by TAB-Austria from 1994 to 1998. Readers who follow the release notes of MAME may have noticed a game added to MAME 0.139 called "Quizard". "Quizard is noteworthy for being one of the few arcade games to be based on the Philips CD-i game console, and benefits from the ongoing CD-i work in MESS by Harmony", as published on his blog here.

Within the Quizard CD-i arcade machine there is a standard CD-i player with a separate I/O board connected to the front and rear serial ports of the console. It includes a protected i8571 microcontroller for copy protection. For anyone interested in seeing what the machine actually looks like, we had a small article about the Quizard machine here.

The Quizard CD-i games fail to boot in CD-i Emulator, but apparently for different reasons than it does in MESS. Harmony: "MESS seems to get stuck in an OS call shortly after the OS launches the cdi_quizard executable module, whereas CD-i Emulator loads it, tries to send data to the (non-existent) I/O board, then hangs while waiting for a response."

Harmony: "Using a targeted hack, I was able to get the 1.7 revision of Quizard to boot in MAME. [...] I've managed to get both Quizard 1.2 and Quizard 1.7 to be fully playable by either one or two players. Additionally, the protection check patches were able to be made partially generic, enabling Quizard 3.2 and Quizard Rainbow 4.1 to boot, go into attract mode, and coin up without problems.

Read more details and watch more pictures here.
[Thanks, Harmony, Klaus]

Funhouse in Disneyland

2010-11-28T21:01:00.003Z

Alan recently posted a link to a great CD-i resource on the web, created by Cliff Johnson: A tribute to Funhouse. Recently Cliff added a picture of the Funheads enjoying a Disneyland trip: That's a rare piece!

DVD custom covers of CD-i games

2010-11-28T20:51:00.003Z

Here you can find custom covers for CD-i games resized on DVD box format.

Burn:Cycle, cyber punk on cd-rom as well

2010-11-28T20:27:00.006Z

Burn:Cycle is a live-action interactive movie, a mash-up of Blade Runner and Johnny Menmonic, with some mini-games and puzzles thrown in. The movie/game follows Sol Cutter as he tries to remove a computer virus from his implant while the player controls some of his actions. If you’re lucky enough to find a version with a bonus CD, you’ll have the extra treat of listening to the music of Simon Boswell. Here you can find information about the CD-ROM version on the game and (in the comments) how you can play it on modern PC's.

Loriciel/Futura developed "Jour J" (D-Day) on CD-i

2010-11-19T11:10:00.007Z

On Assemblergames a screenshot surfaced of an unknown CD-i game named "Jour J", (translated D-Day) developed or published by french based game development team "Loriciel". Loriciel I originally know from Amiga but apparently they did something on CD-i too. "Jour J" is a military themed shooter, but it seems like the screenshot is built with polygons, which sounds unlikely to be on CD-i. Until more proof is found I'd take it with some questions.

From Mobygames: "This multi-genre game represents famous historical events of World War II called D-Day. Driving a tank and fighting as a tank team with enemies in French villages. All kinds of gameplay differ in looks from 1st or 3rd person perspective in simulator-like missions (tank and plane respectively) to isometric (infantry) and platform (paratrooper) with corresponding actions made in all of them."

It's remarkable that Jour J was originally developed for the Atari in 1993 in the english language. I've found some credits to check so we'll have a closer look when we find out.

[Thanks, Michelle, Assembler Games, Amiga Hall of Light]

Random CD-i Quote (12)

2010-11-17T07:13:00.002Z

A new quote by Philips Media HQ: "Another curious thing here in America. There were actually 2 different sales organizations as the Phiilps guys in the US were completely uncapble of selling software, so they sold the players and ultimately a new group controlled out of LA sold the software. But neither group was qualified to the do the job. You can not imagine how frustrating it was to produce great titles only to not see them promoted and marketing properly. Indeed, in Europe I found a great haven for CD-i development as the US developer community reacted to the poor marketing of CDi and basically could even be bribed after a while to do titles. That was fine with my as we took our development budget to England, Belgium, Holland and France and got some great product.Indeed, in Europe I found a sales organization so thirsty for more game titles that was almost intoxicating."

Dark Castle reviewed by The Video game Critic

2010-11-16T09:11:00.004Z

It’s been eight years since the Video Game Critic published a CD-I review and I’m happy to report they’ve written a new article about Dark Castle CD-i. Not surprisingly, they comment about the slow, unresponsive gameplay that this game holds. Still, Dark Castle is a special game because it was the very first platform game on CD-i. Scrolling was a known problem for the CD-I hardware and it shows in Dark Castle. What did surprise me were the first good words about the amazing sound effects and the superb graphics. I don’t really feel that way. The sound is OK to me, the graphics were low-res and muddy. And I actually didn’t find the gameplay not that bad at all. Ofcourse it’s nothing compared to the excellent platformers created by The Vision Factory (The Apprentice, Lucky Luke). Go read the review right here. We at Interactive Dreams published some history behind the Dark Castle CD-i port earlier before.

[Thanks, Trev]

Where are the flight missions in Creature Shock CD-i?

2010-11-07T10:32:00.006Z

Just like Philips Freeland Studios skipped a few puzzles in The 7th Guest CD-i because of the hardware limitations (to save time, money and bytes to fit the game on one disc), Argonaut kind of did the same thing to the CD-i version of Creature Shock. Mike from the CD-i forum experienced the following: "The game, when started, and going into the first mission before the space shoot-out freezes, and the only think you can do is click the action button and it takes you straight to the planet to start the alien ship level 2. It totally skips level 1 space shooting. At first, I thought perhaps this was just a limitation of the player I was on, so I tried it on both 220 models, and the 1100 and also my 370 - all with the same result." opt_fr experience the same problem: "I have the original version of Creature Shock and I could never play the first (shooting) mission. I think it hasn't been implemented in the cd-i version of Creature Shock or maybe it is accessible only in hard mode (never tried hard mode)".

So what happened? In Creature Shock CD-i, they indeed replaced the shooting scenes with MPEG movies; because of the technical limitations of the CD-i hardware. In this way, the CD-i version only has 3 playable levels (2 huge mazes and 1 boss place). The bright side is that the CD-i version by FAR has the best graphics because of the MPEG rendering. That is what it took Argonaut so long to prepare the CD-i version. But don't doubt your copy is bugged or your player is defected: The CD-i version of Creature Shock replaced two flight levels with an MPEG video.

Is there a CD-i system with better output than s-video?

2010-11-07T08:57:00.001Z

Does a CD-i system exist with component, hdmi, or vga output? Is s-video the highest quality you can go without modding the system? "All Philips CD-i players with Euroconnector (SCART) on the back can do component as well as S-VHS. I think this includes all the 210 and 220 models. And yes, there exists a CD-i player with VGA output. Although I don't remember if it did full-screen or only windowed output.", according to cdifan and erronous. I guess the VGA output is limited to the types of the I2m CD-i/PC card.

World Cup Golf CD-i gameplay footage

2010-11-07T08:48:00.003Z

Scotland Yard Interactive: Rare board game on CD-i

2010-11-06T11:55:00.008Z

UK based AVM AG/HQ delivered Scotland Yard Interactive on CD-i in 1993 before they went on developing Master Labyrinth on CD-i, both licensed Ravensburger projects which, just like MB, made a deal with Philips to support the new CD-i format. Scotland Yard however was only published in the United Kingdom so in the end it is a very rare CD-i game to get hold of. Very few people have played it on CD-i (Don't confuse it with the multiplatform Scotland Yard game made by Cryo in 1998).

it is based on the popular board game. You can play two modes, either ''classic'' or ''London Special''. You also have a multiplayer option. If playing by yourself, the aim of the game is to catch Robi X by using various modes of transport around London. You can play as various characters, for example Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes and the game features plenty of still images from London. From the box: "Mr. X, London's most wanted baddie, is still on the loose! Was that him, fitting up Farringdon? Or sipping into the Zoo? Or bounding up Bond Street? Scotland Yard detectives are at their wits end and are desperate for your help. This is your big chance! Can you track down Mr. X? If you haven't 'nailed' him by the time your quota of taxi, tube and bus tickets runs out, he's free to continue his evil career of crime! Scotland Yard is the fascinating CD-i version of the classic board game. You cover London in the chase, learning about one of the world's greatest cities, through photographs and animated graphics. You can zero in on your chosen disctrict, pursuing Mr. X from Maida Vale to the Oval, from Kensington Gardens to Clerkenwell Green. You can play with friends, with or without Robi the game computer, or play on your own with Robi as your opponent. So get on the case now. The meter's running and the heat is on!"

In Scotland Yard Interactive by AVM AG HQ GmbH and Philips Interactive Entertainment, One player takes the part of Mr. X and slinks around the city, leaving clues for the others who are the Scotland Yard detective team. Was the elusive Mr. X last seen at Buckingham Palace or Madame Tussaud’s? Did he travel by bus or taxi? Strategy skills and teamwork will help Scotland Yard players trap Mr. X and win the game. If, on the other hand, Mr. X manages to escape capture, he wins!

The game makes use of the same kind of animations you see in the cutscenes of Mutant Rampage, Hotel Mario and Link: Faces of Evil. It's the same technique as Philips Sidewalk Studios relied heavily on in its CD-i games, and it is a clever choice for a base case CD-i game (so you don't need a Digital Video cartridge)

The main map is in 2D and is very much like the board game. It shows more than 100 stations in the city that can be reached by taxi, bus or underground. Each type of transportation costs you a ticket. One player takes the part of Mr. X and goes around the city, leaving clues for the others, who are the Scotland Yard detective team. If Mr. X manages to escape, he wins. The detectives have to plan different routes to surround Mr. X and try to cut off his lines to escape. To make things difficult for the detectives, they only have a limited number of tickets, and when they run out of a ticket type, they cannot use that mode of transport anymore.

The CD-i version is a nice recreation of the board game and requires strategic planning. It is one of the few (perhaps the only) CD-i games that you can play with 6 (!) players. You can play either as Mr. X or detective, solo against the computer or with friends. It has to be said the CD-i game is a bit slow in places and will require a few seconds loading time between every turn. When you play against the computer you'll quickly find the same routes and hints all over again, and it's definitily more fun to play with 5 other friends.

CD-i Emulator to explore ROM-less emulation

2010-10-29T08:04:00.003+01:00

Cdifan posted some interesting thoughts to develop CD-i Emulator more like CD-ICE: This first CD-i Emulator tried to emulate CD-i with the use of the original ROM of the player. Cdifan: "I have some wild ideas about ROM-less emulation; this would basically mean re-implementing the CD-RTOS operating system. It can be done, CD-ice proved it. I'm not going to tackle that by myself; my current thinking is to make a start by implementing a high-level emulation framework, tracing stubs for all the calls (luckily these can mostly be generated automatically from the digital Green Book and OS-9 manuals) and some scaffolding and samples. One of the pieces of scaffolding would be a really simple CD-i player shell; one that just shows a big "Play CD-i" button and then starts the CD-i title :-)"
Furthermore he explains the start of his CD-i Cookbook: "To prepare for the above I had to do some fairly heavy design, which caused me to properly write down some of the design information and tradeoffs for the first time. This will be invaluable information for co-developers (if they ever materialize), hence the title "CD-i Emulator Cookbook". Well, at present it's more like a leaflet but I hope to expand it over time and also add some history." Read a lot more details on his blog, cdibits.

Beavis and Butt-head game to CD-i if the console 'sold well enough'

2010-10-24T20:11:00.003+01:00

If the CD-i sold well enough in 1994 Viacom planned to get a CD-i release ready of the adventure game 'Beavis and Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity'. Following this source: "In 1995 an adventure game based on the series was released, called Beavis and Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity on the PC. An adventure game is a type of Video game characterized by investigation exploration puzzle-solving, interaction with game characters and a focus on Narrative A CD-i port was planned but was cancelled due to falling sales of the console." It's an interesting rumor/announcement as Viacom cancelled the ICOM CD-i releases as well, possibly due to low sales as well. [Thanks, K1ngArth3r]

Download CD-i game manuals in PDF

2010-10-24T20:02:00.004+01:00

You can find CD-i game manuals online at Replacementdocs, filling its database with all manuals found at different sources including Black Moon Project and Le Monde du CD-i. It's a start that could be a nice home for CD-i manuals once you don't have the original. Find out more here.

Random CD-i Quote (11)

2010-10-17T07:12:00.001+01:00

A Quote made by Philips Media HQ: "I too probably was giving up on Cdi in America truthfully -- but not because of the format, but because of the sales organization that was behind it. Plus, there was a lack of overall software development that would realistically drive the format. The emphasis in America was far less on games as I said before and more on infotainment and I don't think there is a significant market for this then or now. It is niche. CDi was to be mass market. And while you might produce a compelling disc on the Titantic or how to take pictures a la Time Life Photography, these were the types of titles that would complement not lead the format to succcess.
Back then Philips US was in Tennessee, Knoxville as I recall, and they had no belief in the format, no committment and they were completely schiztophrenic over the Philips brand, switching back and forth between Philips and Magnavox (one a proud name in US electronics, pre Philips, but today it is reduced to the level of a cheap import) They were half heartedly getting behind the format and while Emiel and Alex were constant ambassadors between the software arm (American Interactive Media, and then later Philips Interactive Meda), and Philips Consumer Electronics USA - there was a chasm. We came from two different worlds and both organizations were at fault for not coming together better."

DVC/MPEG support in CD-i Emulator 0.53

2010-10-12T18:49:00.002+01:00

Version 0.5.3-beta1 of the CD-i Emulator program supports proof-of-concept MPEG playing for Gate Array MPEG cartridges but not for the other types. It does however support the 1MB memory extension feature of all models. With the CD-i Emulator comes a dummy ROM file so that you can use the extra memory even if you don't actually have a DV cartridge ROM. Some titles can use this even without the MPEG playing function (e.g. The Apprentice). At the bottom you see a video from Lucky Luke CD-i made by cdifan.

cdifan: "The Philips Media bumper animation is MPEG (audio and video) and so is the audio for the piano sequence. The in-game crash is due to an MPEG sound effect. This is with a Gate Array MPEG AH01 cartridge (22ER9141 F1 AH01); as the cartridge types get newer the decoding starts working lesser and lesser. Later GMPEG cartridges will crash earlier in the gameplay, VMPEG and IMPEG will not play MPEG at all. This is simply because I haven't gotten around to fixing those things yet; there are still major bugs in the buffering of the MPEG data and while that remains unfixed there is no point."
Many other DVC titles will play their Philips bumper but crash soon thereafter; some others won't even get that far. In some cases this is not even due to MPEG decoding issues but to various "other" reasons for crashing (The 7th Guest is a notorious example).

[Thanks, cdifan, cdibits]

New MESS CD-i development blog: Emulating Quizard Arcade CD-i

2010-10-11T20:44:00.006+01:00

Harmony from the MESS CD-i development team recently started his own blog with information on his work on the MESS CD-i Emulator. From now on, you can find his latest posts in the right menu bar of Interactive Dreams. His first posts tell us about interesting progress he made with emulating the Quizard CD-i Arcade games. The Quizard CD-i Arcade Machine was featured on Interactive Dreams here and here. It's a rare piece of hard- and software as this is the only CD-i based Arcade machine. With some tweaks Harmony got the Quizard CD-i games (interactive quiz titles made by TAB-Austria in 1994-1998) to work within MAME. Read all details and pictures on his blog here.

[Thanks, Harmony, Klaus]

Report compatibility issues in CD-i Emulator 0.53: you can help too

2010-10-10T07:13:00.003+01:00

Now the official update on CD-i Emulator has seen the light of day, time has come to create new compatibility lists of all CD-i games to get an idea how much improved the new 0.53 version actually is. The way to report compatibility issues has never been easier now cdifan implemented a menu system on the cdiemu site right here. In this page you can easily share your experience with any title and it will pop up in a (hopefully) large list to show you how complete the emulation is.

If you haven't started yet emulating CD-i, read the tutorial on how to get it running on your PC in this article. If you have any problems/questions, don't hesitate to drop here a question or go to the CD-i Emulator Forum.

CD-i Reader Rating: Atlantis is worth a 7,7

2010-10-10T07:04:00.000+01:00

In the following months we let you decide what each CD-i game is worth. We like to know how you would rate every single CD-i game. Keep an eye on the polls in the right column to see if a new game is up. We'll come up with lists once we have some input. Thanks for your vote!

Atlantis was rated with a 7,7 in total (10 being the highest/best). Search the site to find more info on the game. From today, we start with Brain Dead 13; the interactive cartoon by Ready Soft, improving on originals like Dragon's Lair, but how do you think that worked out on CD-i? Check out the label 'Poll' to read all previous entries in the CD-i Reader Rating. The top 2 until now is as following:

1. The 7th Guest (8,3)
2. Accelerator (3,9)
3. ?

CD-i Emulator 0.53 Released!

2010-10-10T07:00:00.003+01:00

cdifan has just released the first public beta of CD-i Emulator version 0.5.3 for Windows, the first update after the original September 2005 public release. A number of existing CD-i title compatibility problems have been solved for this version and a number of new CD-i player models are now fully or minimally supported.

Important new features added for this version are the following:
- Support for CHD disc image files (compatible with MESS/MAME)
- Support for writing AVI, PNG or WAV files
- Support for controlling the CD-i pointing device with the keyboard
- Support for recording and playing back CD-i input events
- Support for online CD-i title and player compatibility reporting
- Proof-of-concept support for MPEG playing on Gate Array MPEG cartridges

This version of CD-i Emulator incorporates source code from MAME/MESS used to support the CHD file format and the writing of AVI and PNG files. More information can be found on the CD-i Emulator website, in particular the Release Notes section. The beta release can be downloaded from the Downloads section; don't forget to read the README, HOWTO and RELNOTES documents included with the emulator! Any questions, comments, etc should be posted to this forum, where the answers will be useful to the entire user community.

Have fun!

CD-i Internet Kit Box Art

2010-10-10T06:56:00.003+01:00

It's very difficult to find good quality pictures of rare CD-i objects, like this one: the box of the CD-i Internet Kit. It was a nice innovative product but a little expensive at $300, but it gave you the possibility to browse the "world wide web" on your CD-i player. That, regarding its technical limits, was quite an achievement. You can read more about it here.

Most of you have a 2xx or 4xx CD-i player

2010-10-10T03:48:00.001+01:00

In the past months we asked you what type of CD-i player you have. As expected, the consumer models 2xx and 4xx are the most common available players for you.
Series 1xx (dev old) 4 (4%)
Series 2xx (Component size) 41 (46%)
Series 3xx (portables) 12 (13%)
Series 4xx (compact) 40 (44%)
Series 5xx (compact adv) 9 (10%)
Series 6xx (dev new) 15 (16%)
Series 7xx (high end) 5 (5%)
Series 9xx (US) 8 (8%)
Non-Philips 18 (20%)

In future polls we'll specify more on what player type you own and which non-philips model is available the most these days.

Changelog CD-i Emulator 0.53 vs 0.52 (update 2/10)

2010-10-02T07:29:00.004+01:00

The following changes have been made between the version 0.5.2 and this version 0.5.3-beta1 release:

- The minimum operating system requirement is now Windows XP, due to my switching to Visual Studion 2010 for development.

- A number of emulation compatibility problems have been solved. All of them apply to Mono-I CD-i systems (200, 210 F1, 220 F2), most of them apply to Mini-MMC CD-i systems (205, 60x, 205/910) and several apply to all CD-i systems.

- Support for CHD (Compressed Hunks of Data) disc images has been added. This is the native disc image file format of MESS/MAME; its main advantages for CD-i Emulator are cross-emulator compatibility and smaller file sizes. Emulating from CHD files is also somewhat slower because of the required on-the-fly decompression.

- Support for writing the decoded audio and video streams to various file formats has been added. The current version includes support for (uncompressed) WAV, (uncompressed) AVI and (compressed) PNG files. Use the appropriate -writexxx option for this.

Each uncompressed video frame written to the AVI file takes a little over 1.2 MB, which results in large file size: about 61MB per second. These numbers are for PAL (50Hz), for NTSC (60Hz) they are a little over 1.0 MB per frame and about 63 MB per second. In contrast, a second of uncompressed audio is about 172 KB.

You can write a silent AVI file with the -writesilent option; this can be combined with the -writeavi or -writepng options to write separate audio and video streams.

Note that with WAV file writing, silent periods (where the CD-i title doesn't play any audio) are not written to the file.

You can limit the AVI file size by using the -writescale or -writerate options to reduce the number of video frames per second or the size of each frame.

The -writeview option controls which view is written out; the default is to write the full CD-i Emulator window (including window borders, menu and the toolbar, if visible). Use -writeview video to write only the CD-i video.

The Emulate | Write... and Emulate | Stop Write menu choices are not yet functional.

- Support has been added for recording and playing back files containing CD-i input events such as pointing device movements and clicks, keyboard presses and disc insertions.

The -record option writes a file containing timestamped input events, prepended by all the extra information required for faithful playback which includes things like CD-i player model, DVC cartridge type, extension roms, PAL/NTSC and special startup options.

The -playback option will read such a file and play back the recorded input events and disc insertions. The extra information should generally cause it to work without the need to fiddle with emulator options to reproduce the exact recording environment.

It is also possible to play back on a different CD-i player model or with a different DVC cartridge or differing startup options. Command-line options will override recorded information, and input channels are somewhat "intelligently" matched to the available input devices.

TBA: What happens when the user doesn't have the required ROMs?

Recorded disc insertion events contain both the full path to the disc image file and the title of the disc; during playback CD-i Emulator will use the full path if possible. If the disc image file does not exist, the disc title will be used to search the list of recently used disc images.

It is thus possible to exchange input recording (the preferred file extension is .inp) with other people, for example to reproduce crashes or audio or video decoding bugs.

You can also use input playback to offline write full-rate full-quality AVI or PNG files from a CD-i Emulator session, this is generally not possible in real-time. In this case, use the -playback option together with -noskip and -nowait.

If you intend your input recording to play back on all CD-i player models, you should use the -playcdi option to avoid recording the CD-i player shell because it differs between models. This means that you have to select the disc image to be inserted before starting the emulation (use either the -disc or the -selectdisc option or the corresponding menu choices).

The current input recording file format uses a single 32-bit field to record event times as CPU cycle count; with a clock frequency of 15 MHz this field will wrap around in 4 minutes and 46 seconds. The internals of CD-i Emulator require that at least one event is recorded every two minutes, otherwise playback will lose synchronisation. This will be fixed in a future version of the file format.

- Minimal support for a number of new player system ROMs has been added: Philips CD-i 370, DVS VE-200 and LG GDI-700. All of these players use the "Portable CD-i" board but have different built-in MPEG cartridges (which appear to be VMPEG and IMPEG, but at different addresses). These players will currently boot into the player shell. However, there is no pointing device support yet so it ends there. The Movies section of the CD-i Emulator website has YouTube movies of these players booting.

- Proper detection and full emulation of the following player ROMs has been added: Philips CD-i 200 F1, Philips CD-i 220 F1. These are both variations of other player types.

- Very buggy MPEG support, mainly for Gate Array MPEG cartridges (22ER9141 F1), has been added. TBA: More details.

- The Decode menu contains a new option Flush Audio. This can be useful on fast hardware when audio starts to lag behind.

- The Decode menu contains new options CCIR Limit, Plane A, Plane B and Dim Video that control the decoding of CD-i video data for display. TBA: More details.

- CD-i keyboard emulation has been added.

There are to my knowledge only a very few titles out there that support a CD-i keyboard, all of which require the DV cartridge are thus not (yet) supported by CD-i Emulator.

However, there is (very rudimentary) keyboard support in the Philips player shells, just enough to verify that your CD-i keyboard is actually working.

The "old player shell" (found on 60x, 200, 210 F1/F2, 220 F1/F2/F3 and 350) supports the "p" key (lowercase only!) as equivalent to clicking the "PLAY CD-I" button.

The "new player shell" (found on 210 F3 and up, 220 F4 and up, 4xx, 615, 660 and 740) supports any key to abort the introductory animation.

Supposedly one or both player shells also support the keyboard for naming favorite track selections, but I haven't verified this.

- You can now control the CD-i pointing device with the keyboard using the arrow keys (four directions) or the numeric keypad (eight directions). The [Space] and both [Enter] keys will press button 1, the [Backspace] and numeric keypad [+] keys will press button 2 and the [Esc] and numeric keypad [-] keys will simultaneously press buttons 1 and 2. The -keydelta option can be used to control the movement speed of the pointing device.

There is currently no way to change the key mapping.

- The -[no]wait and -[no]skip options can be used to control frame waiting and frame skipping (both of these are on by default).

Normally, CD-i Emulator will attempt to maintain real-time emulation by waiting after frame display or skipping frame decoding, when necessary. The former is needed on faster computers, the latter on slower ones.

Use of the -nowait option can make your CD-i title unplayably fast and it will also cause the audio to lag behind if the title plays continuous audio (most games do). The Decode | Flush Audio menu choice can be used to catch up in this case.

CD-i Emulator 0.53 closed beta testing started today

2010-10-01T06:51:00.003+01:00

From CDIBITS: "I have just released the pre-beta version of CD-i Emulator to my beta test group. This version is intended for quick tests; if nothing drastically happens, the final beta1 release will happen in a few days."
This means it is going to be a busy weekend for me! Expect test results and reviews coming up in the following weeks. CD-i Emulator is back in business!

City Golf CD-i: Real Golf in New York City

2010-09-30T15:41:00.003+01:00

David McElhatten in american press (1994) about CD-i: "1994 was our year to prove CD-i was a viable games platform by bringing over other titles and doing them better on CD-i (Litil Divil, Lemmings). Now we are ready to move beyond that, and put our own mark on games with original titles. One of those in the works from Philips Media Games is due from its new Tribal Media co-venture with top effects firm R/GA: "City Golf" is a game set in New York that will feature a real golf engine and a real New York flavor. The firms are working with architects to create the 3D setting in order to get everything just right. If you hit a shot off the Chrysler Building, we want it to react appropriately."

Philips Media was 'shopping the music' in-house for Dead End

2010-09-30T11:17:00.002+01:00

Nice interview with David McElhatten was published in american Billboard magazine of 1994. he talks about the planned bundled CD-i releases with an audio CD including the soundtrack of the game, like Philips did with Burn:Cycle and The 7th Guest. David McElhatten was the president of Philips Media Games (1994-1996). David: "Music will be the key to Dead End, a Los Angeles based racing game due in the second quarter of 1995. Philips plans to get a major act to provide the music for the game including new material. Philips is shopping for music for several CD-i projects to get 'limited editions' including an additional audio CD as an exclusive package.

It's coming: CD-i Emulator 0.53 Beta for compatibility testing

2010-09-30T06:47:00.002+01:00

This is the first official 0.53 boot screen, it's no mock-up from me :). The release of the 0.53 Beta CD-i Emulator is coming close and we actually don't know a lot of details as with the extensive release of the 0.52 version. Cdifan: "Today I resumed working on the input record/playback code to get it towards its final specification for this beta. [It is needed] to get the feature usable for extensive compatibility testing, which is a goal of this beta: it should be possible to exchange input recordings that reproduce crashes or rendering bugs, even when they require some time to reproduce. Emulator state snapshots would make this even better, but that is too much work for now.
The cdifile dumping code will not be released with this beta, there's too much unfinished code in there. I will attempt to finish this tomorrow, but it's just barely achievable..."
We'll eagerly following all the news available around the new CD-i Emulator and report more when it arrives. Read more technical details on his blog here.

New CD-i Emulator to arrive in a few days

2010-09-28T00:09:00.004+01:00

Today, cdifan posted he "did some housecleaning for the upcoming beta, which he is still hoping to release before the end of this month."
cdifan: "I decided to keep the current somewhat buggy MPEG decoding stuff in the beta, which meant that I had to clean up the MPEG ROM detection logic so that it actually works. The MPEG ROM detector will now use the supplied "dummy" xmpeg.rom file if it cannot find another recognized ?mpeg*.rom file. If it does find such a file, the DVC type will now be displayed in the CD-i Emulator title bar" Check out details about his MPEG emulation right here.

CD-i flashbacks seeing the new playstation move controller

2010-09-25T08:46:00.000+01:00

Gir Draxa: " is it me or does anyone else have CD-i flashbacks seeing the new playstation move controller? Guess you gotta have balls (light up ones at that) to revisit the phallic controller days of the CD-i. "

Litil Divil Soundtrack: my personal favourite

2010-09-18T19:08:00.002+01:00

It's no secret I think the main theme of Litil Divil CD-i is the absolute most creative and lovely song in a CD-i game. Unfortunately Gremlin didn't put the sounds in a CD-i Audio format like SPC Vision did with their excellent CD-i soundtracks of The Apprentice, Lucky Luke, etcetera... So now my CD-i player is not regularly connected to the TV set anymore, I can't easily listen to these great soundtracks....but then I found out you great guys even use Youtube for these soundtracks too! Apparently there are more crazy people who love it: Check out the original main theme of Litil Divil below.

Interactive Dreams

CD-i Emulator 0.53 beta versions expired, waiting for an update

Lil' Champ CD-i Arcade Machine, now with a CD-i 450

CD-i Reader Rating: Creature Shock is worth a 7,8

The Kyocera Pro 1000S CD-i player

Le Monde du CD-i and Philipscd-i.com domains disappeared...

Why is CD-i support in MESS Emulator limited?

How Philips had a small hand in influencing every game... ever

Happy Christmas!

Philipscdi.com back online!

The Lost Ride CD-i @ 10 years of Blender Art

What's New at the CD-i Emulator Home?

Alien Gate plays best with the CD-i mouse, because it was developed on one

One reason why touchpad/gamepad control is often so flakey

CD-i 180 emulation now possible

A unique gaming experience with the CD-i Mouse

Whack A Bubble and Thunder in Paradise reviewed by Video Game Critic

CD-i Emulator progress: MPEG decoding, save/restore points, ROM-less emulation

Zelda's Adventure - A complete game or a failed project?

Joe Guard CD-i video review and then try it yourself (!)

Myst CD-i Beta version offers the ability to warp to all locations

The Secret Name of Ra: Rare or unreleased?

For 'true gamers', CD-i is terrible. For some, CD-i is interesting

Pictures of Gobliiins CD-i

How original is Hotel Mario on CD-i?

Some rare CD-i titles from Shrooman's collection

Paul Clarke about Atlantis: The Last Resort on CD-i

Interview with Marty Foulger - Lead Designer on Super Mario's Wacky Worlds

Interview with John Brooks - Lead Programmer on Super Mario's Wacky Worlds

Original CD-i cabinets still exist

Chaos Control: Vivid visuals,passable shooting but easy to finish

The CD-i page @ Videogameconsolelibrary is ready

Philips discontinued CD-i officially 15 years ago

CD-i Reader Rating: Burn:Cycle is worth a 8,7

"We want more CD-i video reviews!"

Philipscdi.com offline

Tox Runner CD-i: a 'quickie game' and a schedule of 6 months

Dutch CD-i article at Gaming Only and Bonami

Unlock Gobliiins levels by studying French on CD-i

CD-i and DCC articles on online dutch streaming channel

Philips 120th anniversary this week

RAM Raid Online & Atlantis: The Last Resort Video Review

Mario and Zelda CD-i press announcements in CD-i Magazine

Philips CD-I launch advertising brochure

first pictures of the i2m CD-i card in the wild

UK CD-i Magazines now in Comic Book Reader format and no cut offs

What to do when your CD-i player won't spin discs?

3D polygon model of the Philips CD-i controller

CD-i Emulator 0.5.3-beta2 released

A reason why controls in CD-i games are often bad/slow

CD-i Emulator bug is fixed and updated tomorrow

'What was CD-i', according to other sites (1)

CD-i Mouse compatibility list?

CD-i Magazine (UK) now at Rapidshare, margins cut off?

CD-i Emulator 0.53 not working on Windows 7?

From DIMA to Codeglue

Quizzard CD-i Arcade Machine

CD-i Magazine (UK) issue 2 available as PDF

'The Black Moon Project' in 2011

No new compatibility reports yet published on CD-i Emulator 0.53 website

Pete's new CD-i game to use RotR code as a base, developed on CD-Ice

Dinosaurs in a CD-i commercial

CD-ice (resurrected) running Frog Feast

Happy Christmas!

CD-i Reader Rating: Brain Dead 13 is worth a 7,1

Video of Making the Grade on CD-i

Discworld CD-i was converted by 'Divide by Zero'

New website features: Pageview statistics and popular posts

RSP say they worked on Donkey Kong on CD-i

Nintendo on CD-i: A gentlemens agreement

Interactive Dreams: 5 Years Online!

CD-i Quizard Arcade Games, emulated by MESS/MAME

*Funhouse* in Disneyland

DVD custom covers of CD-i games

Burn:Cycle, cyber punk on cd-rom as well

Loriciel/Futura developed "Jour J" (D-Day) on CD-i

Random CD-i Quote (12)

Dark Castle reviewed by The Video game Critic

Where are the flight missions in Creature Shock CD-i?

Is there a CD-i system with better output than s-video?

Funhouse in Disneyland